By John Covan

[Editor’s note: This opinion piece originally appeared in Vol 35 Issue 4 of Journal of System Safety in 4Q 1999. It has been reformatted from the original, but the text is otherwise unchanged.]

I‘d like to begin a debate about the role of system safety in business.

I have often heard the complaint that safety (in particular, system safety) is viewed by system developers as a necessary evil – something that must be tacked on after the important decisions are made about system architecture and function. How many of us have heard, when trying to inject system safety into a new project, “Come back later, it’s too early for us to talk to you just now”?

Of course we know that to be maximally effective, system safety must be fully integrated from day one. But if we act as if system safety is at the top of the list and argue for our presence based on our company’s slogan (let’s assume it is “Safety is job one”), we will never achieve this integration.

In my opinion, nobody in upper management of the typical company believes that safety is the top priority. This simply reflects the cold, hard facts of business. In his March 1998 Atlantic Monthly article on the crash of ValuJet Flight 592 into a Florida swamp, William Langewiesche writes, “Safety is never first, and it never will be, but for obvious reasons it is a necessary part of the venture.” What venture? The business venture.

So what if you don’t work in the corporate, for-profit world? Does that mean you, as a government or military employee, are exempt from the “business” mindset? No, not for at least the last decade or two. Let’s face it, all the outfits we work for boil down in the end to a business of some sort, competing to produce goods and services and maintain the status quo. Maybe they don’t have a profit line, but they work pretty hard to grow their budgets.

Business people (including project leaders and upper management) tend to focus on words like functionality, marketability, cost and schedule. And why shouldn’t they? If they don’t tend to these issues, their business —- whether product or service – is at risk of failing from loss of competitiveness or other business deficiencies. But safety is not their long suit, and that does hurt their business.

Now, nearly three-and-a-half years after the crash, the lawsuits are still making the news. It was a high consequence event, especially in the business sense. One would think that the airline industry would have gotten busy and hired a phalanx of system safety experts to improve things. But recent press releases tell of improper hazardous materials shipments (the reason the ValuJet flight went down) continuing to flood the airways.

Consider the demise of the billion dollar offshore oil-drilling platform Piper Alpha by fire and explosion in the North Sea in 1988, with the loss of 167 lives. System safety could undoubtedly have prevented the accident by re-emphasizing safety culture as a necessary part of the profit motive, for example. And system safety could have mitigated the horrible consequences by redesigning the rig’s survival systems when the decision was made to retrofit for gas production. Yet the platform design and its management enjoyed no such benefits, and the system blundered forward to a predictable, catastrophic end. The business impact was a bitter pill to swallow – Occidental Petroleum left the North Sea, never to return.

So what’s wrong with this picture? It’s that missing or inadequate system safety is a business risk – just like any other business risk. Sounds simple, right? I don’t think so. If it were, I wouldn’t be writing this essay. The temptation for upper management to separate safety from other business concerns is strong. As long as this way of thinking persists, system safety will continue to be a day late and a dollar short.

To my way of thinking, the only road to success is convincing the powers responsible for designing, building and running systems to add system safety to their business toolkit. These people must become active partners in the process and understand it to its core. Only then will our tasks be elevated to the importance they deserve.

So what can be done to turn things around? Probably lots of things like educating the business community, CEOs and the like. Perhaps we can start with the SSS. What can we do to attract such an audience? Or, are there other avenues to changing the culture of the business community?

I would like to hear your opinions. I believe the SSS has a golden opportunity to reinvent itself and become inclusive of a broader audience. If we don’t, we will remain a bunch of specialists talking to ourselves.

About the Author

At the time of writing, Dr. John Covan was the Vice President of the New Mexico Chapter of the International System Safety Society and was a senior member of the technical staff with Sandia National Laboratory.

By George A. Peters

[Editor’s note: This editorial originally appeared in Vol 3 Issue 4 of Hazard Prevention (now Journal of System Safety) in 1966. It has been reformatted from the original, but the text is otherwise unchanged.]

The current panacea for reduction of workmanship errors seems to be the high pressure “employee motivation program.” Unfortunately, many of these well-intentioned programs seem to consist primarily of a combination of (1) some “hard sell” advertising techniques employing posters, pins, banners, boosters and bandwagons; and (2) some blown-up wall charts devised by manufacturing “efficiency experts” to show ever decreasing reject rates until each and every department reaches the perfection of “no defects” at all. We should remember that people react to advertising campaigns in a highly individualistic manner and the vast majority of people are not able to be consistently perfect. Words of encouragement and exhortation may be desirable, but they are certainly no substitute for tangible incentives and concrete improvement in the work situation. Where a manufacturer is involved in personal injury litigation involving claims of workmanship errors, how can it be a good defense to rely upon the fact that the fabrication workmen might have seen some banners boldly proclaiming a motivational slogan or that they might have been influenced by some charts bearing department discrepancy or reject rates?

Exhortation may be a step in the right direction, but it seems to be no substitute for the conscientious by which objective analyses, specific become a reality. application remedies, of the methods and techniques and identifiable improvements.

Some extravagant claims seem to promise a magic cure-all at reduced prices, a method by which every employee can help identify all causes of error, or imply quick punishment of those whose supposed lack of knowledge or inattention resulted in human error. Many of these programs include formulae for “establishing goals and measuring effectiveness” which more typically dries-up the flow of data regarding defects (i.e., loss of management visibility) and brings back all the problems of the “efficiency expert” whose effect on morale and motivation is legendary. An inappropriately administered, timed, or conceived program (of the general purpose motivation type) may actually turn out to be a “negative motivation” program with many adverse symptoms and unreported hidden discrepancies.

It would seem apparent that motivational programs can only be truly motivational to the extent that they are conducted by people who have some training in the behavioral sciences. The unqualified leading the blind is akin to placing a sanitary engineer in charge of designing a sewerage treatment plant when his experience has been solely that of a transfer agent at the rear of a truck. Certainly there is improvement which can be made in terms of motivationally connected workmanship errors by the successful implementation of a good “awareness” program if this were supported by other complementary personnel management programs and actions. However, the preponderant workmanship errors are of the “work situation induced” type which would continue regardless of motivation programs, since even the best motivated worker will make mistakes if he has ambiguous or misleading work instructions, the gauges do not permit accurate reading, the equipment operates contrary to his expectation, or it is virtually impossible to replace a component without damaging it. Perhaps, this aspect of product and system safety assurance is but a reaffirmation of the familiar principle that there is generally no easy or simple solution to complex or chronic problems. Exhortation may be a step in the right direction, but it seems to be no substitute for the conscientious by which objective analyses, specific become a reality. application remedies, of the methods and techniques and identifiable improvements.

[Editor Note: George A. Peters was a Past President and Fellow of the International System Safety Society.  He is the author of more than 40 books]