A still, small sound

One of the benefits of having attended a religious elementary school (despite being a fairly secular one as religious schools go) is exposure to the text of the Bible. There are two verses from the first book of Kings that have always stuck with me. They are from I Kings 19:11–13, where God is speaking to the prophet Elijah. I’ve taken the text below from the English translation that was done by A.J. Rosenberg:

And He said: Go out and stand in the mountain before the Lord, behold!

The Lord passes, and a great and strong wind splitting mountains and shattering boulders before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind.

And after the wind an earthquake-not in the earthquake was the Lord.

After the earthquake fire, not in the fire was the Lord,

and after the fire a still small sound.

I was thinking of these passages when listening to an episode of Todd Conklin’s Pre-accident Investigation podcast, with the episode title Safety Moment – Embracing the Yellow: Rethinking Safety Indicators.

It’s in the aftermath of the big incidents where most of the attention is focused when it comes to investing in reliability: the great and strong winds, the earthquakes, the fires. But I think it’s the subtler signals, what Conklin refers to as the yellow (as opposed to the glaring signals of the red or the absence of signal of the green) that are the ones that communicate to us about the risk of the major outage that has not happened yet.

It’s these still small sounds we need to able to hear in order to see the risks that could eventually lead to catastrophe. But to hear these sounds, we need to listen for them.