“Managers who don’t know how to measure what they want, settle for wanting what they can measure.” (1) Russell L. Ackoff, Ph.D.
For the better part of the last two decades, most corporations have fallen prey to obsessively using “zero” to define virtually every safety and health goal, not to mention the plethora of environmental goals - waste, emissions, GHG, carbon footprints, spills, leaks, and on and on.
To those in senior management positions, “Zero is the Goal” is a simple, easy-to-remember catch phrase. Safety and health pros welcome senior management’s support, but still struggle to convince management that human, material, and financial resources are necessary to reach this laudable goal of “zero.” Too often senior managers arbitrarily set goals and have no clue as to what it will take to meet the goals.
For many at the worker level (where most injuries occur), “Zero is the Goal” is contemptible. Factory floor operators and mechanics are cognizant of the fact that they do not work or live in a “risk-free world.” These folks can live with the high probability, low consequence injuries many encounter during their career. It is the low probability, high consequence events they lose sleep over.
Slogans like “Zero is the Goal” are fine as long as management is willing to provide the resources to do the more difficult and expensive safety and health program activities. Otherwise, workers who face the hazards on the factory floor will view these slogans as nothing more than corporate poppycock.
For more than four decades researchers have focused on the benefits of using goal setting to enhance business performance. In fact, goal setting is so ingrained in today’s business cultures that it would be hard to imagine a business being successful without some form of goals.
In 1968, Edwin A. Locke’s research revealed that there is a direct relationship between the difficulty of a specific goal and an individual’s performance to accomplish the goal. In particular, Locke found that hard goals produced a higher level of performance than easy goals; specific hard goals produced a higher level of output than a “do your best” goal; and behavioral intentions regulated choice behavior.(2)