For the longest time I’ve characterized every safety violation I’ve ever seen as boiling down to two things: laziness and lack of planning. Thirty-some years of watching it, and I’ve never needed a third reason.
How it actually happens
Here’s the whole thing, start to finish. Someone sets out to do a task. They’ve given no thought to what they need to do it safely — the harness, the tie-off point, the right lift, a second set of hands. They’re just going to go do it.
Once they’ve started, they realize full well they don’t have what they need. And now they’re standing there with a decision: stop, go back, get the gear — or step out there for just a second.
The path of least resistance wins. Nearly every time. Not because they’re reckless. Because they’re already out there and the shortcut is right in front of them.
That’s the lack of planning putting them on the spot, and the laziness deciding it. Nobody wakes up intending to get hurt.
Our job is to flip the odds
So the fix was never a better rule. Every company has the rule. The fix is to make stepping out there for just a second the riskier path — riskier to their day, their job, their standing on the crew — and to make the safe way the easy one.
That means the gear is already on the lift when they get there. The tie-off is already there because somebody planned the task before anybody climbed. The five minutes of talking through what we’re doing today happened at the truck, before the first tool came off it. Planning is what removes the decision entirely. If they never find themselves standing out there without what they need, there’s no shortcut to take.
And when they do take it anyway, the consequence has to be certain. Not dramatic — certain. A rule that’s enforced sometimes is a rule that’s enforced never, and the crew knows exactly which one it is.
Having a policy looks good. Enforcing it is the key.
I didn’t come up this way
I came up in a trade with no oversight at all. Nobody trained me, nobody planned anything, nobody checked. I learned the way most of my generation did, by doing it the wrong way and surviving it. When I finally leaned into doing it right, it wasn’t because somebody made me. It was because once I’d seen the difference, I couldn’t sleep at night knowing my crew was out there doing things the way I’d been brought up.
That’s when the planning stopped being paperwork to me. The morning meeting, the inspection before the machine goes up, the record that it happened — that isn’t a binder for the GC. It’s the plan, made routine, so that my crew never has to make that decision standing on the edge of something.
Two causes. One fix. Make the right way the easy way, and mean it.
— Dean Davids, Tailgate Technology