Crews who consistently discuss their safety concerns before work begins create more opportunities to mitigate or eliminate hazards.

As someone employed in the electric utility industry, would you be willing to consider that there may be incident prevention strategies yet to be discovered and tested? Are you open to the idea that a better model could exist to create change in our industry – change that could reduce or even eliminate significant injuries and fatalities (SIFs)?

If so, I encourage you to read further.

Here’s a logical equation many of us were taught in school: If A equals B and B equals C, then A equals C. Tell me, do you believe the organization you work for takes a logical approach to workplace safety? This article will examine some of our industry’s current logic regarding incident prevention and whether there’s room for improvement.

Consider the logic Native Americans used in their attempts to fend off solar and lunar eclipses hundreds of years ago. Ancient Cherokee people, for example, believed an eclipse occurred because a frog was trying to eat the sun or moon. They would dance and make lots of noise to chase away the frog. It worked every time – the sun or moon would always return.

Before we understood the science behind them, eclipses and other natural events like earthquakes terrified the planet’s human inhabitants, who often blamed them on witchcraft or sins they had committed. This is one example of a fundamental attribution error, a common mistake many of us make repeatedly throughout our lives. When humans don’t understand an event’s true cause, we can be quick to place blame, and we often attribute it to someone or something other than ourselves.

Assessing Our Logic: The Job Briefing
“Post hoc, ergo propter hoc” is a Latin phrase that translates to “after this, therefore because of this.” Put simply, it’s the logical fallacy that occurs when a person believes a second event was caused by an earlier first event – even though there’s no other evidence to suggest that.

You may have witnessed this fallacy in action, both in your personal life and at work. For example, has a near-miss or incident ever occurred at one of your jobsites that was later attributed to the job briefing delivered earlier in the day? If so, what happened next? Did management make changes to the job briefing document?

If you’re nodding your head, know that you’re not alone. When a near-miss or incident is attributed to a job briefing, logic indicates that the briefing should be amended to improve future outcomes, right? That may explain why nearly every organization in our industry has a different briefing document. Think about that for a moment: All of us use the same tools to, say, tighten a nut – but there’s no standardized briefing document. Does that seem logical to you?

Continue reading at Incident Prevention

For more utility related reading, check out the potential impact of the Supreme Court’s Chevron decision, TerraPower’s new reactor construction, and the demand for AI potentially driving more generation investment.