Performing an incident investigation is an important role within the job responsibilities of a safety manager or safety professional.

The reason we conduct incident investigations is because we want to learn what caused the incident and hopefully prevent a similar incident from occurring in the future.

But that well-intended effort can be led astray and misdirected by cognitive biases that the incident investigator may hold and that may influence his or her decisions, judgments, and decisions during the incident investigation.

In this recorded discussion, Assistant Professor Jennifer Serne from Central Washington University’s Safety and Health Management Program tells us about heuristics, cognitive biases, and incident investigations. In a second recorded discussion, she tells us how to guard against these cognitive biases during incident investigations. And in a third and fourth recorded discussion (upcoming), we’ll discuss how heuristics and cognitive biases affect the decisions that employees make at work.

Here’s the video. Enjoy and be sure to check out the other recorded discussions with Jennifer as well.

Here are some links to stuff that came up in this discussion with Jennifer:

• Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow
• Thinking Fast and Slow at Work 
• List of cognitive biases at Wikipedia
• Cognitive biases infographic
• Daniel Ariely’s Predictably Irrational 
• An article about Daniel Ariely’s The Upside of Irrationality 
• Availability bias 
• Hindsight bias 
• Actor/observer bias and/or fundamental attribution error 
• Dunning-Krueger bias 
• Anchoring effect 
• Richard Nisbett, Mindware 
• lesswrong.com 
• DanAriely.com 
• GeekWrapped.com and their Cognitive Bias Survival Guide 

We’d like to thank Jennifer for sharing her thoughts on cognitive biases during incident investigations as performed by safety professionals and we hope you enjoyed it. Stay tuned for the second recorded discussion, in which we talk about things that safety professionals can do to try to minimize the harmful and misleading effects of cognitive biases during incident investigations.

Before you go, please feel free to download the free guide below.

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As a safety professional, you want to know about the world around you. But that begs the question–what DO you know about the world around you, how do you know that, and how can you apply all of this to helping create safer, healthier workplaces for everyone in your organization.

• We recently met Nick Travaglini while listening to him discussing the intersections between philosophy and occupational safety at one of the GREAT online learning experiences that Ron Gantt has been hosting since the COVID-19 pandemic began. In three consecutive talks, he discussed a chronology of knowledge, if you will, in western civilization by discussing three works:

  Rene Descartes, The Discourse on the Method, a seminal work that helped set up the Enlightenment and the Newtonian mechanistic world view

• Fritjof Capra, The Turning Point: Science, Society & The Rising Culture, anTod in particular a chapter on Einstein and physics since Einstein
• Todd May, Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction (a book about a French post-structuralist philosopher who sought to take lessons from post-Einsteinian physics and apply them to our lives and thought

Give the video below a listen and see what you think. We talk about lots of stuff of interest to safety professionals, including root-cause analysis and how to use diversity to get better opinions and ideas.

We’ve also included some links below to things that came up during the discussion.

Todd Conklin, Pre-Accident Investigation Podcast Series 

Sidney Dekker, Drift into Failure 

 

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OSHA’s 1926 standards provide safety regulations for American employers in the construction industry (along with some additional regulations that apply to all US employers, such as OSHA’s General Duty clause).

To help construction industry employers meet their OSHA compliance requirements, we’ve created this handy Guide to OSHA Construction Compliance, which is based on OSHA’s Compliance Assistance Quick Start for the Construction Industry.

Of course, every organization is unique and no guide (not even OSHA’s Quick Start) can guarantee your organization is compliant, but we think you’ll find this guide does a great job in alerting you to much of what you need to do to get into compliance. We’ve even included a checklist at the end that you can use and modify for your own compliance needs.

Also, stay tuned for our upcoming Guide to Construction Safety Training, which we anticipate having ready for you all next month.

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OSHA’s Construction Incidents Investigation Engineering Reports webpage is an interesting and helpful resource for those of you in construction, construction engineering, and construction safety.

In this article, we’re going to introduce you to this useful resource and provide a brief overview of some of the findings, recommendations, and incidents.

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