How You Respond to Failure Matters

Welcome back to the Safer VRS podcast, where we discuss the principles of human performance in managing risk and safety in an organization. Today, we'll be discussing about the fifth and final principle of human performance, which is how we respond to failure matters.

As leaders, it's important to understand that safety is a part of how businesses operate and not a separate thing that we do. Failures are inevitable in businesses, and the way we respond to them matters. We have two options on how to respond to failure: get better or get even, and we cannot do both.

Blaming and punishing someone for a failure is not helpful, but learning and improving is. Investigating failures can sometimes lead to blaming someone, but it takes a while to shift the mindset towards learning and understanding the context of the failure.

Here are some key takeaways from today's episode:

-Safety should be a normal function of operation within an organization.
-Leaders must implement controls and systems to manage risk and match the level of risk within the system.
-Understanding the coupling of risk and capacity is important in managing risk.
-Learning, improving, or deliberate strategies in event response can be deliberate and purposeful.
-It's essential to learn, improve and get better rather than blaming and punishing employees for mistakes.
-Todd Colin's book, The Five Principles of Human Performance, emphasizes the importance of learning and getting better over blaming and punishing employees.
-A leader's mindset shift from punishment to learning and improvement can lead to reduced serious events and strengthened controls, improving the overall safety of the organization.

Thank you for listening to this episode where we delved into the fifth principle of human performance. I hope that this discussion has provided you with valuable insights on how to manage risk and safety in your organization. If you have any questions or feedback, please feel free to reach out to me. Be sure to stay tuned for upcoming episodes where we will continue to explore ways to effectively manage risk and safety in organizations.