Accountability and Blame in Safety Management: Channelling Norms to DAMS

ArchDAMS Approach | Accountability

Accountability and Blame in Safety Management:

Channeling Norms to DAMS

Published Mar, 2024

The inclination to assign fault and blame is a universal human trait, manifesting across both our personal and professional interactions. Yet, in the context of safety management, this tendency assumes a particularly detrimental role.

Blame, whether for minor oversights or major accidents, creates a pervasive culture of stress and fear, often exacerbated by regulatory pressures perceived by company directors as a hunt for accountability.

Against this backdrop, the ArchDAMS Approach emerges as a beacon of change, aiming to steer the industry from a blame-centric paradigm to one that values responsibility and fosters a culture of continuous learning in a manner that is both empirical and reproducible.

The Quest for Accountability: Beyond the Blame Game

The landscape of safety management has traditionally been mired in a cycle of blame. When accidents occur, the rush to pinpoint and penalise the responsible parties dominates, overshadowing the potential for open dialogue and valuable learning.

This culture of blame is further amplified by traditional norms characterised by indistinct responsibilities and elusive accountability.

In such an environment, unfulfilled duties lead to a murky game of finger-pointing, which clouds the true causes of safety incidents and obstructs constructive progress.

Recently, there's been a movement towards advocating a culture of care, trust, and a no-blame ethos—commendable yet challenging concepts to both understand and implement.

While some of these shifts are superficial, serving as attractive but hollow marketing narratives, others genuinely transform the workplace into an overly protective environment, where accountability is glossed over in favour of universal affirmation.

These swings toward either extreme arise from safety management practices that are too often shaped by a patchwork of research, conventional wisdom, and the seasoned instincts of industry veterans. True accountability, however, transcends the simplistic question of who is to blame and who deserves to be protected.

Accountability within Normative Systems

Normative systems, designed with the intent to uphold safety, often stumble when it comes to fostering authentic accountability.

Burdened with broad duties and responsibilities, these systems sometimes delegate tasks to individuals who lack the requisite information, expertise, or authority for effective execution.

Consequently, there emerges a pervasive uncertainty about who truly holds the responsibility for safety—is it the safety officers, the line managers, or the senior executives? This ambiguity weakens the fabric of accountability, allowing oversights to persist unnoticed until compelled into the spotlight by audits or, regrettably, accidents.

Consider an incident where a worker suffered a fall into an unprotected elevator shaft. In the aftermath, during discussions with senior management, one manager pointedly questioned why the worker hadn't been wearing a safety harness.

This line of inquiry, while perhaps well-intentioned, sidestepped the core issue: the absence of necessary edge protection. The focus on the worker's actions, rather than the systemic safety failures, exemplified the challenge of shifting blame away from systemic issues and onto individuals.

It was a telling instance of how deeply ingrained the blame culture can be, even in the face of clear evidence pointing to a lapse in safety measures.

Accountability within the ArchDAMS Approach

The ArchDAMS framework revolutionises accountability in safety management. Unlike normative systems plagued by ambiguous responsibilities, ArchDAMS clearly defines and assigns accountability to designated dutyholders for each task, ensuring a direct line of responsibility from task assignment to completion.

This system transcends the traditional blame game, focusing instead on the efficient and safe completion of tasks. It introduces a proactive model where early interventions and corrective measures replace punitive actions, ensuring a constructive path towards safety compliance.

In the ArchDAMS methodology, responsibilities such as installing edge protection at elevator shafts are precisely allocated to specific individuals. These dutyholders are then provided with the necessary resources to fulfill their obligations effectively.

Each dutyholder reports to a supervisor for that particular task, ensuring its installation at a designated time as part of the corewall casting and striking process, verifying its durability and ensuring its ongoing presence until a later designated time when other activities are required in the area.

Leveraging cloud computing, the ArchDAMS system meticulously tracks and reports on the inspection of elevator shafts, enhancing transparency and accountability across each project stage. This methodical tracking facilitates a comprehensive overview of safety measures, making it easier to manage and access data.

This rigorous approach to safety tasks, once considered burdensome, is now streamlined thanks to advancements in technology that facilitate easy data management and access.

By making inspections task-specific and data-driven, ArchDAMS ensures that every aspect of safety management is accounted for, transforming how safety measures are implemented and monitored on-site.

Genuine learning environments demand a high level of engagement and accountability from everyone involved. They necessitate a culture where individuals are expected to contribute fully and may be scrutinised for even minor issues to prevent them from escalating into major incidents.

The Culture Shift: From Blame to Learning

Transitioning an organisation from a culture of blame to one of learning represents a nuanced challenge, intertwining the delicate balance between accountability and the tendency to point fingers.

