I believe the most significant challenge we (safety professionals) face is those outside (and even some inside) our profession and their lack of understanding of RISKS. I am confident that any safety pro reading this has endured the old and tired argument...
"We have been doing ________ that way for __________ years, and it has not hurt anyone, but now you want us to do ____________?!?!?"
Recently, while participating in a serious accident investigation, there was an honest discussion of how the LOTO program and all the effort to implement it caused the accident. Yep, several members of senior management and front-line supervision pointed out that since the facility had implemented its LOTO practice, there had been several injuries and none before the LOTO program. They were serious, albeit somewhat ignorantly, blaming the LOTO program and the effort to implement it for the serious accident in which the 2-year-old LOTO program was NOT followed and cost a worker their arm.
Sadly, I was not shocked as I had heard this argument many times over my career. In fact, in this accident, several witnesses were part of the LOTO discussion, and the supervisor decided that LOTO was not necessary for the task that would be performed. He stated this task would fall under "minor servicing," which had become a cancer within the LOTO practice at this facility. Essentially, if the LOTO would take too long or have too large of an impact on production, it was sidestepped under the guise of "minor servicing" even though the written program and training clearly DEFINED AND QUANTIFIED "minor servicing" and provided the framework to assess the task(s) as "minor servicing" and prescribed the additional/alternative safeguarding that would be required for the "minor servicing" tasks. None of these were being followed by management.
Minor Servicing had become the rule, and LOTO had become the exception! This is still happening at far too many facilities in 2024.
This management group argued that this previous LOTO implementation effort had impacted production so severely that "workers were forced to take shortcuts" to compensate for lost production. They had convinced themselves that this pattern of accepting shortcuts prevented this injured worker from following the LOTO practices. They even defended the supervisors' decision to call the task "minor servicing," admitting the workers challenged that decision and noted the task was not within the scope of minor servicing. But it was still the fault of the very program that was put in place to prevent the accident.
But here is our challenge:
convincing those outside our profession that the mere absence of an incident is NOT how we define and quantify our success in safety.
The fact that there were no machine-related injuries before the LOTO program does NOT equate to zero risks. But even when the launch of the LOTO program is successful, some team members will still point out that "LOTO changed nothing" as there were no injuries before the program. So, having no injuries after the program's implementation and validation means very little to them (i.e., nothing changed from before to after the launch).
This all comes from a lack of understanding of how RISK works. We are essentially trying to convince a group of people responsible for something OTHER THAN SAFETY (i.e., production, maintenance, engineering) that spending a few minutes, several times per shift, across hundreds of workers, that we need to perform LOTO before removing guards bypassing safety devices and sticking body parts into these machines' hazard zones, when in fact no one has been doing anything remotely similar for decades, "and we have not killed anyone yet."
I should point out that most cultures, even today, still place the responsibility for "safety" on the safety professional(s) AND NOT on production, maintenance, and engineering. This is another fundamental flaw in "safety management" that prevents those outside our profession from needing or wanting to understand risk.
However, many safety pros deal with this LOTO scenario daily. Our ultimate challenge is overcoming the lack of negative consequences to drive necessary actions to reduce the real risk. The saying "We've done it that way forever, and..." comes in here. Let's say that for the sake of this discussion, we have successfully gotten a LOTO practice in place. It will not go unnoticed and will frequently be the crutch for those responsible for production, maintenance, and engineering to use as an excuse for missing their targets. And this will only feed the flames of discontent, as again, they will always go back to...
"Why do we need to do this? We never did it before, and look what it is doing to us now."
So, "safety" ends up being the driver of LOTO against a culture that fails to identify the risks that it places its people at without it.
