Episode 170 - Preventing All Injuries

This week's podcast focuses on workplace safety, particularly on whether all accidents and injuries are preventable. Key points include:

1. Safety Philosophy:
   • Initially, Dr. French believed all injuries could be prevented, especially in controlled environments like factories. However, his view has evolved to recognize that while striving for zero injuries is noble, some risks, particularly in public and uncontrolled environments, might be unavoidable.
2. Hierarchy of Controls:
   • Emphasis on using elimination, substitution, and engineering controls to reduce risks within an organization's sphere of influence.
   • Examples include better equipment, safer driving policies, and training.
3. Public Risk Challenges:
   • Dr. French shares examples of safety challenges in public spaces, such as commuting accidents, where some factors remain uncontrollable.
4. Cultural Shift:
   • Transitioning from an "all-or-nothing" mindset to focusing on mitigating risks wherever possible rather than achieving perfection.
5. Real-life Examples:
   • Stories of workplace fatalities and public incidents highlight the importance of proactive safety measures and awareness.

The overarching message is the shared responsibility for safety and the need for leaders to actively work towards reducing risks in controllable ways while recognizing limitations.

Episode Transcript

Mark French (00:01):
This week on the leading and learning through
safety podcast, we're going totalk about are all accidents
truly preventable? Let's talk alittle bit of safety philosophy
coming up this week on theleading and learning through
safety podcast. You

Announcer (00:33):
mark, welcome to the leading and learning through
safety podcast. Your host is DrMark French. Mark's passion is
helping organizations motivatetheir teams. This podcast is
focused on bringing out the bestin leadership through creating
strong values, learningopportunities, teamwork and

(00:55):
safety, nothing is moreimportant than protecting your
people. Safety creates anenvironment for empathy,
innovation and empowerment.
Together, we'll discover meaningand purpose through shaping our
safety culture. Thanks forjoining us this episode and now
here is Dr Mark French. You

Mark French (01:30):
mark, welcome to this episode of the leading and
learning through safety podcast.
Hi. I am your host, Mark, And asalways, I am honored and happy
and excited that you've chosento join me on this journey of
leadership, leadership thatbegins with the fundamental to
me, this is impaired moralimperative, as if we protect our

(01:53):
people, it's got to be the firstthing we focus on. Nothing else
can help progress. Motivationcan help progress. Empathy can
help progress, any part of whata modern day employee needs,
like being able to work at asafe workplace, and let's begin
there. So welcome this week, asI kind of previewed, I want to

(02:18):
begin by talking about thesafety philosophy. And this has
been debated time and time andtime again. Is that? Is it true
that all injuries arepreventable? Now, if you had
spoken to me, let's say twoyears ago, maybe even three I
would have been a die hard, diehard that it's an absolute 100%

(02:42):
yes. And now I may be changing alittle bit. And yeah, I'm kind
of teasing out a little bitwhat's going on, but I want to
give some background of why didI believe that, and why I still
very much believe in safety,first of all, that I'll get

(03:03):
there, of why I may be changinga little bit. And I look at the
point of where I was comingfrom, at the time, was a lot of
factory work inside a verycontrolled environment. When
you're inside that level ofcontrolled environment, I always
felt that there was alwayssomething that could have been

(03:26):
engineered better or removed orsubstituted. When I looked at
the hierarchy of controls, italways felt that there was with
any type of injury, with anytype of potential risk, there
was a way to assure that itdidn't happen. When you did the
root cause analysis of mostthings there were, even though

(03:48):
some of them were a little bitextreme, of how you could have
prevented it, it was stillpreventable, even if you had the
the money, the materials. Iremember one where it was like a
speck of dust landed insomeone's eye. It happened to be
the perfect angle neededremoval, recordable injury, and

(04:08):
it's okay. What do we well, Imean, technically, could we have
done a better job with cleaning,done a better job with keeping
vacuums available. Could we havedone different? Yeah, there were
still elements. Even though itwas stretching, there were
elements to say that that waspreventable. I move forward, and

(04:29):
I think about where I'm workingin, like, fast forwarding to
where working in more of apublic arena, and that is where
I really start to think of likethere's a lot of things you can
do when working in the publicI'll come back to a point that I

(04:51):
just want to get to at somepiece of this, there's something
you can do. There's. Processesthat can be in place to lower
the risk. But is it always 100%preventable? Theoretically? I'm
going to say yes, of course,theoretically, in certainly do I

(05:13):
love the idea of trying tostrive for the fact that you can
prevent every single injury.
Yeah, I think that's a noble wayto go, after your philosophy and
safety that we never want to seeanyone get hurt. And we have to
control the controllable. Now insome organizations, and I have

(05:37):
seen this, and I see this ineven smaller areas. That's not
as critical as safety, but itfeels like that, just because,
well, you know, there's still achance that could happen. Let's
just do nothing. We haven't. Wehaven't given it 100% so instead
of going the 80% we're justgoing to not do anything at all.

