Is the hand that feeds the economy being bitten? Why does it seem that all of enterprise is often considered to be bad, corrupt and evil? How can it be that a few rotten apples spoil a whole barrel? Or it is a few do-gooders who are making it fashionable to stifle all enterprise by blaming it for questionable hazards. The old adage that the “squeaky wheel gets the oil,” it is suspected that something will go wrong or if it does go wrong, it gets a lot of negative media attention. In either case, does enterprise get a “bad rap?” Sorting these issues out is difficult.
Our courts are busy with unending liability claims for wrong-doing by corporate enterprise and malfeasant of government agencies. Notable, was the massive oil spill in Valdez, Alaska; the BPO oil well disaster in the Gulf of Mexico; the GM auto ignition switch failure; the Flint, Michigan water contamination and many other occurrences. Litigation is a torturous process intended to bring justice, but sometimes causes wrongful losses to other unnamed parties.
What is ignored, overlooked and often with a total lack of awareness by the large companies listed above, is a common thread of what makes things go wrong for them. After WWII, the military recognized a need to test and evaluate new weapons and support systems before they were issued so they would not fail in combat or expose their personnel to unwanted hazards. As we are entering a new age of automation with driverless cars, crewless cargo ships and aerial drones, there is a great awakening to ensure for reliable machine performance that is free of hazards. Already, an open-pit mine in Australia has a fleet of huge driverless ore-hauling trucks. Fifteen miles west of Green Valley, Arizona, Caterpillar has a proving ground that tests their huge autonomous self-driving ore trucks that are programmed to follow a GPS travel route.
Safety is becoming design-based. Behavior-based safety is fading into the past. Concepts of risk management that rely on acceptable worker performance are no longer relevant with workerless producton. Conventional management hierarchy is usually clueless about design-based safety. The larger the organization, the greater the probability of blindness of recognizing hazards of their product or services. There are principal reasons why leadership is unaware of the inherent hazards that may plague their product. Traditionally, safety only addresses user/people behavior. A great void exists in a formal methodology to identify hazards that may arise during use of a machine or product. Without this skill, engineers, designers and developers are inclined to avoid design-safety issues because they have had no training in hazard identification and elimination by design. The primary approach to ensure for product, machine and activity safety is to comply with industry or government standards. These controls are made after multiple occurrences that caused injury or damage. This approach does little to provide insight on how to identify all hazards that may exist in new machines or products at the time of design and ensure for safer design. In the event of injury or damage, the typical investigation usually does not go farther than to identify what the victim may have failed to do.
This approach permeates most management review and even includes legal defense of personal injury liability claims. For this reason, the corporate CEO is often blindsided when numerous failures occur, resulting in government reviews, liability or an overwhelming cry for product recall. The corporate CEO has been informed by defense lawyers of the wrong information that focuses on improper user or insured’s unsafe behavior with a complete absence of identifying the inherent hazard. Insurance companies are usually of little help, as they are only concerned with the nebulous risk of injury or damage with little attention to hazard elimination at the time of design. A striking exception is the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, Highway Loss Data Institute (IIHS HLDI), which publishes a free monthly status report. They have an outstanding history of identifying hazards to the driver. With research and testing of the reliable performance of auto and highway safe design, has resulted in a remarkable reduction of highway injuries.
Since the time when money was first developed as a medium of exchange, accounting became a primary issue to protect it from loss. Today, the corporate comptroller has authority for oversight to protect corporate money. As the legal environment of business has become more and more complicated, the corporate lawyer has a vital role. Within this same corporate leadership, an engineer skilled in design safety is as necessary as a vice president or board member, who has an overriding authority to ensure for safe design. Without this additional safety engineering expertise in top management, it is the reason why some large corporate companies have been blindsided by a disastrous occurrence.
The good news is that for every enterprise wrongdoer, there are more than a thousand others that seem to do it right. This measure of success may be attributed to an overriding faith of leadership not to put anyone in harm’s way. As our enterprise becomes more and more dependent on technology for products, machines and systems that become exceedingly complex, then hazards become unseen by both the maker and user. Nonetheless, enterprise has always survived. The high cost of failure is the engine that drives the avoidance of liability, recall and more regulation with safe design and planning. The “bad rap” is the catalyst of change for all enterprise. To ban enterprise from using new technology is not the answer. The winds of change will bring a new priority to ensure the product or activity does not trap the user with an unseen hazard. Manufacturers are becoming aware of the “bad rap” and are creating an overriding top management oversight to ensure for the prevention of hazards that cause wrongful consequences.
In many circumstances, enterprise does get a “bad rap” that is generated by the lazy and incompetent who believe that they are owed a living. This “bad rap” is the salt in a wound that becomes a powerful incentive for design-based safety.
David MacCollum is a recognized authority on design-based safety. He is listed on the special few by the International Safety and Health Hall of Fame. He authored Construction Safety Engineering Principles, published by McGraw Hill, which is a guide to design-based safety.