Safety Moment - Embracing Graceful Extensibility in Safety Programs

One of the most important features the space program had in getting a spacecraft back to Earth was the ability to always take one more orbit around the world. I'm set.

Music. I'm set. I'm set. Hi everybody, I'm Todd Conklin and welcome to the Pre-Accident Investigation Safety Moment. it. This is a pretty cool one. Special thanks go out today to David Woods, Ohio State University. He really made me think about this one in a big way.

Let's introduce the idea of graceful extensibility. Let's introduce the idea that you always have the capacity to expand your safety and reliability programs to meet the need of the variabilities that have existed within the work you're doing that have created the potential for an operational upset. That makes sense. Let's talk about the idea of hedging your bets, of measuring twice, cutting once. Let's talk about the idea of graceful extensibility.

And the reason we ought to talk about this in a safety moment is because if you think about safety. Safety exists when people create the margins so that the bad thing can't have the consequence it would normally have. The bad thing appeared. There's no question that the bad thing was there. The bad thing just didn't create the outcome that would have negative implications to either people, processes, product, the value that the company adds.

So when a load falls off a truck and doesn't hit anybody and lands in the exclusion area, then that load fell in a way. It fell. It sure fell.

I mean, it absolutely fell, but it landed in a way that provided graceful extensibility, another orbit around the world. It allowed us the opportunity, the margin to have the failure without having the consequence. That graceful extensibility is exactly what we want to build into our systems. It's exactly what we want to build into our processes and our good processes have it in it. In fact, I'll bet you you've built graceful extensibility into your life.

I'll bet you you have high-risk things you do, whatever risk looks like for you, that when you do those high-risk jobs, you've built in the opportunity to have some room, some margin for that failure to happen. Think rumble strips. Think where you put your keys at night. Think how you handle your cell phone. And then think of the words graceful extensibility.

That's the podcast for today. That's a really good safety moment. I don't know what you guys thought, but that's my favorite one so far of all the ones we've done. And we've done a crap load. Until then, learn something new every single day. Have as much fun as you can possibly squeeze into your average work week. And for goodness sakes, be safe. Music.