Zero Injuries Is Not Your Goal
Accidents are simply another kind of defect -- a deviation from the standard of perfection. And, like quality, these defects must be detected and eliminated at the moment they first appear.
It was 1981, and I was in Danville, Va. I followed Tom, the safety director, through a dark, old textile mill, walking on heart-of-pine floors that probably had seen workers come and go for more than a hundred years. The smell of machine oil mixed with the warm smell of cotton. The textile machines hummed away, spinning out yard after yard of fabric.
I watched the workers busily monitoring the machines to keep them running at peak efficiency and noted many of them had T-shirts emblazoned with a slogan: Zero Injuries -- Our Goal.
On the walls in every breakroom, the same "Zero Injuries" slogan was repeated on posters, coffee mugs, you name it. I was impressed by the passion in this culture to reach zero injuries, so I asked Tom about his plant's safety record. "Well, Bill, I'll be honest. We've made huge gains in safety over the last five years, but now it seems that reaching zero is impossible," he admitted. "The closer we get to zero, the harder it becomes to show improvement. We've started to plateau or 'flat line,' and my concern is that we'll do a 'hockey stick' and trend back up."
With some 1,500 employees, Tom's plant routinely celebrated million-hour milestones, fed people steak dinners, and the like. But it still had a steady stream of injuries that wouldn't go away. Tom's problem was like that of many other cultures: They have chased the goal of Zero Injuries year after year, only to find it to be more elusive than the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
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At that moment, I looked Tom dead in the eye and told him part of his problem was that he was chasing the wrong goal. I told Tom what I've told thousands of safety leaders around the world for more than 30 years: Zero injuries is not your goal.
"Huh? What did you say, Bill?"
If you're thinking this, it's completely normal. Usually I get a degree of "shock and awe" when I say this to audiences. They're not quite sure I'm in my right mind. But I am completely serious. Zero injuries should not be your goal. Until leaders understand that there is a level of safety beyond zero, they will be stuck on the dreaded "hockey stick plateau" in their safety performance.
Why is it that chasing Zero Injuries eventually produces this plateau? To get at this answer, we need to look into the world of quality improvement. In particular, I want to consider the work of Dr. W. Edwards Deming, Statistical Process Control and general-all-around-quality guru.
For those of you who don't know who Deming was, I'll give you the short version. After World War II, Dr. Deming approached the U.S. automakers and told them if they would listen to his somewhat radical theories on quality improvement, they could revolutionize quality, make vehicles that would last longer, and build more loyal customers. There was just one problem with Deming's idea: The big three automakers actually were delighted when something went wrong with a car, as long as it was out of warranty. If enough things failed on a car, then the customer would bring it to the dealership and trade it for a new one. This strategy even had a name: "planned obsolescence."
Planned obsolescence is why, as a little boy just 6 years old, I remember admiring the beautiful chrome "Cadillac" emblem inside my dad's 1969 Cadillac Sedan DeVille. About two years after Dad bought his new Caddy, right on schedule, those emblems would fall off. This "defect" provided a pretty big NIC for my Dad (a negative, immediate, and certain consequence). I'm not sure what else went wrong on Dad's car, but soon enough, he headed for the dealership to swap for a new car (a very big PIC for both him and me!). "Planned obsolescence" had sold another car.
Strange as it may seem, this strategy of building poor quality into a product was a PFC (positive, future, certain) consequence for the major U.S. automakers in the fifties and sixties.
As you might imagine, Deming's words of wisdom fell on deaf ears at the Big 3. That's why he went to Japan.
Here, as is often the case, one man's NIC is another man's PIC. The Japanese (who were looking for ways to grab U.S. market share) listened to Deming and designed quality into their products, making them better, cheaper, and more fuel efficient than their U.S. competition. Needless to say, the Japanese taught U.S. manufacturers a vital lesson in quality versus planned obsolescence and about PICS versus NICS in product design and market share.
How Quality Relates to Safety and Recognition
In a nutshell, here’s how Deming gave the Japanese the winning hand in quality.
When a factory produces a part that is defective and fails to meet specifications, then the part must be either scrapped or reworked. Or, worse yet, it ships to the customer, creating an unhappy customer who eventually stops buying the product. Any of these options is expensive and wasteful. Deming taught that quality should be measured at every step in the process. Rather than get the car fully assembled and counting defects at the end of the line, every step in the assembly process needed to have statistical analysis to see whether the process was in control or out of control. Hence the name "Statistical Process Control."
