How to convince Shipmates that Incident Free Operations are Achievable

Five years ago, I wrote an article for the maritime news website gCaptain in which I made the case that incident free operations were achievable.  While the article was geared specifically towards commercial shipping and the offshore oil and gas industry, the premise of the article is applicable to a variety of “high risk” industries.

When you take a look at the safety policies of most large businesses, you’ll likely see some variation of a “safety vision” or “safety goal” stating that the company will conduct its operations incident free (no injuries).

The reality is, at least for most employees, the idea that a large company can operate incident free over an extended period of time is incomprehensible.

“Eventually, someone’s bound to do something stupid and cause an accident.” is a common statement you’ll hear under peoples’ breath.

One way to change this perception among our coworkers is to rethink how we present the goal of “incident free” operations. As I said in my article:

What if we took these same “IFO non-believers” and assigned them to do a complicated task.

Now, what if we broke this complicated task down into individual steps and agreed that we would not perform any of the steps until the entire group was confident that each step had been thoroughly analyzed and risk assessed to eliminate the possibility of anyone involved getting hurt.

I believe a consensus would eventually be reached that each step of the task could be completed safely. Sometimes additional expertise, equipment, or time may be needed, but a consensus will eventually be reached that the job is either 100% safe or is simply not worth doing at all.

The point is, if we can agree (with confidence) that accomplishing one task, one step at a time incident free is achievable, it’s not that much larger of a step to believe that incident free operations are achievable overall. Even when we look at a time frame of a billion years; a ZERO likelihood of an incident occurring per step multiplied by a billion steps is still ZERO!

Safety does not have to be complicated.  Almost every workplace injury, especially in the maritime and offshore industries, is a result of someone not taking the time to properly risk assess a job or doing something that they already knew was not the safe and/or against company policy.  Changing this mindset is what will eventually lead us into achieving our goal of working “incident free”.