Blame cultures, despite their focus on fault-finding, can drive results. The deterrent effect of potential blame serves as a motivator, albeit a flawed one. Its efficacy in broader business practices suggests it has its place in safety culture as well.

Blame cultures attribute responsibility for actions, albeit often retrospectively, once mistakes have occurred. The primary issue with such cultures isn’t necessarily their unpalatability or the potential detriment to well-being but their reactive nature. Many elements of highly functional teams might be considered unpalatable and mentally taxing, yet they deliver outcomes.

For instance, elite athletes often testify to the benefits of a strict regime that, despite being strenuous and mentally demanding, cultivates excellence over time. Ensuring that everyone is able to go home safe after each day of work is arguably a nobler task and should benefit from proven excellence regimes even when they are tough to master.

Learning cultures, on the other hand, aim to harness the positive aspects of blame cultures and channel them into growth and development. In these environments, accountability is not evaded but actively pursued. Learning strategies, such as the ArchDAMS approach, advocate for a form of accountability designed to foster discipline.

By clearly delineating responsibilities and insisting on their acceptance by duty holders, approaches like ArchDAMS preemptively set the expectations for which individuals will be held accountable. This method alleviates unnecessary mental strain while maintaining the discipline essential to the process.

Learning organisations are not intended to be overly relaxed workplaces where shortcomings are easily overlooked; rather, they are rigorous settings where strict discipline lays the foundation for robust safety cultures. This disciplined approach is crucial for cultivating an atmosphere where excellence in safety is not just envisioned but actively achieved.

Navigating the Legal and Cultural Landscape: The Role of ArchDAMS

Organisations operate within a complex interplay of internal culture and external legal and business environments, striving to maintain a delicate equilibrium. Achieving harmony between these domains is a formidable challenge, one that few organisations manage successfully.

This discord often precipitates stricter regulations, contributing to a cycle of misalignment and collective failures both within organisations and in the wider business ecosystem.

Globally, legal frameworks tend to penalise corporations and its management team members for accidents, creating a pervasive fear of documenting recurring issues lest it opens the door to prosecution and regulatory scrutiny.

The apprehension among management teams regarding the documentation of site issues becomes palpable when attempts are made to meticulously record every infraction, albeit with the intention of contributing to a culture of learning from mini failures.

Within this framework, the ArchDAMS approach shines as a catalyst for innovative transformation, moving beyond a culture motivated by fear. It advocates for openness and meticulous data gathering, enabling organisations to chart their progress toward enhanced safety outcomes in a way that supports deeper learning and minimises exposure to legal risks.

This approach advocates for the candid disclosure of shortcomings, with an emphasis on deriving lessons from them. It poses a marked departure from conventional methods that often conceal inefficiencies and failures in compliance until they culminate in significant crises.

ArchDAMS equips organisations to deftly manage the fine line between compliance with legal standards and the cultivation of an internal ethos characterised by accountability, continuous learning, and transparency.

An Ethical Future with ArchDAMS

For safety management systems to be effective, they must be designed to be transparent thereby facilitating the collection and sharing of the operational data that feeds into continuous improvement. Transparent data, however, carries the risk of blame, additional scrutiny and prosecution; yet in its absence the risk of all three swells.

The norm in the industry is an approach that 'reluctantly' prioritises obscuring the true scale of minor issues for fear of scrutiny and the additional work and cost that are associated with getting them fixed. This system works well enough until the next major accident—an unethical failure to protect the injured for fear of exposing minor frailties.

The ArchDAMS approach takes a bold approach to exposing minor failures and committing to fixing them before they escalate. It does this by leveraging technology that makes identification and analysis accessible and makes the gains visible to strategic decision makers.

In essence, accountability stands as a fundamental component in the crafting of efficient management systems. Conversely, blame acts as an unwelcome presence within the workplace, undermining the efforts of employees and managers alike, and fostering a culture where minor issues are concealed in the hope that major accidents are avoided.

In the absence of accountability, organisations struggle to conduct disciplined operations that transform minor setbacks into opportunities for continuous learning. Experienced professionals in safety and operations management recognise the critical role of accountability. They are equally aware of the detrimental effects of a blame culture that not only pervades organisations but also aspects of the legal framework.

The effectiveness of the ArchDAMS Approach stems from its alignment with the inherent structure of operations—a constellation of interlinked modules driven by a unified goal and supported by communal resources.

By overseeing every operation through Dutyholders endowed with concrete Accountability and equipped with appropriate Means to excel in every Sphere of operations, ArchDAMS solidifies a foundation for unparalleled safety success across all organisations. It creates robust barriers that control Hazards, mitigate Risks, and prevent Accidents, while subtly nurturing a beneficial Cultural flow.