Complacency kills. Right? And if we could just make sure that every worker is switched on and vigilant at every moment, we would have a lot less complacency, and incidents to deal with. Sounds easy but there is one small hurdle, it’s in our nature, or in the nature of our mind in any case, to want to take the shortest route possible.
Science tells us that constant vigilance is a biological impossibility. Ultimately we have a finite number of ‘attention credits’ to spend before we bankrupt (or fatigue…) our brains. Depending on your mental fitness you may have a healthy balance in your ‘attention account’ or, you may be constantly teetering on the brink of financial collapse. But, no matter how mentally fit you are, maintaining an uninterrupted state of heightened awareness 12 hours a day, 8 days in a row (or even 14 in some FIFO arrangements that I’ve seen) is almost impossible and definitely not healthy. But the real question is how do we get the balance right that delivers the best safety result for our workforce?
Mental Load, Energy Management and Awareness
Our brains are constantly receiving, perceiving and interpreting sensory data from the world around us. Thankfully most of that data never reaches our conscious awareness because it would quickly overwhelm us if it did.
Your brain is the product of thousands of years of evolution. Over the course of its development it always kept one objective front and centre; your brain, indeed your entire body, is driven by an incredibly strong requirement to conserve energy. And this makes sense when you think about it because if the biological machine that is a human being was too inefficient it never would have survived.
This biological imperative to save energy is both superbly useful and potentially fatal. On the one hand this allows us to undertake tasks we’ve encountered many times before in an ‘autopilot’ fashion. While on the other hand, if we activate ‘autopilot’ without having the most up to date map of the terrain we run the risk of potential disaster.
This introduces a need for choice. Choosing when, where, how, and why we activate autopilot is the key to performing at our best and keeping you and your mates safe in high risk environments. Deciding what occasions are safe to operate autopilot requires us to pay attention to our situation and regularly reassess the hazards in our environment. Introducing this conscious choice into more parts of our day allows us a moment to pause and decide where the autopilot pattern fits the environment and where it doesn’t. I think if we were to reflect on what a pre-task risk assessment is, it does exactly that. By applying the fundamentals of risk management, we not only find and manage the hazards, we recruit the right mind to complete the task. But, for the moment let’s get back to the mind and how it likes to function.
Mental Rules for Efficiency
We can think about the way we consciously pay attention to things in the same way that the news cycle works. The world provides our brain with a huge and unrelenting data feed, but we cannot hope to pay attention to even a fraction of it. We therefore construct ‘rules’ that decide what information becomes ‘newsworthy’ and is subsequently ‘broadcast’ on one of several ‘news channels’ in our conscious mind. We then have to decide which ‘news channel’ we switch to, because unlike ‘picture-in-picture’ technology humans cannot multitask, we can only pay attention to one ‘channel’ at a time.
We all have two main types of rules, factory fitted and aftermarket. Our aftermarket ‘rules’ are the product of our prior experience, preferences, biases and habits. The factory fitted rules are those that come as standard in basically all functional brain models around the world, they are the fundamental ‘rules’ that exist to protect us from potential threats to our physical or mental wellbeing.
When our brain receives information that fits a factory fitted ‘threat rule’ our amygdala hits the alarm button which sends a distress signal to our hypothalamus, a part of your brain that you can think of as like the brain’s command centre (Harvard Health Publishing, 2018). Once the alarm has been activated our adrenal glands (which you’ll find on top of your kidneys) start pumping adrenalin into our blood stream which turns on those all-too-familiar physical and mental stress responses.
Stress and the Mind
Adrenalin is great stuff! It increases your heart and breathing rates, raises your blood pressure, sharpens your focus on the threat, sends blood to your muscles, increases sensory processing and makes more energy available. I think most of what we find exciting on a weekend has a fair dose of adrenalin attached.
But adrenalin is only designed to get us out of immediate danger, if we perceive the threat (or stress) is ongoing, our body responds accordingly and instructs the adrenal glands to pump cortisol into the bloodstream [American Psychological Association (APA), 2019]. Cortisol increases the amount of sugar floating around in your blood, makes your brain better able to burn the sugar for energy and counters the body’s natural inflammatory response.
Now, don’t get me wrong stress chemicals such as adrenalin and cortisol are critical for survival. But moderation is the key. When stress chemicals – and particularly cortisol – are regularly found in excessive amounts floating around in your body they start to do more harm than good. The chronic excess of cortisol in your body actually starts shrinking your hippocampus (the region of the brain responsible for memory processing and storage), weakens your immune system and leaves you vulnerable to infection and disease (APA, 2019).
A chronic state of vigilance therefore begins to break down systems and structures in your body and brain which could ultimately lead to more accidents, injuries and fatalities – both in the short-term and long-term. Some safety terminology that I’ve seen recently mentions terms such as “Chronic Unease” which doesn’t sit well with me as it appears to be inconsistent with good mental health practices. Given the prevalence of mental health issues in society, and especially in the FIFO workforce, having a firm understanding of mental load and stress will be paramount for good safety outcomes.
