Behavior-based safety: a model poisoned by the past; based on obsolete thinking, behavior-based safety isolates safety instead of integrating it

Behavior-based safety's future is in its past. Over the past year, reference to behavior-based safety is conspicuously missing from advertisements by its purveyors. Even they recognize that the bloom is off the rose.

Rather than finding the root cause, behavior-based safety often masks it. Behavior-based safety has some virtues but it lasted too long and cost too much. Water is essential to life; if we fill our lungs with it, it becomes poison. Correct behaviors are essential to avoid loss; if we obsess about behaviors, we will--over time--fail to create a loss-resistant environment grounded on a firm base. And, we may harvest a disaster.

Behavior-based safety offers little really new. Defining safe behaviors and doing job observations was done long before the early '80s when behavior-based safety became a vogue--and it was done far less expensively.

The biggest problem with behavior-based safety is that it isolates safety instead of integrating it. Behavior-based safety is based on management thinking of the 40s and 50s--the command and control model--instead of modern management thinking. It features flat organizations and empowerment. Organizations that have world-class safety "do it right the first time" and minimize inspection; behavior-based safety advocates more and more inspection. What that means is that the process is not enduring; when you stop inspecting and having committee meetings, the benefits evaporate.

A group of employees at a large Australian company have dubbed behavior-based safety "dob on a mate," or translated into U.S. speak, "tell on a friend." Damaged employee relations are one of the frequent byproducts of behavior-based safety.

Behavior-based safety marketing has featured misinformation and disinformation. The best example of that is the position that attitudes and culture can be changed by changing behaviors.

Organization leaders are like parents and employees like children. If you want your children to do something based on your values, which they don't share, you need to watch them and force your will upon them. When you stop watching, they will go to doing it their way and maybe do so with passion and zest. The best way to insure what you want to happen is to create a set of attitudes or a climate that is likely to produce the behaviors you desire. There are better and worse applications of behavior-based safety. The best achieve a level of balance; the worst distort the loss prevention process, portend failures in the future, and alienate the very people whose behaviors you are trying to shape. The behavior-based safety process has been marketed skillfully and so has masked the truth; it only works in the right culture, and then not as cost effectively as other more enlightened approaches would. Most organizations that have achieved world-class safety have not used nor do they need behavior-based safety; they do have similar cultures that predict excellence.

In medicine, the method of application and dose are essential to effectiveness. If the dose is too large, the remedy can become poison; if a medication designed to be applied topically is ingested, it can become poison. So it is with behavior-based safety; if applied with balance, in the context of a supportive culture/climate, it can be effective. If the culture is not supportive, it can be a disaster and has been in many environments.

DONALD J. ECKENFELDER is chairman and CEO of the consulting firm Social Operating Systems Ltd.

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