SafetyInsights.org

What is the relationship between reasonable tasks, clutter, and bullshit tasks in safety management? An upcoming summary explored these links, tracing the connection from regulation to internal requirements.

Some points:

• “the management of values like safety and quality often leads to the creation of unnecessary tasks that interfere with the actual work being done”.
• These facets of management generates work that “interfere with the core work, or “real work”, as it is often called”, hence, “safety management interferes with safe work”
• This is driven by how organisational and technological systems encourage a shift in safety management away from the sphere of people and their “real work”, towards bullshit tasks
• People often reported not seeing the purpose of their bullshit tasks, with outputs “seemingly disappearing into a “black hole”; including extensive documentation of simple routine chores or reporting in systems they never saw anybody use
• Practical systems and verification are “often in conflict, and regulatory traditions lead the verification to trump practical systems” [*** and more often I believe, internally derived blue tape rather than from government]
• Managers are “expected to show paper trails to safety regulators, quality management auditors, financial supporters, insurance companies, and a line of stakeholders”.
• From a worker perspective, many safety management tasks are “are often viewed as external to the core work, constituting two parallel trails of tasks—the real work and safety management”
• That is, as shown in the second image, there’s the core tasks that people accomplish for their jobs, and the secondary tasks which meet the safety management requirements and these two trails don’t always overlap
• When personnel are so pre-occupied with safety management tasks (the secondary tasks), they can find it difficult to find time to properly complete their core tasks, hence, need to make decisions based on local rationality

It’s open access, so you can freely read the chapter and book.

Authors: Størkersen, K. V., & Fyhn, H. (2024). In Compliance and Initiative in the Production of Safety: A Systems Perspective on Managing Tensions and Building Complementarity (pp. 29-40). Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland.

Study link: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-3-031-45055-6.pdf

LinkedIn post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/benhutchinson2_what-is-the-relationship-between-reasonable-activity-7177068235421282305-J0qs?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop