A technician spills a toxic chemical. She isn’t injured, but easily could have been. The hazmat cleanup costs more than $10,000 and shuts down a critical building for a week.

An electrical engineer flips the wrong switch in a substation control room. He isn’t injured. But within seconds, a $50,000 transformer is destroyed.

Three financial clerks in two different countries are processing payments for a large bank. They intend to schedule a routine $8 million payment. Antiquated software makes errors hard to catch. The clerks accidentally wind up sending $893 million instead.

Talking about building a culture of safety and human reliability is easy. But how many great ideas get talked about and never actually get put into practice? The real skill is to be able to transform good ideas into practical steps that you and your people can apply immediately.

There is no one secret or solution. Instead, many successful companies around the world have built a culture of safety and human reliability using a “consolidation of subtleties” — a combination of practical steps like these seven tips:

1. Take a learning-based approach to errors. If you’re in a work culture that’s stuck in the old-school, control-based approach of eliminating all errors, then consider labeling it that way. “Hey, are we stuck in a control-based approach as we’re discussing Tuesday’s incident?” The more you label it, the more you’ll be aware of it, and the less you’ll be stuck in it. When ready, propose the alternative — the learning-based approach. How? After the next incident or unwanted error, don’t start by asking, “What went wrong this time?” Instead, start by asking, “How do you all get this job done right 99% of the time?”
2. Create psychological safety. It’s easy to destroy and challenging to create. Yet research from Dr. Amy Edmonson at Harvard and Google’s Project Aristotle reveal that psychological safety is key to successful, safe, engaged and reliable teams. After an error, instead of saying, “Joe failed to do [X]...” ask, “What did Joe do, and why did it make sense for him [at the time] to do that?”
3. Lead after-action reviews, or AARs. For more than 30 years, these psychologically safe, semi-structured, post-job team debriefs have been used by an increasing number of high-hazard industries worldwide. After your next successful, complex project, instead of asking “What could we have done better?” ask these four questions initially developed by the U.S. Army to accelerate learning among the troops: What did we set out to do? What did we actually do? How did it turn out that way? What will we do differently next time?
4. Transform investigations. Traditional investigations often “Name, shame, blame and retrain.” The result? Fear, silence and box-checking on corrective actions. The alternative? Instead of asking, “What was the error, and who made it?” ask, “How did our processes set that person up to make that error? And how can we improve our processes to set our people up for reliability and success instead?”
5. Apply defenses. Peer checks. Three-step communication. Checklists. These and other simple, yet powerful defenses have proven successful for decades. You can learn them in a few hours, and get real-world results immediately. Pick a task you and your team perform routinely. Consider writing or updating the checklist for that job to include only the three to seven items most often missed. One physician from Baltimore helped save 1,500 lives in 18 months with this classic defense.
6. Improve systems. Instead of trying to “fix” your workers, improve your work processes and systems. How? Pick a process you regularly follow. With trusted frontline workers, brainstorm one low-cost, low-risk, low-fear, low-maintenance process improvement that would make it easier to do the right thing in that process. For example, companies with fleets of trucks have dramatically reduced serious injuries and saved millions of dollars each year by simply avoiding left-hand turns.
7. Build resilience. The world’s most high-reliability organizations, or HROs, don’t try to eliminate all errors. They don’t create a procedure for everything either. Instead, they build resilience so most errors become easier to detect, recover from, and learn from. How do HROs do this? One method they use is to look for “weak signals,” like the sound an engine makes when it’s just starting to develop a problem. Novices miss weak signals. But experienced workers sense them and act quickly to manage errors before they cascade into catastrophes. So talk with a few of your trusted staff members and identify one weak signal for a complex job you all do. Name that weak signal and what to do about it. Then teach that to your newer workers instead of hoping that they’ll discover it on their own.

MAKING PROGRESS

If these seven steps seem like a lot, don’t worry. Just pick the one that resonates with you the most right now, and discuss it with a few members of your team. When ready, try it out in a low-cost, low-risk experiment. A few small, quick wins will help you build momentum fast.