Paradigm Shift in Safety 4: From Fault-finding to Fact-finding

In the series of paradigm shifts in Safety, today I would like you reader to transform safety from a situation of Fault-finding (blame game) to Fact-finding (feedback game).  Raising fingers on an individual or a team for injury situation may not help an organisation bringing down the number of injuries. Instead, a near miss or injury should be looked upon as an opportunity to gather facts from all systems that probably have role to play in causing an accident. Here I say you to consider all contributory factors related to behaviour (bad SAFETITUDE), person (incompetency) or environment (unsafe condition) as well. We miss many contributory causes because we investigate the accidents for finding the single cause i.e. root cause.  Thus evaluation of injury in process of Accident Investigation remains incomplete because we get very less information than they could be. In fact, to learn more about the inputs for injury prevention, we need to approach the task with a different mindset and i.e. Accident Analysis.

When an accident is analysed to look for all possible aspects that caused it, probably we try to find facts. We get cooperation from and participation of employee in the process and reap more advantages. Workers, who fear to speak in earlier approach, come forward in later to provide information on potential contributors of the accident. More and more workers thus get encouragement to give feedback and as a result ownership keeps getting rooted in them. Gradually, this leads to a situation of Total Safety Culture for a sustainable safety performance.