Post-pandemic Era Leads to Re-examination of Safety in High-risk Industries
Shocks from the COVID-19 global health crisis reverberate in all directions. Questions at the forefront for many organizations are: How will and how should industrial safety change post-pandemic?”
ISE Faculty Emeritus David Woods has been part of worldwide talks with leaders from many international organizations to define the future for industrial safety. Dr. Woods was an invited (virtual) speaker in an international symposium led by the French Foundation for an Industrial Safety Culture (FonCSI) as part of the biennial Resilience Engineering Association conference on June 23 in Toulouse, France. In this symposium attended by 230 people around the world either virtually or in-person, Dr. Woods addressed the topic, “Does the At-Risk Industry Need to Change the Paradigm for Safety Management?”
Dr. Woods, who was named a Fellow of the International Ergonomics Association this summer in recognition of his extraordinary international accomplishments advancing safety and resilience of complex systems, framed the situation as precariously poised between retreat or renewal.
He says, it is comfortable for organizations to look to return to previous ways of thinking and working. In fact, Dr. Woods says he has heard this attitude in discussions with top management: They say, “’We got through the crisis. Yes, it was hard, but looking back, though my leadership, my organization’s processes and technology, the company was able to cope and survive,’” he says. “’Now we can return to a focus on the normal key business goals.’”
But, he notes, the stress of the pandemic caused financial distress with tough budget choices and one of these quickly becomes how can we reduce the costs of safety management? When the question is posed this way, he says, the future of industrial safety puts more emphasis on checking off boxes and pressuring people for rigid compliance with rules until the organization has to react to an adverse event.
So, how did these organizations actually cope with disruptions from the pandemic? He observes that most organizations were able to cope only because people provided the source of resilient performance by adapting how they worked, adapting how they coordinated with others and adapting how they used new technology. “Through great efforts, some people were able to rethink on the fly, work at new faster tempos, share information in new ways and reprioritize across multiple goals — all well outside the normal channels which would have been too slow, too stale and too stuck in ineffective actions,” Dr. Woods says. “They went well beyond the normal processes because they faced pressures far outside the assumptions behind the normal plans.”
Prior to the pandemic, he says studies were showing that there was little preparation and investment from upper management to build the organizational capabilities for this agility and resilience. As Woods’ research has observed many times before, most organizations are set up to be slow and stale when challenged to adapt. “When challenges arise, it is people throughout organizations who are the ad hoc source of resilient performance, not management or technology alone,” he says. “And the pandemic is far from the only source of shock and change in our world. “
The symposium speakers warn that the lesson is not that we survived this shock and can now go back to what was comfortable. “The lesson is the world continues to be dynamic, turbulent and complex in ways that place a premium on investing in agility and resilience,” Dr. Woods says. “Post-pandemic, the opportunity is to rethink what investments actually balance the pressures for productivity and efficiency with the ability to see and defuse changing sources of risk before anyone is harmed.”
Woods’s answer to the symposium’s question for safety management is that the post-pandemic world provides an opportunity to renewal and reconfiguration, not retreating to reactive bureaucratic rigidity. “Renewal,” he says, “looks forward, ready to identify changing opportunities to better achieve key goals in more effective ways”.
During the symposium, Dr. Woods reminded the audience: “The pandemic is not even over but we can see already that the disruptive forces unleashed are continuing to produce changes. Operating in this emerging world of turbulence, uncertainty and novelty rewards those who can see and act in new ways rapidly seizing opportunities. The future rewards those who can adapt.”
Story by Nancy Richison
