We watched a TED Talk recently that was fascinating (click here if you want to watch it too). In it scientist Nicolas Perony details complex behaviors of animals such as puppies, bats, and meerkats. Each of these animals displayed interesting, complex behaviors that were not easily predictable, even by the animals. Take the meerkats for example – when the group of meerkats came across a busy road with vehicle traffic that must be crossed the group stopped, went one at a time, allowing the group leader to not have to go first. Basically the idea was to have the others go first to see if it was safe before the group leader went across. As Perony explains, if the group leader is hurt it can have devastating effects on the pack.
Think about this for a second. The meerkats haven’t had to deal with cars before the last few decades or so. How did they figure out a strategy to protect themselves and their group against such a relatively new threat? They must have had a meerkat safety meeting where they discussed the hazards, wrote out detailed procedures, and then provided thorough training to ensure that all meerkats were aware of the risks. Of course you need the safety officer meerkat there to enforce these rules as well, because you can’t really fix stupid, right? How else can we explain how these animals who are of lesser intelligence than us came up with these complex safety behaviors?
Obviously, we’re joking a bit here. In reality, as Perony explains, it’s likely some simple rules, usually starting with the basic rule that the meerkats want to do things that lead to success (e.g. food) and don’t lead to failure (e.g. getting run over) that the meerkats follow that lead to these complex behaviors, and ultimately to safety. In fact, if we complicated the system by making explicit rules we may actually be less safe in some circumstances (see the example of Perony’s complicated robot). As he explains, simplicity leads to complexity, which leads to resilience. The simplicity allows for the ability to adapt to changing circumstances (e.g. the incursion of humans and vehicles in the meerkat’s habitat) and still have success.
Contrast this approach with the current approaches to occupational safety and health. Our workers have the same innate instinct as meerkats, in that they want success and they don’t want to get hurt or killed at work. The difference of course is that our workers are much smarter than meerkats. So we have a smart, motivated workforce (relatively speaking) – how then do we manage their safety? We build complicated safety programs, policies, and procedures designed to protect our workers from themselves.
Consider for a minute if the world that Perony shows us applied to our workplaces. What if by applying more complicated rules, policies, and procedures, rather than making our organizations more safe, we are making them more brittle, less able to adapt to changing circumstances, more likely to fail, and unsafe?