The Impact of Question Quality on Effective Safety Analysis

Safety professionals are trained to frame problems before attempting to solve them. This process begins by establishing the risk context—identifying the work activity, the hazards it creates, who is exposed, and what risk treatments are reasonably available.

Unfortunately, many legal cases begin with a much narrower question.

Rather than asking, "What hazard existed?", the discussion often begins with "What object was involved?" or "What mistake did the employee make?"

While those questions may ultimately be relevant, they are rarely the ones to ask first.

The way a problem is framed often determines the quality of the analysis that follows.

Here are some examples and concepts to drive this home. 

Example #1 – The Grape

Suppose a customer slips on a grape.

An attorney might ask:

"How many prior grape incidents has the store experienced?"

A safety professional asks a different question:

"How many customers have slipped on floor contamination, regardless of whether the contaminant was a grape, lettuce, blueberries, water, detergent, or another foreign substance?"

Why?

Because the hazard is not the grape.

The hazard is contamination on the walking surface.

If the store's inspection and housekeeping systems fail to identify and remove floor contamination, then the object involved in a particular incident is often incidental to the larger safety issue.

Example #2 – The Ladder

Suppose a customer is struck by an employee climbing down from a ladder; there is some kind of collision. 

Many people immediately ask:

"Did the employee use proper three-point contact?" or “Was the employee trained to go up and down that ladder correctly?”

That may be an appropriate question.  It simply is not the first question.

A safety professional first asks:

"Why were customers and employees performing elevated stocking activities permitted to occupy the same operational workspace?"

The employee's actions occurred within a work method selected by management.

That operational decision establishes the risk context.

Example #3 – Assisted Loading

Suppose a customer is injured while helping employees load a heavy product into a pickup truck.

A legal analysis might ask:

"Did the customer lose his footing?"

A safety professional first asks:

"Why was the customer participating in the loading operation rather than being separated from it?"

Again...

The work method is evaluated before human performance.

Example #4 – Wet Floor

A customer slips and is injured on a wet floor. 

We might ask:

Was there water?

A Better Question:

Why did customers have access to an active wet floor without an effective risk treatment?

Example #5 – Security Incident

An argument might be:

The Patron resisted our request; therefore, we had to remove him physically. 

The safety professional will ask:

Why did management choose immediate physical intervention instead of stopping operations, isolating the incident, and/or waiting for law enforcement? 

Risk Context points out that the physical force and restraint weren’t the cause of the injury; they were the result that caused it.    

Example # 6 – Warning Signs Left Out

An argument might be:

We posted signs for the floor being wet, but the customer walked through the area and still slipped and fell.

Wrong Question:

            Did the customer not see or ignore the signs?

Safety Question:

Why did the organization accept warning signs as the primary and long-term risk treatment instead of removing the hazard from the floor, or guarding the hazard and isolating people from it?

Why This Matters

Risk assessments do not begin by evaluating the outcome of an incident.

They begin by evaluating the work activity that existed before the incident occurred.

When attorneys, investigators, and organizations frame the problem too narrowly, they often ask questions that produce equally narrow answers.

A properly framed risk assessment asks:

• What was the work activity?

• What hazards did that activity create?

• Who was exposed?

• What risk treatments were reasonably available?

• Did the selected work method reasonably manage those foreseeable hazards?

Only after those questions have been answered does the analysis turn to the actions of individual participants.  In safety management, the quality of the answer is often determined long before the investigation begins. It is determined by whether the investigator asked the right question.