Managing Safety: Why We Fail to See Risk

While walking through a crowd, you suddenly hear a specific word and it prompts you to turn your head. You listen to a speech and realize you are counting the “um's” and “uh's.” You are told of a new vehicle and the next day you see it everywhere. Did the vehicle type suddenly appear? A scent triggers a memory of a long-ago event. You walk into a room and immediately notice risks; others don't.

In Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi writes, “We filter around 2 million bits of information per second down to seven plus-or-minus two chunks of information.”

For efficiency purposes, throughout our life, our brain has been developed to filter out information deemed unnecessary and instead focus on a handful of critical details at any given time. The brain of a safety professional has been trained in a manner that facilitates the necessary recognition of risk. It is possible for others to benefit from this training as well.

THE RETICULAR ACTIVATING SYSTEM

The portion of the brain that controls information filtering is called the reticular activating system (RAS). The RAS is an extremely critical system within the brain because it bridges the lower part (automatic functions like breathing) and upper part (where thoughts occur) of your brain. It is said to be the gateway between external stimuli and cognition.

Figure 1 shows the location of the RAS within the brain. The RAS is defined as, “The part of the reticular formation in the brainstem that plays a central role in bodily and behavioral alertness. Its ascending connections affect the function of the cerebral cortex and its descending connections affect bodily posture and reflex mechanisms.” Simply put, the RAS is your awareness and arousal¹ mechanism and the filter that controls what we experience throughout life. If properly leveraged, the RAS is the gateway to assisting others in their ability to recognize risk.

UNFAMILIARITY AND RISK COMPLACENCY

Many safety professionals believe that new workers, when exposed to a new job or task, often are in a heightened state of awareness, purposely scanning for new risk. They will be more attuned to see hazards than experienced workers because they have not become experientially complacent to the daily associated risks in a task or job. Theoretically, this seems logical. Unfortunately, it is rarely true. If an individual has not yet trained their RAS to see the risks, those risks likely will not be recognized.

What of experienced workers? How does risk complacency occur? Through work experience, what often gets filtered out in safety is low-probability risk, which is the opposite of common sense (highly probable) risk. If a risk has a one-in-a-thousand chance of turning into an incident, it has a low degree of probability. As a result, it easily can escape our focus, especially if safety is falsely defined and measured by the lack of accidents. After being exposed to risks multiple times without incurring an undesirable outcome, our brain, for efficiency purposes, tends to filter it out.

Our perceptual thinking is tricked into believing we are safe; or worse, it generates a dangerous internal state of complacency, where someone feels secure but is unaware of potential dangers. Initial perceptions about risk often can change. What was perceived as a risk years ago might not create the same perception today. If we have trained our brains to perceive certain information as unnecessary and no longer risky and tune it out, are we unknowingly — subconsciously — contributing to our own risk exposure?

WE EXPERIENCE WHAT WE INTEND TO

When entering a room, the first thing we notice is what our brains have been trained to subconsciously scan for. Without realizing it, we experience what we intend to experience. We unknowingly have trained our brain's filter. The good news is we knowingly can retrain because this, by nature, is a continuous process.

Karl Albrecht states in his book, Brain Power: Learn to Improve Your Thinking Skills, “That the RAS can be trained is clear. Mother will awake on hearing her baby while father sleeps on. Father, in the country, will awake when he hears the dog bark, but on a visit to town he soon learns to ignore a dog's bark while he is sleeping.”² Similarly, how do you think about safety today compared to your first involvement in safety? Would it be fair to state that you now see things differently? You have, over time, retrained your RAS. This retraining can be achieved purposefully in a three-step approach.