Yesterday was a shining example of springtime in New England: sunny, chilly, breezy. The perfect weather to kick off the season’s yard work. At the top of my to-do list: remove a dead bush from the bunch of them that surround the Japanese maple in front of our porch, depicted above after one of the many late winter snow storms we had this year.
As I struggled to free the root system from the ground, inspiration hit. Maybe there are some lessons learned in gardening that apply to Safety Management? But what would they be?
Root Causes are tough to unearth, but always worth it
At home in Bellingham, the soil is riddled with stones of various sizes, sometimes up to 2 inches in diameter or more. Digging around the roots of the bush to be ousted, I’d frequently get stuck on one of these stones and would have to find a different angle or spot for the shovel to really dig in.
Each time I dug up a stone, I’d dust it off and set it aside. I use these in my garden as decoration and to reduce the amount of mulch needed.
By the third one, this thought popped up: the most valuable Root Causes are like these stones!
- Tough to unearth: they force you to adjust your approach to dig them up
- Always worth it: once revealed, they become valuable opportunities to improve
Be mindful of the full impact of any change
Towards the end, I was having trouble with one quadrant of the root system which remained stubbornly in place. Digging around with my hands, I discovered a ¾ inch root that looked a little out of place, since it was reddish and so much thicker than even the branches of the bush I was digging up. I kept on digging and discovered a 12 inch stretch of this reddish, thick root, running across the bush’s root ball. Evidently this didn’t belong to the bush at all!
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Remembering my mom’s gardening lessons, I worked gently with my hands and a small fork around the thick reddish root to untangle the bush from it. The more I dug, the more it hit me:
- As Safety Management experts, sometimes we push fundamental system changes in our organizations, the kind that can uproot entire “bushes” of processes
- When we do effect these changes, we will sometimes encounter that thick, sideways root that doesn’t quite belong but will be affected
Don’t bring a pair of Safety glasses to a chemical splash fight
For starters, my digging approach was to soften the soil by thumping it with a long-handled fork, then use a small hand shovel to move larger chunks. I was able to loosen about half the root ball this way, and then realized I needed the “real” shovel to keep going. Progress sharply picked up at that point.
The Safety Management lessons for this one are simple, but fundamental:
- Adapt the tool to the job, not just in the sense we tell people not to misuse a tool, but also for us in the sense that not every incident may need a full-fledged investigation or not every training topic must be a hands-on one hour session
- Start small, work your way up to more complex tools: if your Safety suggestion program is working with index cards and a box, keep doing it! Only upgrade your tools when it’s needed, not simply because they’re fancier.
What Safety Management lessons have you learned or been reminded off lately?