Safety Speaker John Drebinger Answers the Question, “Why Don’t People Intervene When They See An Unsafe Act?”

Nothing Will Happen

People don’t intervene and share safety with others when they don’t think an incident or injury is going to occur. In Chapter Seven in my latest book, “Would You Watch Out For My Safety?™” I share the following:

“What do you think when you see somebody doing something hazardous? Let’s say I see somebody on a ladder. They’re working in a hotel lobby, and they’re changing a light bulb in one of the chandeliers. They put a ladder up and climb up there to change one light bulb. Then they see another one’s out. They have another bulb with them and so they think, “Oh, shoot, I can reach that.” Now, they should take the ladder and move it to the other position so they can do it safely, but they’re trying to save time. So they reach a little farther.

Imagine as safety speakers we go out into the hallway and we see somebody doing that. What do you think? What you think is that nothing is going to happen because our life’s experiences tell us in most cases, nothing will happen. We have all done something similar ourselves. We’ve all taken short cuts when we’ve reached a little bit farther than we should and nothing happened. Once we believe nothing’s going to happen, we cease to be concerned.

Let’s change the situation and imagine for a second, you know for a fact what is going to happen. There used to be a TV show called Early Edition. The premise of the show was this guy’s cat would bring him the next day’s newspaper. So he’d read headlines that would tell him what was going to happen. For example, he’d look at it and read, “At 8 o’clock, 15 school children killed at the corner of First and Main Street.” The story says an out-of-control bus runs into them. He had this special knowledge so he had to arrive there before 8 o’clock and move the kids. Then, the headline would change and they wouldn’t die. That was his job. He had to prevent horrible incidents from happening.

What if you could really do that? My guess is, for any safety speaker audience to which I’ve ever spoken, if we knew for a fact we’d see somebody on a ladder, and at that moment they would fall just right, hit their head and die, we would take action. If we knew it with certainty, if we could really predict the future, I don’t believe there is a single person you or I would bump into who wouldn’t go out there and do something to make a difference.

As a Safety Speaker I Know What I Would Do

I don’t know about you, but if I knew that was going to happen, I’d probably take the ladder and hide it. My position would be this guy is not going to climb up the ladder today. If it meant saving a life, I’d break the ladder. I’d saw it in half. If you knew for a fact the person was going to die, you’d intervene. You would do what it takes. The problem is you don’t get to know ahead of time. What I suggest to people is, they need to think in those terms.”