BBS and a Fatality

The other day I wrote about a fatality that an organization I worked at suffered. My classmate asked about that in terms of how it affected our safety and our culture. 

As I mentioned in my post, my organization suffered a fatality and we implemented the behavior-based safety system as a response to that accident. I think that accident was a transformative moment for our executive leadership as well as the workers in the field by extension.

The first of ten phases of transformative learning that Mezirow observed, according to Clark, Merriman, and Sandlin (2011) is a disorienting dilemma followed by a self-examination with feelings of fear, anger, guilt, and shame. The organization went through these first two phases and more to help inspire change in the organization. Despite that, it still included having a nine-person core team doing the training, and over 2 years of work to change the culture. 

Six years later, we merged with another organization equal in size that performed exactly the same type of work. After the merger, we tried to roll out the behavior-based safety system to the new organization. This rollout was not as smooth and twice as long. I think partly because there wasn't that transformative moment with a disorienting dilemma. 

From my perspective, as a part of the safety team, and the Director of Training, I was surprised by how long it took for the system to gain acceptance by the field technicians and managers. Secondly, I was glad that we bought and existing system, despite the high cost, because having a finished product to introduce to the field was far better than trying to create one ourselves or self-perform the rollout. 

From an adult learning perspective, if I was to go back now, armed with the information that our classes have given us, I think some of our marketing material, and training material would have been written from a vastly different perspective, one more geared toward a behvaiorist training approach. 

Reference

Clark, M. C., Merriam, S. B., Sandlin, J. A. (2011). The relationship between adult learning and development; Challenging normative assumptions. In Hoare, C. (Ed.), The oxford handbook of reciprocal adult development and learning (pp. 17 - 38).