The Art of Screwing Up

Errors may be with us always, but the injuries associated with them need not be. These insights into the world of error reveal how underlying behaviors cause people to make mistakes and why we must rethink the proper way to engineer a safe workplace.

On one hand, industry spends a fortune trying to prevent mistakes: We put up posters, conduct safety talks and provide awareness training in an attempt to get workers to do their jobs more safely. Despite all of these efforts the workplace still endures that inevitable injury that makes us scratch our heads and wonder how things could get so screwed up.

On the other hand, many people are pretty cavalier when it comes to making mistakes: “It’s an imperfect world . . . to err is human . . . that’s why we put erasers on pencils, etc.” When it comes to screwing up, choose your idiom. Many times it seems that some incorrect actions aren’t just tolerated, they are actually encouraged. After all, aren’t mistakes the vehicles through which the most lasting and important learning occurs?

The handshake between these two sides creates a workplace environment that readily acknowledges how perfection is impossible as it looks with murderous intent to blame those who make mistakes. This sort of dichotomy is never desired, but its results aren’t always bad.

Consider, for example, personal injury lawsuits. This oft-maligned practice has actually weeded out some incompetent doctors, improved the urgency associated with patient safety and increased the awareness of personal responsibility. Though many politicians deride them as the single-handed cause of sky-rocketing healthcare costs, the reality is that many medical advances, improvements in machine safety and heightened awareness of preventable safety concerns were all encouraged by these cases.

But back to that dichotomy: To overcome this implicit sort of division through proper engineering of a safe workplace, the underlying behaviors that cause people to make mistakes must be recognized, understood and addressed.

This begins by identifying behaviors that fall under the blanket term “mistakes.” They run the gamut from simple errors to misjudgments, risk taking and catastrophic breakdowns. Note that deliberate actions shaped by depraved indifference (like carelessness or recklessness) are excluded because the worker in those cases makes an informed choice that disregards highly probable undesired outcomes. Fraud or sabotage, for instance, is not a mistake.

ERRORS
Errors are unintentional actions that produce an unwanted result. Because errors are unintentional we cannot really blame the person who makes them. Punishing someone for something they never intended to do is unjust. However, we can hold those who make errors accountable.

If your neighbor accidentally breaks your window you may not call the police, but you do expect him to cover the repair costs. People don’t generally expect to mete out justice for someone who causes an accident if they categorize the act as an honest mistake because honest mistakes tend to be the errors others make that we could see ourselves making. Factors like impairment from drugs or alcohol change the act from an honest mistake to something more serious that deserves punishment. The event transforms from a simple mistake to recklessness.

In his book Why We Make Mistakes: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things In Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are All Well Above Average, Pulitzer prize winning author Joseph T. Hallinan explores the nature of mistake making. His book is an incredible collection of facts relative to mistake-making that has profound implications for worker safety. All safety engineers should read and internalize these amazing studies to gain insights into the world of error making.