There’s hardly a day goes by in safety where a new slogan, brand and spin has to be developed because Safety continues to have little idea what to do.

Of course, the ‘new focus’ is SIF (Serious Incident and Fatality Prevention). So, if this is a ‘new focus’ what the hell was Safety doing for the last 20 years?

You don’t have to dig deep to find out that SIF is the same safety package re-marketed as SIF.

You can even download and pay for new guides and standards for SIF. There’s always money to be made out of new marketing in safety.

But, don’t dig too deep or you’ll find out its all marketing for the same thing. Nothing new, nothing different, no shift in ethic, no shift in methodology. For example, just download the Serious Incident and Fatality Prevention Model and Guidebook from the National Safety Council (https://www.nsc.org/workplace/sif-prevention-model). Wow!!! and a new method: Plan, Do, Act, Check (PDAC).

Then download your free ‘model’ (https://www.nsc.org/getmedia/abdc94f2-651b-4843-919c-81e1629755fe/sif-guidebook.pdf) complete with HOP propaganda (p.8) about slogans called ‘principles’. Then a model of safety culture that has nothing to do with culture (p,9). Then follow the PDAC model till you come to that radical new idea called the Hierarchy of Controls (p. 13) and there’s your guide to SIF.

I wonder how this ‘guide’ is going to go down in court when those HOP slogans are pulled out in a fatality investigation and the court is told ‘blame fixes nothing’ and all the other slogans that simply end up in the same old tired safety methods?

So, PDAC is now this radical model that is now anchored to HOP and SIF, you couldn’t make this stuff up. PDAC has been around since Deming (1940s) and Shewhart (1920s) declared the model a ‘scientific’ method for quality control.

But now it’s all new because it’s linked to SIF and HOP.

PDAC has been undertaken for hundreds of years before Shewhart and Deming gave it a name. We used to call it ‘problem solving’. I wonder how they ever built the pyramids without PDAC?

The Education sector has been doing PDAC for 50 years before Shewhart discovered it. It used to be known as ‘action learning’ and somehow this is all new. Pestalozzi was ahead of all this by 200 years! (https://dn760106.eu.archive.org/0/items/pestalozzipestal00barnrich/pestalozzipestal00barnrich.pdf; https://dn790006.ca.archive.org/0/items/pestalozzihisedu00barnrich/pestalozzihisedu00barnrich.pdf).

But hey, don’t worry, safety is right on top of the game, having discovered SIF and HOP.

Although, some are not sure if its Plan, Do, Check, Act (PDCA) or Plan, Check, Act, Do (PCAD) or is it (Plan, Do, Act, Check? PDAC? You will find millions of models online, all with their own iterations ready to sell the basic of problem solving under a new acronym.

And now this ‘revolutionary’ method of PDCA is anchored to SIF, HOP and HoC. Don’t you know, SIF ‘saves lives’ (https://gasdetection.com/articles/how-preventing-serious-injuries-and-fatalities-sif-saves-lives/). And don’t worry Mitti (was Safety Culture) have got all those SIF products ready for you to buy.  Or, jump on to any one of the 10 associations and sources selling SIF products (https://www.en-standard.eu/). There’s nothing like the re-marketting of a product to sell more products.

Of course, Plan, Do, Check, Act is NOT a method, just as it also hides an undeclared ethic. If you declare PDAC a ‘method’ then please tell me what the ethic is that drives the doing? What philosophy and ethic drives the planning? And if there is a check, by what method of analysis does one check? If the Plan is a strategy, what methodology, ethic and philosophy has motivated and set the plan? All of this is hidden in the model (from the pragmatism and utilitarian vision of Deming) and helps hide how all of this masks the Safety addiction to duty.

Then apply HOP slogans to the PDCA and you’ve got a method to focus on SIF.

Just download your SIF Prevention Guidebook and it’s all there. Nice and glossy, neat and tidy, with no ethic, no detail about how to implement PDCA or what is hidden in its model.

If you go back to Deming and Shewhart (1939), the philosophy is anchored to systems, object, efficiency, data and management theory.

This is all a long way away from what we know now through neuroscience, phenomenology, cultural theory, social psychology, anthropology, Transdisciplinarity and existentialist thinking about the nature of persons.

Just have a look at Deming’s 14 points (https://deming.org/explore/fourteen-points/ ) set out as if there no ethic needed to implement it. It’s not much different to the same mechanistic theory of Heinrich (1931), all anchored to the same hidden behaviourism and Taylorist philosophy of the time. You can download your 1939 copy of Shewhart and Deming here. (https://archive.org/details/CAT10502416/page/n1/mode/2up) Just read up on all you need to know about productivity, competition, management theory and statistical analysis.

BTW, if you want to read the original Heinrich (1931) I can send you a copy.

So, get your copy of Deming/Shewhart and see if you can find anything about the human person, ethics or human judgement and decision making. Get your copy of Heinrich and see if you can discover just how much Heinrich demonsised the human in his work. Heinrich didn’t have a clue about persons, ethics or culture.

So, why is Safety going back to PDCA to focus on SIF, HOP and the HoC? Isn’t it clear? Safety has no cause to shift in philosophy or worldview as long as it can concoct propaganda like S2 and HOP to make sure that nothing changes in safety.

Indeed, when the focus is on ‘performance’, Jenga blocks, swiss-cheese and slogans, what’s new? What’s different? What is going to be operationalised? And if the focus is on learning, then please tell me what the theory of learning is.

Perhaps SIF really represents Spin in Fraudulence. Or PDAC – Promotion, Dollars and Commercialism.

But this is what Safety does. It markets the basics and re-badges the old calls it ‘new’ and the lemmings buy the products. It’s the emperor’s new clothes and safety remains naked.

If you are interested in an alternate view, worldview and methodology to all this, you can start here: https://www.humandymensions.com/product/it-works-a-new-approach-to-risk-and-safety-book-for-free-download/