Where risk management goes off the rails

[obk]

I was hoping for some insight on an issue I struggle with daily. I run a risk management program for an environmental non-profit with operations in all 50 states and a few territories. With that comes a lot of nonsense and I'm often in a position of acting as the intermediary between insurers and boots on the ground.

One of the biggest struggles in that regard is the difficulty of maintaining coherent safety programming among a broad spectrum of operations. Insurers love hearing how simple things are and how on top of things our leaders are, but the reality is far more complicated. Often we rely on partners who disregard or pay lip service to best practices, promote individuals to positions beyond their experience level, and fail to put systems in place to facilitate situational awareness.

On the whole, this works out. The people that work for me kick ass and nobody shows up to do a bad job. However, shit happens. When shit does happen I'm in the position of explaining what mitigation measures were or weren't in place and have to present a narrative that puts the companies' best foot forward. In these discussions, there is often a point of agreement that is broadly sensible but might throw a wrench into local activities. Things like restricting certain tool or vehicle use to varying age groups come to mind. Understandably, my leadership team hates how these restrictions limit their operations and our partners are prone to latch onto them as being unreasonable in the context of their past experience as government employees.

This ties into things like reporting. I require people to report tons of mundane things that almost certainly don't matter... until they do. If you've reported the issue I'm in a great position to help. If you haven't, I'm not. Although I've spent a lot of time explaining this to other staff, I have the perception that they feel this is an individual choice I'm making and not something imposed by the systems I'm working on. In part, they're right and I'm just trying to make my job coherent for myself. More generally, I'm doing what's required of my position. It creates tension between myself and our staff which sometimes detracts from our central mission of keeping people not hurt while doing great work.

Would greatly appreciate any insight others with similar experience might have on this topic, whether it's from the viewpoint of on the ground workers, management, or safety officers.

[mynewunit]

Ah, Too many cooks. The real answer is not everyone is going to be happy with any answer. We always want something super satisfying like getting the insurance guy with every safety measure stand in front of you and 10 of your peers and perform the daily tasks, while he is out performed by your 12 year old daughter is converse, t shirt and shorts.

What you need to do is have all invested parties prioritize their requirements. Then you need to evaluate the real risks of their priorities, and generate your list of priorities. You will need to have relationships with all those parties. To do that you have to learn the languages of all the parties. Insurance you will have to argue property vs personal injury. Lawyers will need to talk liability vs bad outcome. You will need to be able to discuss all these things in all these "dimensions" and languages.

How would you do you job better? What changes should you actually make? I would look at the military. If you look at Tilt, when he was deployed he didn't have body armor, PPE, or even extra water. When Jocko and TU Bruiser were deployed they had helmets, Humvee's, gloves, safety glasses. This is because the most common injuries are eye injuries, hand injuries and helmets can reduce the "order" of injury from death to concussion, concussion to cut, and cut to nothing. What are the things that are risks to safety? Your goal is to reduce recordable incidents, presumably. Try do find the things that would make the biggest difference and put costs on them. Then run it up the ranks and find out where they want to focus.