Mental Recovery vs. Constant Vigilance
The good news is, your body has a powerful inbuilt desire to want to return to a restful, calm state after a period of stress or heightened awareness, but, if we ignore this desire too long we risk doing irreparable damage to ourselves and others around us. Thankfully though, returning the body to this resting state and raising the balance of our ‘attention account’ is often as simple as taking a breath.
The body’s ‘relaxation response’, first described in 1975 by Harvard’s Dr Herbert Benson, is the natural opposing force to the stress response and can be turned on by a range of well-known activities such as deliberate breathing, meditation, yoga, massage and gentle exercise (Benson, 2011 & Sternberg, 2016). Actions such as the use of breath as an avenue to manage stress are excellent ways to access this relaxation response (more on that in another article).
Risk Management: A Conscious Choice Tool?
We pay conscious attention only when and where it matters by applying tools such as risk management to aid our decisions on when and where to spend our ‘attention credits’.
Risk management is an excellent tool for deciding what situations we really need to pay close attention to and what situations we can simply sit back and let our ‘autopilot’ take the wheel.
A risk is simply the effect of uncertainty on objectives (ISO Guide 73:2009). In every action you take there is a certain level of uncertainty. The risk management process is designed to either reduce the uncertainty or help us recognise it and take deliberate action with greater awareness of what might go right, what might go wrong and what could possibly go terribly wrong.
So perhaps we can see risk assessment as a very practical tool for managing your mind. And the best thing is that we already do it (or have to do it by legislation!).
The Subconscious Mind and Risk
In the simplest terms: the world, and our interactions with it, provide information inputs which are usually first processed subconsciously. If the input requires additional brain power to properly process it is shifted to our conscious mind, which requires much greater effort and energy to run (Kahneman, 2011). The vast majority of the time this is advantageous, however, there are some very important pitfalls in how our minds function, particularly when it comes to safety and decisions around risk.
It is incredibly important that we are aware of how our subconscious mind deals with risk assessment, particularly in estimations of probability (or ‘likelihood’, in risk management terminology) and in coming up with potential consequences. Humans are generally very bad at estimating probability without the assistance of sufficient, reliable data. Likewise, our ability to imagine potential consequences is heavily influenced by whether or not we have experienced such consequences and how easily these memories can be brought to mind (Kahneman, 2011).
The concepts of how fallible we naturally are when it comes to estimating likelihood and coming up with possible consequences are described in excellent detail in Kahneman’s work so we won’t go into further detail here (Kahneman, 2011). But, being aware of the potential pitfalls of our in-built mental processes and what it feels like when our mind shifts between conscious and subconscious (or as Kahneman puts it, ‘system 1’ and ‘system 2’) decision making is an important factor when it comes to ensuring your safety at work.
The Verdict
From what we know of the mind and the way it works, our risk management tools are an excellent way to not only focus the mind, but also to filter out the distractions and additional mental load that ultimately work against our ability to think clearly and efficiently. It gives us a process to pause, assess, and deliberately observe our environment which then allows us to switch back to autopilot only once we have consciously determined it is safe to do so.
So just remember that when we get minds / workers being driven by their emotions and complaining about the efficiency of completing a thorough pre-task risk assessment, they are probably in auto-pilot, trying to increase mental efficiency and take the shortest route to get there (“The Shortcut”)!
There is a difference between violation and innovation, and it’s called risk management.
References:
American Psychological Association (APA), Stress effects on the body, accessed 13 Nov 2019, <https://www.apa.org/helpcenter/stress-body>
Benson, H. & Proctor, M. (2011), Relaxation Revolution: The Science and Genetics of Mind Body Healing, Scribner.
Cuda, G., (2010), Just Breathe: Body Has A Built-In Stress Reliever, accessed 13 November 2019, <https://www.npr.org/2010/12/06/131734718/just-breathe-body-has-a-built-in-stress-reliever>
Dartmouth Undergraduate Journal of Science, (2011), The Physiology of Stress: Cortisol and the Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal Axis, accessed 13 November 2019, <https://sites.dartmouth.edu/dujs/2011/02/03/the-physiology-of-stress-cortisol-and-the-hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal-axis/>
Harvard Health Publishing, Harvard Medical School (2018), Understanding the stress response, accessed 13 November 2019, <https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/understanding-the-stress-response>
ISO Guide 73:2009 – Risk management – Vocabulary
Kahneman, D. (2011), Thinking, Fast and Slow, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Sternberg, E. (2016), Good Stress/Bad Stress and Good Relaxation/Bad Relaxation, accessed 19 November 2019, <Mhttps://esthersternberg.com/good-stressbad-stress-good-relaxationbad-relaxation/>