This article focuses on safety culture and asks if outdoor professionals could apply the same principles.
Credit to the IOL and author Loel Collins.
Thanks to the IOL- Horizons from ‘Horizons Spring 2022’
In the first article of this series (Horizons issue 96), we considered the value of creating good habits. For example, we advocated driving to work via the same route to reduce demands on your decision-making resources.
However, have you ever driven home after work and realised you don’t remember the last five minutes of the drive? Almost as if you switched into autopilot?
When we perform an action repeatedly, it becomes habitual, one that doesn’t engage us. This contrasts with the positive habits encouraged in the first article. Habits can become unsafe outdoors if the instructor is not cognitively engaged in the decision-making process. Such lapses can be especially costly when instructors need to verify that a particular action has been completed — we don’t want critical safety checks disconnected from their purpose
What if instructors have developed bad habits with karabiner, knot or buoyancy aid checks when they’re working with groups? The challenge is not having habits form in critical aspects of those final safety checks before an activity occurs. We may be able to learn a lesson from the Japanese railway network.
One practical approach in ensuring safety checks is called ‘pointing and calling’. The Japanese rail system implemented pointing and calling as a method of occupational safety. Principally, to avoid mistakes by pointing at important indicators and calling out their status.
It may sound odd, but consider the last time you performed a critical safety check when under pressure; there is a good chance you did this! For example, you may well have physically checked the karabiner while saying (even under your breath) ‘done up’. Instructors frequently know ‘what’ to check (the buoyancy aid waist ties need to be done up) and ‘why’ (to make sure the buoyancy aid does not ride up on the wearer if in the water)— pointing and calling is the ‘how’!
Known in Japanese as ‘shisa kanko’, pointing and calling works by associating a specific task with a physical action and vocalising that action, raising the consciousness levels, engaging the checker and consequently improving the quality of the check – three legs to the safety check stool (see figure one).
In the Outdoors, rather than just relying on the instructor’s eyes or habit, each step in a task is reinforced physically and verbally to ensure the stage is both complete and accurate. Pointing and calling has a particular value in time-constrained tasks. By necessity, these tasks are identical, repetitive and prone to the damaging habits (automation with a lack of engagement) highlighted earlier; attaching someone at the top of a zip line, or at the head of an abseil or lower off; climber to a rope on a climbing wall, may all be typical examples.
The Concept
When performing a check, the instructor could ‘point and call’ the check:
waist tie done up
karabiner screwed up
buckle threaded back
It’s not enough to perform just a visual inspection nor just a physical assessment; it is the combination of the three – the task (the check), the physical and the verbal – that gets this to work.
Pointing and calling works by engaging multiple senses. The instructor identifies the object and verbalises their checking action; they can’t skip over the safety check. The cognitive aspect ensures the habit has value.
In short, the instructor is cognitively engaged. A vital element of this is the variety of physical actions and calls the instructor might perform while completing their checks. While this sounds silly pointing and calling reduces workplace errors by up to 85 percent in some studies (1). An initial investigation improved error detection in rope work systems to over 90 percent, mainly screw-gate karabiners being done up and edges protected!
However, such a simple and effective method of improving error detection has primarily been confined to Japan. Perhaps Westerners ‘feel silly’ and self-conscious performing gestures and calls. Given its demonstrable value, how might we encourage instructors to apply ‘shisa kanko’ without feeling self-conscious?
The first point to make is that this is an essential aspect of an instructor’s role; their group will want to be safe, so straightforward and explicit safety checks are expected. In the group’s eyes, this is professional and good practice.
Moreover, the expectation of a check is genuine; evidence in activities that are single experiential ‘rides’, such as zip wires, bungee jumps, and abseils, shows that participants perceive the safety checks as the instructor’s key role — more a technician than an instructor (2, 3).
CHECKING THE RIGHT HABITS
A second point is to understand the mechanism, ‘associating a specific task with a physical action and vocalising the action, raising the consciousness levels’.
Some instructors may point and call enthusiastically; those who are more self-conscious will also benefit from the increased awareness by reinforcing each task.
However, the ideal solution is integrating all ‘three legs of the stool’ to the safety check. It need not be the explicit ‘pointing at and calling out’ as the name implies. Indeed, simply raising awareness that essential safety checks have three parts – a need, an action and a verbalisation – may suffice.
Imagine, securing a canoe trailer to a minibus, for example (see figure two);
The driver has a legal responsibility (need).
Connecting the hitch, plugging in and passing the chain over the hitch (action).
The driver says, out loud whilst pointing,
Hitch, lights, brake
(verbal).
When pointing and calling was applied in the New York subway, but without the explicit ‘pointing and calling’ safety checks still improved (4).
When an instructor checks a knot is tied correctly, they don’t just look at the knot and mentally check it (only 2 of 3 stool leg safety checks). They say,
that’s good
with the knot in their hand (3 of 3). The physical action of holding the knot and the verbalisation of the quality of the knot achieves the essential link.
A karabiner check could be done by holding the karabiner, squeezing it across the gate and spine while saying
great, done up
If the gate opens, they have discovered differently and can correct it.
It’s simple, the three parts, the check, physical and verbal, work in synergy – that’s why this works so well.
This need not be constrained to just instructors; for instance it can be used on occasions when we have students check their own actions or equipment, clipping onto a fixed-line. The same three links can be made.
The student can clip the line, rotate the karabiner, do it up, then squeeze the karabiner while looking at it and calling karabiner check,
…clip, rotate, tighten squeeze…
The instructor can feel more confident that the check has been effectively completed.
By understanding the three legs of the safety stool, instructors can apply it to all checks, and is a simple model that works.