(05:58):
Have I been in that mindsetbefore? Unfortunately, yeah, we
had an engineering issue. Iremember we were trying to think
of ways to break up material sothat it would be easier to
handle. And I wanted to solve itall. I wanted to break it,
handle it. I wanted to becompletely hands off from the
employee standpoint. I didn'twant them to have to touch it.

(06:19):
And so it was like a bigengineering deal, and there was
a supervisor that decided thatinstead of waiting and doing
nothing, they would at leastfigure out a way to get the
material broken up. And that wasprobably 60% of the risk was
trying to get the materialseparated, and I wanted it
completely hands off. And that'swhere I got too focused. I got

(06:42):
too if I couldn't do it all, Ijust got hung up with just
waiting until I could do it all.
And now some organizations usethat as an excuse to just quit
trying. Now that's a wholedifferent philosophy. That's
very different philosophy, andthat's a very different
mentality. But in this case, thesupervisor came up with an idea
that got a 60, 70% there. Ithelped, and that taught me a

(07:05):
great lesson in getting better,rather than being perfect, or do
something even, even if it's notgoing to get you all the way.
Start reducing it. Start puttingthings in place, start working
on those items, rather thanusing it as a method to halt or
to get stuck, as I did. And whenI go back to the idea of like,

(07:31):
can they all be prevented? Yeah,theoretically it still can be.
There are still ways andmethods. The more that I work
again in the public arena, themore it concerns me that that
may not be 100% true. So forwhen you're just commuting back
and forth to work, that's notand here's where also the law

(07:51):
gets a little weird, right? Whata recordable injury is. And I've
heard this from attorneys andpeople in trainings time and
time again, the OSHA recordkeeping laws were not meant to
be fair. They were meant for thegovernment to be able to get as
much data as possible. And sowhen we're measuring ourselves

(08:13):
on Did you have an injury, andthat usually gets defined as
recordable or worse, we getfocused on was that a recordable
or not, rather than Was it aninjury? And when does the injury
occur? It's when you're on theclock. So when I'm driving to
work, driving home from work,that's not considered on the

(08:34):
clock if I'm driving fromlocation to location while at
work. So if my job is travelingaround doing things, then I have
the same exact risk of anaccident than I did when I was
just driving from home. Andthat's a sobering thought, that

(08:57):
in a workplace, we can put moresome engineering in place.
There's a lot of really neatcameras with AI and
notifications. You can do a lotto try to change the behavior of
someone who's driving back andforth, commuting, and then when
they get into the companyvehicle or begin on company
time, that would be consideredas something the company would

(09:19):
have to recognize as an injury,and I'm just using driving as an
example. That risk doesn'treally change a lot. You can
alter some of the risk, but it'sstill there. It's still a
significant risk to be behindthe wheel of a car, or even in a
car, and with that, how do youfly in this idea of, can all

(09:44):
injuries be prevented? Oh, ofcourse, there could have been
like, if we'd re engineered theroads, and if we had stopped
that person, that other driver,from swerving into the lane
somehow. Or you think of all theoptions and the truth. This,
that's not really feasible. Andso now we have to think about,
well, if that blanket andanytime you use the word like

(10:09):
blanket philosophy, there'salways exceptions. You just
can't find it. It's toocomplicated. But let's really
talk about what we're strivingfor in the world of safety, how
we handle it, and still, there'sreal results when things don't
go well. Let's talk about thaton the second half of the

(10:29):
podcast,

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Mark French (11:18):
Welcome back to the second half of the leading and
learning through safety podcastthis week, we're talking about
the philosophy of if allinjuries can be prevented, and
not necessarily did my goals ormy core feelings about safety
shift, but my ideas behind beinga very staunch defender of that

(11:40):
all injuries are absolutelywanted to present, prevented.
Yes, I have evolved from thatstandpoint. I think where I have
moved to is more of look ateverything within your control,
and there's a lot of thingslike, you're eliminating a lot
of risk when you look at whatare in the sphere of control of

(12:03):
the organization, and do yourvery best to control those
things. Use the hierarchy ofcontrols, elimination,
substitution, engineering. Lookat those key items in where you
can utilize those to reduce riskin what you can control. So

(12:23):
let's use the example of drivingthat I used before. The risk
remains the same. If you're onthe road, the risk is there of
weather conditions, the risk isthere of other drivers. The risk
is in my area, a giant deerrunning across the road at an
instant. There's things that canhappen that truly because you're

(12:48):
in the public sphere, you're inthe name the natural world,
you're outside of that microcosmof a factory. There are factors
that happen. Are there things wecan do? We can put good policies
in place to make sure that we'renot driving when the weather is
poor, that we're going to justmaybe halt driving for a while.

