How cheese could save your life
Published: Fri, 09/08/17
I believe it was the airline industry which adopted the slightly silly, simple and, I think rather useful, concept, of seeing risk as Swiss cheese. The Swiss cheese is the situation that has risk, flying a plane or, as in my example yesterday, reconstructing some shelves. (My nose is getting better, thanks for asking.) It has to be Swiss cheese because fromage from that country has bubbles in it and the bubbles represent individual risks. In my case the bubbles were:
1. Board is just the right height to hit my nose.
2. Board is leaned against door.
3. Room has two doors and it was possible for me to both put something against the outside and then open it from the inside.
Accidents happen when the bubbles happen to line up and you suddenly get a hole all the way through the block of cheese. Accidents are avoided when you minimise the number of bubbles and pay attention to the way they might be lining up. Sorry if this seems rather simplistic but this is how my minor and completely unnecessary accident happened and any accident you have ever been in will have come about in a similar way.
You are probably familiar with the term ‘Risk Assessment’ two words that have become synonymous with bureaucracy and a fear based culture. Okay, a simple principle can easily be turned into an unnecessarily complicated procedure which no body understands and won’t do if they can avoid it. So, learn to see risk assessment as a simple procedure of looking for the bubbles and seeing which ones you can eliminate. Keep a close eye on the bubbles you can’t get rid of and be aware of when they are lining up.
From a Stav training point of view we have had a pretty good safety record over the past 25 or so years. I will outline a couple of incidents when things did go wrong in my next post on action to see what can be learned from them. Ever since I have taught Stav we have tried to build safety into training as a fundamental principle. If students can’t be educated into how to keep themselves safe in a training environment what chance do they have on the ‘street’? A full analysis my approach to safety in training would take a long time but three things come to mind.
Firstly, Ivar pointed out a very long time ago that training with weapons is so inherently dangerous that everyone has to be careful. You simply can’t afford to muck about with weapons in class so the kind of people who come into Stav don’t. If there is any sign of anyone getting silly I deal with it as an instructor and I hope my students are confident to discourage dangerous behaviour too. In my experience my students are not shy of telling newcomers ‘that is not how you do it, hopefully in a polite way’.
Secondly, training is structured to develop a sense of personal safety as a first priority. Pretty much all two person drills begin with a Trel response. This means simply backing away from the attacker and covering yourself in some way. The first drill a student learns with the staff is one simple move out of harms way. Once the Trel drill can be performed safely and competently the same move can be applied as the Karl response and so on. I apply the same principle with CQC training beginning with safe distancing. It isn’t that some of our training isn’t potentially dangerous, just that the drills are carefully structured and the student carefully prepared for each level of risk.
3. Awareness of your own vulnerability is your greatest gift as far as keeping safe is concerned. The Thor rune means protection. The Thor rune also represents the thorn, you could see this as meaning a thorny hedge protecting you from intruders but I think that is missing the point. The single thorn pricking the skin hurts without doing great harm. That pricking reminds that getting hit hurts and can do serious damage. So, we need to be careful both in training and out in the world. This is why we train with weapons but do not spar with protective clothing and equipment.
Of course we cannot eliminate risk completely, even if you abandon one activity as too dangerous it won’t change the fact that none of us will get out of this world alive. The other questions are: What to do when the bubbles do line up, as inevitably they will occasionally. Also, how to be accountable for safety by using the power of imagination.
I will have a session on this subject at the Stavcamp next weekend http://www.stavcamp.org, we could still fit one more person in, drop me a line if you are interested.
regards
Graham
PS If you missed downloading my pdf booklet on Hagl and Hemidal you can still get it from http://www.screencast.com/t/GtGtqp1USOq