Two hundred years ago, it wasn’t really a big deal when someone died at work. When I say someone, I mean someone from the working class – a laborer. A bourgeois dying on her unfinished oil painting was a more pronounced tragedy, simply because it would have been more unique. But workers died every day, so it didn't stand out.
This is like the way we treat traffic deaths today. “Yes, they happen – we know – but we’re tired of hearing about it. Can’t you give us more stories about workplace violence? Or nuclear meltdowns? I want to be scared (entertained) not depressed (bored)!”
Twenty-seven (27%) percent of worker fatalities in the United States in 2020 were workers in transportation and material moving occupations. Nuclear didn’t scratch the top 10. At least 1,282 workers died as a symptom of our dangerous transportation system. Why don’t we worry about it?
This is the problem with health and safety. It’s not sexy. It's mundane. We get tired of the routine. Statistics don’t resonate. Anecdotes are juicy and gripping. For a workplace accident to catch the attention of the public, it needs to be sensational or scary.
Radiation, bear attacks, homicide, and fires are deviations from the norm. They're sensational. Improvements in the safety of coal mines were fueled by tragedies. In the United States, federal mining safety acts quickly followed on the heels of explosions or fires that killed hundreds of miners at once. Because those mass fatalities qualified as true tragedies, they generated a public outcry. But if just a few died, it wasn’t sensational enough to be big news.
For a safety concern to be scary, it needs to directly affect the public. Poor sanitation in a food factory, for example. Poor sanitation could lead to occupational disease, but also to consumer food poisoning. In other words, there needs to be an overlap between public safety and worker safety. Rock falls that killed individual coal miners were neither sensational nor scary.
Improving workplace safety requires the public to exert pressure on a corporation or industry. The public only gets involved in issues that catch its attention.
And that's the problem. The sensational and scary hazards that most catch our attention aren’t the hazards that cause the most injuries and deaths.
So, our biased focus on the exotic and scary has a cost. Companies are pressured into addressing sensational hazards – not systemic ones. Companies invest in designing narrow safety protocols instead of broader safety protocols that could save many more lives.
Three Bullet Thursday
The public focus on the wrong accidents is an intersection of Sayre’s Law and the Availability Heuristic. Sayre’s Law states that the lower the stakes, the more heated the debate. And the Availability Heuristic suggests that we gradually tune out expected events. This bias is one of the explanations for why boring work like monitoring for quality control is impossible for humans to do well.
This article, Unbundling the Corporation, does a great job of breaking down a theory of why big companies get torn apart by start-ups; big companies are actually comprised of three types of business models (Customer Service, Product Innovation, and Infrastructure) that have conflicting priorities (Scope, Speed, and Scale, respectively).
We had a great guest talk in the Summer of Protocols program this week by Alex Komoroske. He’s a former product manager at Google, and an expert on how to grow (not build) business platforms — which is what his slides and talk were about.
