Tom Andel

Turn information into knowledge
July 28, 2008

In this multi-tasking world, workers are dividing their attention among too many masters and not giving anything of value to any of them. Look at how we gather information. We Google it. It flows into our stream of thought but doesn't empty into our body of knowledge. Learning is giving way to problem solving. Once a problem is solved, we move on to the next problem--discarding whatever factoid was used in that solution.

This breeds ignorance and compromises safety, especially among the younger generation of employees who are old hands at multi-tasking but new to materials handling. Many bring valuable skills but bad habits to the workplace. As a result, employers need to train and retrain their people on how to safely work in an environment that demands their focus. Some equipment doesn't forgive carelessness. 

Recent news accounts have reported fatalities involving cranes used in construction and steel-making applications. One man was crushed by a crane that hadn’t come to a complete stop before he started ascending it at the beginning of his shift. The irony is, this man was instructed on crane safety a year earlier. I guess at various points in a worker’s employment cycle, academic and occupational truths diverge and converge. How do we get to a point where those truths are just THE truth?

I talked to John Nofsinger, president of the Material Handling Industry of America, about this and he says this is a common discussion at industry gatherings he attends. He agrees that in today’s wired society, we all tend to lose focus on core issues. He believes industry needs to step in to re-establish that focus.

“When MHIA leadership is talking about a broad topic involving a major initiative, we always start by refreshing ourselves on the objectives of this initiative so we don’t get far afield,” he told me. “Our tendency is to invent new wheels all the time. We need to ask how does what we’re talking about support the objective we all agreed was important? We ought to be creating baselines and touchstones that are revisited regularly.”

That’s a great idea where safety is concerned. It’s also a far better answer than asking “How could that crane operator I trained last year have forgotten what I told him?”

Posted by Tom Andel on July 28, 2008 | Comments (0)