Lessons Learned: Assessing Risk Factors

How often while you are working do you “refresh” your assessment of risk factors?

Consciously or (mostly) subconsciously, we are constantly assessing and addressing risk factors as we go through our days. Being aware of risk factors that can affect our perceptions of risk and addressing them in real time can go a long way toward preventing undesired results.

Risk recognition, assessment, and avoidance

A recent injury accident provides important reminders about common contributors to unintended results.

A bicyclist riding their personal bicycle and wearing an approved helmet was on their way home. They intended to use a route with a curb break that provides easy and safe access from the road to a paved path. This day, they inadvertently passed the curb break and continued into a parking lot adjacent to the paved path. Instead of returning to the curb break, the rider attempted to ride over the curb between the paved path and the parking lot. The anticipated success did not happen – the rider fell and their head struck the pavement. They received multiple abrasions/bruises (including on a lip) and experienced a headache, left front tooth and left knee soreness, and neck and upper back pain/aching/tightness. Later the same day, an offsite urgent care provider diagnosed the rider with a concussion.

Analysis

A fairly common set of causes is the primary contributor to this and many other undesired outcomes at and away from work.

Addressing any one of them may have prevented this event.

• Time/schedule/economic pressure. This may be self-imposed or externally imposed. Personnel may not have this and the potential effects front-of-mind.

• Strong task focus. This can result in missing indications that something about the task and its trending or results are not what they should be. People tend to continue forward whenever they are not experiencing negative consequences/unexpected results (or when these are not perceived as significant enough to pause/stop work).

• Inaccurate risk assessment.

This includes:

• not understanding what (e.g., injury, property damage, environmental or security impacts) or how severe the consequences can be.

• not understanding the probability of an unintended consequence (often because we are not aware of just how close we are to the line between positive and negative outcomes).
  
• not understanding the potential of compounding effects. These are the effects from multiple and often minor missteps that build upon each other and put people and work in an undesired condition).
  
• And experience that reinforces incorrect decisions. Sometimes referred to as good luck, this is positive results despite risky/incorrect choices.
  
• Passing on the opportunity to repeat a missed opportunity. Most of our daily tasks, whether detailed prescribed work tasks or the informal tasks of daily living, provide opportunities to course correct. Our tendency to not want to repeat something we mentally checked off as done, combined with one or more of the three bullets above, can be a strong mental barrier to course correction. The missed opportunity, riding the short distance back to the curb break and taking the route the rider originally intended, always remained available.
  
  Recommended action
  
  Always be alert to the possibility that one or more of the causes in the previous section may be affecting your approach to a task, whether it is a detailed prescribed work task or an informal task of daily living. Do not hesitate to “recognize and recalibrate” and make different decisions that are more likely to produce the desired result.
  

Content/image credit: DOE OPEXShare: “Risk Recognition, Awareness, and Avoidance,” Publisher: Lawrence Livermore National Security (LLNS), Livermore, CA (Lawrence Livermore National Security – LLNS); origination date: 08/15/2024.