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Mac's Safety Space: Fear is not sustainable

Hospital Safety Insider, January 7, 2016

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A Welshman of some repute once noted that "fear is a man's best friend" and while that may have been the case in a Darwinian sense, I don't know that the safety community can rely as much on it as a means of sustainable improvement. I've worked in healthcare for a long time and I have definitely encountered organizational leaders that traded in the threat of reprisal, etc., if imperfections were encountered in the workplace (and trust me when I say that "back in the day" something as simple as a match behind a door-left by a prickly VP to see how long it stayed there-could result in all sorts of holy heck), it typically resulted in various recriminations, fingerpointing, etc., none of which ended up meaning much in the way of sustained improvement. What happened was (to quote another popular bard-one from this side of the pond), folks tended to "end up like a dog that's been beat too much," so when the wicked witch goes away, the fear goes too, and with it the driving force to stay one step ahead of the sheriff (mixing a ton of metaphors here-hopefully I haven't tipped the obfuscation scales).

Read Steve's entire blog post here.

Read all of Steve's blog posts on Mac's Safety Space.

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