We tried our best!

There are some things people say that on reflection are quite ridiculous - and we're all guilty of saying them! 'We tried our best' is surely one such saying! Is it really good enough that your football team 'tried their best' at the weekend - but lost, or that you 'tried your best' to pass that exam - but didn't? Worse still, is it really good enough for a company to have 'tried its best' to sort out health and safety when someone just got hurt?

The fact is that in all of these situations what you should be doing is setting an objective and applying the necessary resources to achieving that objective. In other words you can only achieve what your resources allow you to achieve, it's just about setting the right objective and applying those resources effectively.

The resources can be anything at your disposal; money, people, time and equipment and they should be employed after careful consideration of every factor you can possibly think of. This means considering everything that could possibly get in the way of achieving what you want to.

If you fail or if you don't meet your objectives this really should be against all the odds - you should have weighed up the odds after all (I think they call it a risk assessment) The outcome shouldn't be a surprise!

Douglas Adams school of safety

We had our Health and Safety; Implications for Directors free seminar last week, which was very interesting indeed. My guest speaker was Don Graham (JP), who certainly gripped the audience with tales of directors in all manner of peril, simply by not taking health and safety seriously at board level. You would think that the very real prospect of going to jail, or losing your personal assets (just 2 of the real-life stories from Don), would motivate board's across the land to jump out of their seats and empower safety teams to get cracking on protecting their rear ends.

One of our employees is a huge fan of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and loves a quote from Arthur Dent, who proudly proclaimed "I'd far rather be happy than right any day". This phrase has been changed a little in our organisation now, and it goes something like this: "It's a shame that people often confuse being lucky with being right". We use this to apply to some of the stories we hear in the health and safety world and it wasn't until last week's seminar that it came crashing down on me as to the full implications of this little saying.


Of course, those words apply to so many things in life, but for safety, the ramifications are huge. Just because nothing has gone wrong so far, really doesn't mean that everything is all right. There are so many preventable accidents and injuries, just waiting to happen in the workplace today, not to mention the more insidious injuries like vibration white finger or noise induced deafness! Being lucky to get away with it certainly isn't the same as getting to grips and getting it right!

The government might not be as stupid as you think!

Does it seem to you like the tide of public opinion about ‘Health and Safety gone mad’ is on the turn? Even in this month's Safety and Health Practitioner, they look at the recent media coverage of health and safety and it would seem that a number of outlets are actually beginning to tackle the issue of Health and Safety in a much more mature, grown up way. For example the 26^th November viewing of QI, which actually set about to dispel a few of the ‘myths’ of health and safety.

This made me ponder as to what would bring this about and my thoughts are that it is all to do with anti-establishment vogue - perhaps the government actually did the industry a favour by bemoaning over-zealous health and safety culture (the Lord Young Review; http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKTRE65C30O20100613)!

It could be the case that there has simply been more publicity of late and that the HSE has done a Stirling job with its PR. Nice thought, but probably not realistic if we're going to be honest. It's actually far more likely that the media always want to take a pop at the establishment, even when that means questioning on one of its own pet subjects – i.e. ‘the health and safety fun police!’

So if this is the case, then could it be that the government has been so clever as to use reverse psychology on the media to drive the issue of health and safety to the fore to ensure that everyone begins to play ball – hmmm

It's also perhaps worth thinking about the public at large for a moment. I have always felt that we are permanently under attack in this business even though we're only here to stop people getting hurt, but maybe the public really do understand the difference between stupid health and safety and what we actually do for a living!