“The partnering of an injury rate to a matching severity rate was done with the express knowledge that injury rate statistics would drive underreporting if severity was not considered.”
A fascinating chapter from Kevin Geddert in Dekker’s Safety Theatre, exploring why our modern metrics are fundamentally misaligned.
As far back as 1915, Royal Meeker and his team knew that frequency rates were susceptible to being underreported. Therefore, they specifically coupled it with severity rates.
But, over the last century, we’ve kept frequency but lost our way with the severity: in a sense, we’ve turned a tool for clarity into one of safety theatre.
As the chapter ponders, would Meeker have gone ahead with these transformational measures “knowing that the half-functioning version released 56 years later would drive poor safety practices and become a contributor to Safety Theater and a motivator for under-reporting industrial accidents”?
Highly recommend checking out Kevin’s chapter, and his other published work. As Kevin aptly puts it, we may be “hitting the target, but missing the point”.
PS. See here for a 2-part YouTube interview where Kevin unpacks the history of how we’ve lost our way with stats.
SafetyInsights.org 