Australasian Mine Safety is the leading voice for all key decision makers within Mining company's and major contractors. Delivering the latest industry news as it breaks.
Issue link: http://ebook.aprs.com.au/i/44685
Safety Psychologist Digging deep S o where does this "tolerance" of risk come from? I suggest largely from our personal experience. We really do need to remember that the safety community measures its success so much differently than the rest of the world. Our success is In the previous edition I began our journey toward an often ignored construct which is known as "risk tolerance". Within an industry which places so much emphasis on the assessment of risk, this is truly concerning. We just have to dig deeper into this one. measured by the absence of events. That is critical, so allow me to try and say it in a different way. When something has NOT happened, then we are doing well. Try watching any sporting event and feeling that something really fantastic has been achieved when there has not been a result. I don't know about you… I always feel a bit disappointed when I have watched a game of football and at the end of the 90 minutes we have a draw. In Rugby League, they even came up with a "Golden Point" rule; just to make sure "something happened". So when so much "stuff" is not happening, we very quickly become tolerant of all those risks that we "know" are there, but are not happening. After a while we may not even "know" they are there. They have been absent from our experiential frame for so long that they are fi led in the "rainy day" category. Now here's something a little scary! How do we know what is "happening" or "not happening". Well yes, there is that thing about our personal experience. I had been riding a pushbike a few thousand kms for a number of years and never been "hit" before. The fact that I had never been "hit" before has absolutely nothing to do with the consequences that would occur should the "event" occur. My titanium shoulder tells me that every day! We are severely restricted in our ability to make informed risk decisions because of this question of "knowledge". I have lost count of the number of health professionals at John Hunter Hospital (the major teaching hospital where they put me back together), who when advised what had happened to me, responded with "not another one". Does that place a whole new emphasis upon our risk matrix exercise (See Australasian Mine Safety Journal winter edition: 2011 pp. 34-35). It certainly did for me. We have to be careful though we don't "jump" the other way. The staff at John Hunter Hospital also have a biased frame of reference – they see the banged up cyclists (or the outcome). They have no real understanding of "frequency" or "likelihood". So, not only does the issue of "likelihood" bare no relationship to "outcome", our ability to make 60 The Australasian Mine Safety Journal Spring 2011