Near Misses

Your infrastructure must be able to accommodate the volume of data for which you ask — if you aren’t adequately prepared for the sudden influx of reports your system can quickly get swamped and bog down making it impossible to garner any useful information.

Have a good reason for collecting Near-Miss Information. Collecting data for collection’s sake happens a lot in worker safety. Unless we truly understand what the data means and what actions the organization should do in response to what it has learned we are wasting the time of everyone involved.

Understand that Near Miss Reporting is NOT a Leading Indicator. Near misses aren’t a leading indicator, at least not in the sense that most people think. Near misses can only be seen as a leading indicator if one believes in the statistical relationship between near misses and fatalities.

Many of the leading thinkers in worker safety now openly question the methods, data, and conclusions of the father of these theories, Herbert William Heinrich. If Heinrich’s theories are flawed — and even Heinrich advocates admit that his theories are fraught with problems — then drawing statistical inferences from data sets based on them are irresponsible.

This is not to say that organizations shouldn’t investigate the causes of serious near misses, quite the contrary. Near misses provide real insights into serious system flaws that otherwise might go undetected until tragedy strikes.

SOMETIMES A NEAR MISS IS NOT A NEAR MISS
A big problem with near miss reporting is that it creates another category of safety information that sounds like a logical grouping when it is really nothing of the sort.

A near miss that results in someone almost tripping isn’t the same as a near miss that almost gets someone killed. One of these events is significant, while the other is notable but probably benign. By lumping all these near events into a single category we end up Pareto charting them — we have quantitative data when only qualitative data is useful.

In other words, unless we recognize that not all near misses are created equally, we run the risk of improperly prioritizing our response to workplace risks and legitimate and proximate threats.

Think this can’t happen to you? Think again. I see this mistake made repeatedly in shops that had ought to know better; it’s an easy mistake to make.

SHOULD WE IGNORE NEAR MISSES?
We should never walk away from a key source of hazard information, but not all near misses fit this particular bill.

Near misses should be managed like any other hazard — contained, investigated, prioritized, and corrected. We need to contain those conditions likely to injure workers, investigate the causes and contributors, prioritize those conditions so that we are able to focus our efforts on the those conditions that are most probably going to result in injury and those that are highly likely to produce an injury that is going to be severe.

We don’t need to worry about having a special name for these conditions — they are just hazards. The fact that they are “near misses” is no more significant than whether they are behaviors or unsafe conditions.

In a business climate where every dollar counts, we need to choose our battles in safety interventions and this begins by vastly improving our approach to near miss reporting.