Process or Outcome?

Today I was reading a LinkedIn post lamenting the state of health and safety management, evidenced by too many "safety stickers" on a piece of machinery.

A commenter noted that the situation was "absolute madness", which doesn't keep anyone safe. Much of the conversation from there was focused on whose "fault" it was and we ended up with all of the usual suspects in the firing line – insurers, lawyers, consultants and so on. Probably quite justified too.

To my mind, this issue illustrates the disconnect apparent in health and safety management between "process" and "outcome". It seems to me that health and safety management is obsessed with process – the way that we "do" safety. This obsession means that every few years somebody reinvents the way we do safety, or the way we do parts of safety. As evidence of this you only need to think of the transition from safety culture, to safety 1, through to safety 2 and now safety differently - with god only knows what in between. On a micro level, just think how many iterations of the JHA you have seen during your working career.

What makes this more interesting is the process doesn't really matter. How you "do" safety is not really an issue. What is important is whether you can show your process achieves the outcome it was designed for.

The table below lists a series of cases looking at the "outcome" of understanding hazards. The "processes" were all different: documented, undocumented, buddy systems, on-the-job training and so on. But even where the processes were the same this did not determine the decision – the decision was determined on whether the outcome, and understanding of hazards and risks, was achieved.

So, the question is not how fancy, new or shiny your process is. The question is whether it achieves the outcome.