"All Hat No Cattle" is an expression meaning someone who is talking but not doing. What is the cause of this phenomenon? How does it relate to safety and business performance?
For a clue I think of the Non-Sequitur Cartoon of October 1 2010. There is a night with his armor and his lance at the entrance of a cave inhabited by a dragon. The dragon has a convincing argument with a win-win solution. If the dragon slayer fails he will be dead. If he succeeds he will be out of a job. So the dragon proposes three simple words. "Dragon slaying research."
What has happened with safety is that it has become like "All Hat No Cattle."
There is talk. There is purchase of products and training. There are voluminous safety plans. There are frequent safety meetings. There are reports and measurements. The Law of Diminishing Returns kicks in. Yet we constantly read of large companies having an incident. BP is the latest big example. BP spends incredible amounts of money for safety and has thousands of safety engineers. Why did they outsource their Gulf safety plan to a small company that produced a boiler plate safety plan that included protection for walruses, sea lions and polar bears? Did no one at BP read the plan? Did no one in the government read the plan? When BP or any other big company has an incident newspaper reporters in their first article while the fire is still burning have a concise and mostly correct answer for the safety failures. At the nuclear armaments fire in the UK recently one problem was that the security guards did not allow fire trucks onto the premises. No one had given them any exception instructions.
Because of the way safety is managed not only is safety not met but safety often becomes a hindrance to performance.
I remember a man coming in for a basic safety orientation class for a refinery. He was a supervisor with 25 years of experience. He had a pocket full of course completion cards. He wanted to be exempted from the class. He had to take the class to meet the refinery requirement. After taking the class I noticed that he barely passed the multiple choice exam.
What is needed is to link safety efforts to the actual safety need. I'll give just one example.
Many firms have annual fire extinguisher training classes. There are five basic fire extinguisher classes. Without looking can you name them?
A for common combustibles like paper. B for flammable liquids. C for energized electrical equipment. D for combustible metals. K for cooking oils and fats. Successful completion of the course requires knowing these five types. The odds are that the only fire extinguisher in use at that site is a class C. What about hands on training? This is usually not done because it may be illegal to set a fire in the parking lot. And it may be viewed as too costly to recharge after use in a class. So a fire starts and the employee with the current training card may find that he cannot actually put out the fire. Have you ever used a fire extinguisher? Putting out a fire is not as easy as it may seem.
The photo shows Indians learning to brand calves with hands-on training. Why do we not want to include safety training as a hands-on part of job training? Why is safety an expensive academic activity? Why are safety plans so complex that employees cannot read them? All Hat No Cattle fits well with most safety programs.
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