Green is the color of complacency
Here are a few anecdotes about safety from the past few years.
In 2020, the world was struck by the COVID-19 pandemic. The U.S. response was… not great. Earlier in 2019, before the pandemic struck, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security released a pandemic preparedness assessment that ranked 195 countries on how well prepared they were to deal with a pandemic. The U.S. was ranked number one: it was identified as the most well-prepared country on earth.
With its pandemic playbook, “The U.S. was very well prepared,” said Eric Toner, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “What happened is that we didn’t do what we said we’d do. That’s where everything fell apart. We ended up being the best prepared and having one of the worst outcomes.”
On October 29, 2018, Lion Air Flight 610 crashed 13 minutes after takeoff, killing everyone on board. This plane was a Boeing 737 MAX, and a second 737 MAX had a fatal crash a few months later. Seven days prior to the Lion Air crash, the National Safety Council presented the Boeing Company with the Robert W. Campbell Award for leadership in safety:
“The Boeing Company is a leader in one of those most safety-centric industries in the world,” said Deborah A.P. Hersman, president and CEO of the National Safety Council. “Its innovative approaches to EHS excellence make it an ideal recipient of our most prestigious safety award. We are proud to honor them, and we appreciate their commitment to making our world safer.”
On April 20th, 2010, an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig killed eleven workers and led to the largest marine oil spill in the history of the industry. The year before, the U.S. Minerals Management Service issued its SAFE award to Deepwater Horizon:
MMS issued its SAFE award to Transocean for its performance in 2008, crediting the company’s “outstanding drilling operations” and a “perfect performance period.” Transocean spokesman Guy Cantwell told ABC News the awards recognized a spotless record during repeated MMS inspections, and should be taken as evidence of the company’s longstanding commitment to safety.
When things are going badly, everybody in the org knows it. If you go into an organization where high-severity incidents are happening on a regular basis, where everyone is constantly in firefighting mode, then you don’t need metrics to tell you how bad things are: it’s obvious to everyone, up and down the chain. The problems are all-too-visible. Everybody can feel them viscerally.
It’s when things aren’t always on fire that it can be very difficult to assess whether we need to allocate additional resources to reduce risk. As the examples above show, absence of incidents do not indicate an absence of risk. In fact, these quiet times can lull is into a sense of complacency, leading us to think that we’re in a good spot, when the truth is that there’s a significant risk that’s hidden beneath the surface.
Personally, I don’t believe it’s even possible to say with confidence that “everything is ok with right now”. As the cases above demonstrate, when things are quiet, there’s a limit to how well we can actually assess the risk based on the kinds of data we traditionally collect.
So, should you be worried about your system? If you find yourself constantly in firefighting mode, then, yes, you should be worried. And if things are running smoothly, and the availability metrics are all green? Then, also yes, you should be worried. You should always be worried. The next major incident is always just around the corner, no matter how high your ranking is, or how many awards you get.