(13:10):
We can have aI cameras we canset up, and we can make sure
that we're buying the bestsafety features on vehicles and
that we're getting themregularly serviced. We're
keeping the tires serviced.
We're keeping the car serviced.
We can do a lot, and we cancontrol a lot of things. We can
train people on safe driving.
Still, the outside risk ofsomething happening,

(13:33):
unfortunately, is very real andvery much out of our control in
some cases and again, we can getin. This is where my all or
nothing mentality had to reallyshift, because for me, it was
kind of unacceptable to thinkabout the all or like, not to
have it as all or nothing. Ifelt it was necessary as as a

(13:54):
safety person, as someone whonever wanted to see people get
hurt, that I had to have thatpassion, and now I've realized
that that's a heavy burden tobear as a leader, to think that
you should be trying to controleverything, and you can't, but
you can control a lot. You caninfluence a lot. You can do a

(14:15):
lot to help prevent to helpincrease that safety factor.
Wherever you are now, especiallyif you're within a factory,
there's a lot more within yourcontrol, because you control the
environment. You control whocomes in and out. You control a
lot involved in that. And whatmade me think about this this

(14:37):
week is, again, I'm readingthrough the fatalities of the
week, which is a very soberingexperience. And there was a lot
of crushed in between, Forttrucks, pinning people, other
moving vehicles inside, likepowered industrial style
vehicles or other such items,pinning people. I think there
were two or three examples thisweek. Of people getting pinned

(14:59):
in places and factories andlosing their life because of
being in an area that maybe thecompany should said, no one be
in this area when there's movingequipment or better visibility
or better controls or in thereare a lot now here's one of the
situations where the technologyis there to help really create

(15:19):
prevention, and especially justthe elimination of the hazard of
saying, if this is happening, noone be in the area, and if even
possible, keep the area separateto where walking pedestrians and
equipment don't have tointermingle, or have to
intermingle, as Very little aspossible. Those are
controllable. And it made methink about what is controllable

(15:43):
within that environment. Butthen I saw another story that
just rattled me a little bitbecause of again, here is the
public and here's the story. Andthis came from a news out of
Columbus, Ohio, a truck driver.
And I'll just read it word forword, because it's a little

(16:04):
short paragraph, and it stunnedme, a truck driver is dead after
being struck twice by separatevehicles. Wednesday evening on
the far west side of the city,according to the Columbus
police, a white tractor trailerwas traveling west on a road at

6 (16:20):
21pm, so dark when it stopped in the left turn lane in front
of the warehouse, for reasonsyet unknown, the driver exited
the truck and stepped into theleft travel lane of west bound
traffic. At that time, a a hondacr V was heading west in the
left lane and struck the truckdriver, he was knocked into the

(16:43):
right lane, and while laying inthe right lane of the westbound
lanes, a maroon Alexis struckhim again, and he was pronounced

dead at the scene at 6 (16:51):
28pm, this is where we have to think
about is public citizens. Areyou slowing down for the mailman
when he's in the road? Are youslowing down for the trash truck
drivers? Are you getting out ofthe way for emergency vehicles
when you see a car on the sideof the road or in the middle of

(17:14):
the road and they've got theirflashers on, or they seem to be
having issues, are you slowingdown and paying a little bit
more attention? Because you youcan't take that back once it
happens. And not just one, buttwo, two people not maybe paying
as much attention as what theycould have been to see that
things were evolving andchanging. And I don't know the

(17:35):
full circumstances of what washappening or why it happened,
yet. There it is, the risk andthe so much that might have been
controlled. But even when youthink back of how do you control
it, what do you control? Do younot get out of your truck? Why

(17:56):
was he out of his truck? Werethe traffic paying attention
was, did he have reflectivegear? Did he have any means of
being seen better? Did so muchthat might have been within the
control but still may not havebeen the prevention that was
needed to create the safety thatbe necessary to prevent the loss

(18:17):
of life. And so it's up to allof us. This is where I think
safety is. We all have to beresponsible for it, because when
we see it, even as a pedestrianin everyday life, we have to pay
attention for the things thatstill influence the workers that
are around us, that are outthere. So as we close out, I

(18:41):
want you to think about what iswithin our control as leaders to
make our workplaces, our peoplefeel and become more safe. How
do we control it? What is withinour control? How far can we take
it? How much can we invest init? Thanks for joining me on
this episode of the leading andlearning through safety podcast,

(19:02):
and until next time we chat,stay safe.

Announcer (19:14):
Thank you for listening to the leading and
learning through safety podcast.
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all the opinions expressed onthe podcast are solely
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(19:39):
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(20:07):
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