Originally published by the Australian Institute of Health & Safety
While work-related incidents can have a significant impact on workers and their employers, there is often a tendency to focus narrowly on immediate causes of incidents at the expense of the bigger picture when it comes to WHS investigations.
Furthermore, the quality of workplace investigations depends on many factors and varies from industry to industry – and the nature of the organisation that is doing the investigating, said Anjum Naweed, a professor in human factors and operational readiness at the Appleton Institute for Behavioural Science at the Adelaide campus of CQUniversity.
“For instance, is it an outside agency that has been brought in to investigate? Or is it an internal investigation?” he asked.
“In either case, investigators tend to embody their organisation’s culture and vibe,” said Naweed, who was speaking ahead of the South Australian Health and Safety Conference 2024, which will be held on Friday 18 October.
Investigators typically excel at thinking analytically and Naweed also observed they can be highly skilled in data collection and analysis.
“However, thinking critically is harder, and thinking in systems, harder still. Investigators exhibiting these skills may be highly competent in and of themselves, but this can also be a reflection of an organisation willing to consider systems influences,” said Naweed, who has a background in psychology and more than 15 years’ experience across a range of industry sectors and occupational settings in safety science.
Systems thinking provides a framework for making sense of complexity by looking at the interconnected factors and relationships of the whole (rather than splitting it down into its parts) and can help improve the process of WHS investigations.
However, Naweed said that not every organisation knows what systems thinking is (including some that think they do).
“One of the reasons for this is that the word ‘systems’ tends to feature everywhere in discourse. It is easy to conflate ‘systems thinking’ with ‘safety management systems’ when, ironically, the two could not be more different,” he said.
“Second, the appetite and will to pursue systems thinking is not always there. Looking at systems influences provides a more complete picture of ‘what happened’, but it can take longer and may also compete with other legislative and work pressures.”
Without the application of systems thinking to WHS investigations, this can lead to shallower investigations, which in turn leads to outcomes and findings that lack depth.
“This raises the question of the quality of ‘learning’ associated from investigations, and in some cases, whether any has happened at all,” he said.
While safety science has progressed massively since the early 2000s, Naweed said he frequently comes across organisations and individuals using outdated investigation concepts and approaches.
“I’m talking methods that don’t reflect the real complexity inherent in the world around us. There are myriad of reasons for this, but my main advice to WHS professionals is a bit of a cliché – try and see the bigger picture,” he said.
Naweed will be presenting a session on WHS investigations and systems thinking at the South Australian Health and Safety Conference 2024, which will be held on Friday 18 October from 9am-5pm at the Morphettville Racecourse Function Centre. For more information, email events@aihs.org.au, call (03) 8336 1995, or visit the event website.
