Challenging the Safety Quo by Craig Marriott

Author:Craig Marriott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-10-05T11:48:27+00:00

think we should have said or done (which is another point to note in investi-

gations when interviewing witnesses – memories are extremely unreliable).

When we look back over why a decision was made, we tend to imagine a

logical, thought- through process that weighs up all the relevant factors. This

is reinforced in safety by our use of risk matrices, decision trees, job safety

analyses and so on. But the reality is quite different. In life we make hun-

dreds, if not thousands, of decisions every day. If we stopped and thought

through them all logically and weighed up all the pros and cons and possible

outcomes, we would be paralysed into inactivity. Thinking is hard work, so

the less we can do of it, the better. Ask someone to solve a tricky maths

puzzle while walking and they will stop. Thinking hard and walking is simply

too much for the brain to cope with.

To overcome this, we use a combination of previous experience, assumptions,

values, biases, knowledge, constraints and pressures (and others) to develop some

broad decision- making rules, or heuristics. A heuristic is essential y a rough and

ready, practical decision- making process that is not optimal, but is quick and that

our experience has shown us tends to work well enough. It is a trial- and-error

approach or a rule of thumb. But we don’t just use it for things we have done

before and learned from. We wil also use it for decisions that are reasonably

similar to previous ones. We wil even replace a difficult question or decision

with an easier one that we know the answer to. Ask someone a more simple

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