(54ax) Communicating Major Incidents

The way we communicate major incidents is broken.

Research into major incidents shows the lessons are almost completely forgotten three years after the incident. Unless you were personally involved—after three years no one remembers the details of the incident or the lessons learned. Incidents repeat themselves as if new.

To fix this problem, you need to do three things to your communication.

#1 Frighten Your Employees

Engineers/managers believe that scaring employees is unprofessional. This is wrong. What is unprofessional is repeating the same incidents over and over. A “high fear-appeal illustration” will result in at least 50% more behavior change. Behavior change is closely tied to an emotional reaction to the communication. You need to frighten your employees.

#2 Communication Should Contain Mostly Images Not Text

Human are not designed to read text, they are designed to look at images. Your lessons learned will be remembered up to eight times longer if your communication is dominated by hand-drawn illustrations, diagrams, and photos.

#3 Frontline Supervisors Should Present the Communication to Their Own Teams

The correlation between supervisors’ informal communication of safety information and the number of major process safety incidents is huge (r = - 0.64).

No other form of communication (print, video, electronic) delivers more behavior change than informal face-to-face communication between a supervisor and his/her team. That’s why supervisors need to communicate the major incident. And that is why your communication should be designed so it is easy for frontline supervisors to use.

Using research and many samples, Dr TJ Larkin shows how to improve major incident communication.