The Holidays

As the year winds down and the holidays approach, it might be tempting to think it’s time to take a well-deserved break from the rigors of managing safety performance. After all, as the home office empties out, and the emails and the phone and zoom calls dwindle down, it seems as though the management processes for safety goes on holiday, too. 
 
To a certain extent, that is the case. Put it to the test: how much planning, organizing and decision making actually takes place over the holidays? In my experience, precious little. That kind of management work either gets done before everyone leaves for vacation or is pushed into the new year. These days, that’s how business gets done.
 
That helps explain why, back in the day, the holidays were my favorite time of the year to be in the office. The phone seldom rang, meetings were rare, and drop in visitors were few and far between.
 
All of which allowed me to get things done, which, as you know is the purpose of a business.
 
The Hypothesis
 
Unlike leaders, hazards never take a holiday. Even when management isn’t there, as long as people are doing the work of the business there will be things present that can hurt them. The reduced management footprint over the holidays raises an interesting question: how does their lessened presence impact safety performance at year’s end?
 
In theory, the combination of less supervision and the distractions served by the holidays ought to cause safety performance to deteriorate. Sorry if that puts a damper on your holiday spirits: “Darn! Now I have one more tough safety challenge to manage.” Which you must, or something bad can happen. 
 
For more than two decades, we’ve been asking industrial leaders the world over about their toughest safety challenges. The consensus view of your peers is that the absence of the visible presence of leaders and outside work distractions are both tough safety challenges. Come the holidays, it’s not as if these challenges are unforeseen; they’re just conveniently ignored. Otherwise, management would be spending their holidays at work, keeping people safe.
 
In the spirit of sending everyone home, alive and well at the end of every day – holidays included – this is a fair concern to raise. In scientific research, it’s known as a hypothesis. What separates science from art is that proof comes in the form of evidence. Evidence comes in all sorts of forms, but the one thing it is not is somebody’s opinion. 
 
Not that we suffer from a scarcity of opinions about safety.  Opinion often drives policy. Case in point: there was a time when it seemed just about everyone was of the opinion that back belts were the solution to back injuries. Eventually, the researchers looked for the evidence, and found no data showing injury rates were lower with the use of belts, or higher without their use. Making the benefit of back belts an unproven hypothesis.
 
Bearing that in mind, this particular one about the holidays should be simple enough to prove – or disprove. All that’s needed is a comparison of injury frequency rates for the last two weeks of the year with the preceding fifty. Run the numbers for enough years to cancel out random variation and, voila, there’s the evidence to prove the hypothesis true – or not.
 
As Dr. Deming would say, “In God we trust. All others bring data.” 
 
But before you run that experiment and produce the data, you might want to consider its implications. What if safety performance actually got better when so many leaders are on vacation? 
 
Explaining that would be your problem, not mine.
 
The Scientific Method
 
Simply stated, the Scientific Method calls for establishing a hypothesis, designing an experiment, running the experiment, and evaluating the results. If that reminds you of Deming’s Virtuous cycle – plan, do, check, act – it’s no accident. Deming made no secret of the fact that he imported the Scientific Method as the means by which to run experiments to improve work processes. When Peter Drucker defined the work of a manager as planning, leading, organizing and to measure/correct, he was describing a similar process. 
 
Creating new knowledge, continuously improving processes, and rationally managing a business have the same core elements. That explains why what you do for a living is considered as management science. As it should be.
 
That assumes the principles of science are followed in practice.  The problem is, we humans are naturally inclined to want to skip the science and operate on instinct. In behavioral psychology terms, it’s called Cognitive Bias: the tendency to take mental shortcuts. No different than the shortcuts your followers would prefer to take with work procedures, but theirs are physical and yours are mental.
 
Cognitive Bias seems harmless enough, until it isn’t. For example, Confirmation Bias – the tendency to seek out and rely on information that fits with what we prefer to think – helps to explain the faulty decisions and actions on the Deepwater Horizon and at Three Mile Island. 
 
As to how it works, Confirmation Bias was discovered in a simple experiment where test subjects were given three numbers and asked to predict the next number in the series. It seldom took long to come up with an answer; rarely was it correct. The common flaw in the thinking process was the failure to test what amounted to a hypothesis in a way that might prove it wrong. 
 
Sound familiar?
 
Thinking Critically
 
When falling victim to the flawed thinking of Cognitive Bias, it’s somewhere between difficult and impossible to recognize it’s happening to us. Our view is that our thinking makes perfect sense. Even more so when there are plenty of others just like us thinking exactly the same thing. 
 
That, by the way, is another Cognitive Bias, jumping on the bandwagon. 
 
For some reason, safety seems to be a popular place for these biases to show up. Somebody comes up with a theory, and instead of testing the hypothesis, leaders jump on the bandwagon. I will leave it to you to put that observation to the test: it’s simple enough. Make a list of the safety programs that you would consider to be “flavor of the month” and ask yourself, what is the evidence that might prove it true or false. 
 
I typically begin that process by asking myself about firsthand experience: what I have witnessed that either confirms or rebuts what amounts to an untested hypothesis, “By doing this, we will reduce injuries and improve safety performance.” In research, that is known as anecdotal evidence.
 
I should warn you, though: thinking critically will not necessarily win you friends. For some reason, those with the ideas would much prefer that everyone jump on the bandwagon. For leaders, that’s how Confirmation Bias plays out in real life.
 
Testing The Leadership Footprint Hypothesis
 
So back to our hypothesis about the relative absence of leadership over the holidays: let the data speak. If the injury rates prove there is in fact a performance problem, you know how to deal with that kind of problem.
 
But what if it doesn’t? What if safety performance over the holidays is equal to or better than the rest of the year? That could happen; if so, there must be a logical explanation, calling for an alternative hypothesis.
 
You might already have one in mind. I’ll offer mine, which goes along the lines of recognizing the difference between the short and long term effects of management and leadership. What goes on over the preceding fifty weeks (and maybe five hundred weeks) determines behavior on any one day or in one week. If the leaders have done their collective jobs well, behavior should be just as good over the holidays as it is the rest of the year.
 
In a word, that’s the culture.
 
Closing the Books 
 
The holidays signal the year is drawing to a close. We hope yours has been a good one, starting with the single most important thing every leader has to get done: managing safety performance. If it has, by all means, celebrate. 
 
If it has not, no better time than the relative quiet of the holidays for a tough examination of the evidence: what do the metrics and information tell you about the problem. On that subject, Charles Kettering’s advice that “a problem well stated is a problem half solved” is always good counsel. One more example of the benefit of following the Scientific Method.
 
As we wrap up our year, there’s no better time than the holidays to say thanks. Thanks for your interest in what we have to say and thanks for allowing us to help your cause. It is always our privilege to help.
 
Finally, while the purpose of a business will always be to get things done, the most important goal of every business is to get those things done safely.
 
Paul Balmert
December 2024