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Part 5 of 7 · Safety incident logger series ~5 min read

How safety patterns get counted

A single near miss is usually unremarkable, which is why they get mentioned at lunch and forgotten. Three near misses in the same corner of a yard are a specific thing that is going to happen, and nothing except counting will ever find them.

Key takeaways

  • Count locations, equipment and activities. Never count people.
  • Three patterns: a recurring place, a recurring piece of equipment, a recurring activity.
  • The threshold is three within a rolling quarter, and it is deliberately low.
  • A pattern is reported with the reports attached, so somebody can read them together.
  • The one number that matters is the report count itself, and it should be going up.

Places and things, never people

Every report carries a location, and most carry an implied piece of equipment or an activity. Those three dimensions are what get counted, and there is deliberately no code path that counts by reporter or by anybody named in a description.

The reason is not squeamishness. A count by person answers a question nobody should be asking of near-miss data: near misses are reported by the people who are paying attention, so a per-person count mostly identifies your most safety-conscious staff and makes them look like a problem. It is exactly backwards, and once anybody notices the count exists, reporting stops.

How safety patterns are counted across three dimensionsA vertical chain of five steps entered by a box labelled A confirmed report, with a location. Step one asks which place, resolving to a site zone from the map using a dozen zones per site. Step two asks which equipment, taken from the description. Step three asks which activity, such as loading or working at height. Step four increments three counters over a rolling quarter, for place, equipment and activity. Step five asks whether any has reached three, and surfaces it with the reports attached. A note says there is no fourth counter, and counting by person is not a feature that was left out.AWS ACCOUNTA confirmed reportwith locationWhich place?site zone, from the mapZonesa dozen per siteWhich equipment?from the descriptionWhich activity?loading, working at heightIncrement three countersrolling quarterCountersplace, kit, activityAny at three?surface with the reportsThere is no fourth counter. Counting by person is not a feature that was left out.
Fig 1. The three dimensions counted from each report. The absence of a fourth is a design decision rather than an omission, and it is worth stating in the documentation people read.
  • Database
  • Machine learning
  • Management
  • Analytics

Zones rather than coordinates

A location from a phone is a point, and points do not group. Two reports about the same corner of a yard will be twenty metres apart and count as two different places. So each site is divided into a dozen named zones — the roller door, the loading bay, the mezzanine, the wash bay — and reports resolve to a zone.

A dozen is about right. Three zones per site is too coarse to be actionable and fifty is too fine to ever reach a threshold. Naming them the way people already refer to them is what makes the resulting report readable by somebody who works there.

Three, and why so low

Three reports on the same zone, piece of equipment or activity within a rolling quarter surfaces a pattern. That is a low threshold on purpose, because the cost of a false pattern is somebody spending ten minutes reading three reports and concluding they are unrelated, and the cost of a missed one is not comparable.

The pattern is reported with all three reports attached in full, because the value is almost never in the count. It is in a person reading three descriptions together and seeing the thing that connects them, which is frequently not what the counter grouped them by.

The number that matters

One quarter of safety reporting summarised in five numbersA horizontal row of five boxes. Reports: sixty-one this quarter. Up from: forty-four last quarter. Actions created: twenty-three. Actions closed: nineteen. Patterns found: two. A note says the first number going up is good news, and that this is the opposite of how it reads.ONE QUARTER OF SAFETY REPORTINGReports61 this quarterUp from44 last quarterActions created23Actions closed19Patterns found2The first number going up is good news, and it is the opposite of how it reads.
Fig 2. A quarter of safety reporting in five numbers. The counter-intuitive one is first: a rising report count is the system working, not the site getting more dangerous.
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This is the one statistic in the entire series that has to be explained before it is published, because a rising number of safety reports reads like a deteriorating site and is almost always the opposite. Near misses were always happening; a quarter with sixty-one reports and one with four differ in how many were written down.

So the report says so, every quarter, in a line above the number: “Reports rising is the system working. What we are watching is the gap between actions created and actions closed, and the patterns.” Four reports a quarter is not a safe business; it is a business that does not know.

Next: what all of this costs to run.

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