The Bandwidth of Safety Management: How much can you do at once?

One of the most common mistakes organizations and safety professionals make is to try to do too much at once.  It seems logical that more safety-related activities should create better safety awareness and thus result in improved safety performance.  This is seldom what happens.  Too much at once results in overload and also blocks internalization of important safety principles and practices.  Trying to eat the elephant in one bite chokes the eater and aggravates the elephant.  

Human attention, like the internet has limited bandwidth.  It can only handle a certain amount of information at once.  More is not better, it is lost.  When organizations and safety professionals focus on specific and well prioritized improvement targets, the human attention machine works well.  New precautions are understood and internalized.  As the new safety habits and thinking progress, new targets can be added.  The organization sees the elephant disappearing a bite at a time and that further motivates progress.  

It requires discipline and clear thinking to realize that more is not better and that slower can actually be faster.  But keeping safety efforts within the proper bandwidth of the human brain is the best and ultimately fastest path to safety excellence.

-Terry L. Mathis

Terry L. Mathis is the founder and CEO of ProAct Safety, an international safety and performance excellence firm. He is known for his dynamic presentations in the fields of behavioral and cultural safety, leadership, and operational performance, and is a regular speaker at ASSE, NSC, and numerous company and industry conferences. EHS Today listed Terry as a Safety Guru in ‘The 50 People Who Most Influenced EHS’ in 2010, 2011 and 2012-2013. He has been a frequent contributor to industry magazines for over 15 years and is the coauthor of STEPS to Safety Culture Excellence, 2013, WILEY.