Safety & Entropy - A Leadership Issue

• Published in: Professional safety Vol. 65; no. 8; pp. 36 - 41
• Main Authors: Grieve, Rodney, Van der Stap, Tania
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Des Plaines American Society of Safety Engineers 01.08.2020; ASSE
• Subjects: Behavior; Collaboration; Culture; Decision making; Employees; Entropy; Environmental management; Failure; Human resources; Leadership; Preventive maintenance; Risk management; Safety; Safety management
• ISSN: 0099-0027

Key Takeaways Building on the entropy model (Van der Stap, 2018), there are two types of risk: residual and entropic. The latter is caused by degradation of systems and, as explained in this article, also by degradation of human behavior and organizational factors. To manage risk effectively, leaders must understand why degradation occurs in human behavior and how to support people to minimize entropic safety risk on a continual and consistent basis. Leaders can engage employees more effectively through interactions that develop new technical competencies while also building individual confidence and resilience through recognition and feedback, which gradually flows on to higher levels of organizational capacity. Leaders must understand the entropic risk associated with organizational factors such as leadership, competencies, management systems and resilience. These are also subject to degradation unless managed proactively. Current organizational strategies and operational practices related to risk management seldom consider the cyclical nature of risk and the tendency for systems, organizational factors and behaviors to degrade over time. This can occur at the macro level, for example, through cost-cutting on infrastructure, plant or equipment maintenance, and workforce competencies, with potential consequences for productivity and safety performance. At the granular level, organizations can fail to effectively leverage the opportunities for their frontline leaders to build capacity, relying on technical and scheduled interactions to influence behaviors rather than meaningful, enduring engagement that articulates desired outcomes and builds the risk management culture. This article is highly relevant to safety professionals and other disciplines involved in the management of organizational risk who are seeking to make a step-change from safety-based to risk-based thinking. It has been written with bookends, having the entropy loss causation model applied to systems at the front end and to organizational factors at the back end (Part 2, by Van der Stap). The central piece explains the practical application of the model in relation to building frontline supervisor and workforce leadership capacity (Part 1, by Grieve).