“We’ve always done it that way” isn’t a defence

Ask why a job is done a certain way and sooner or later you’ll get that line back. I’ve had it hundreds of times, usually with a shrug, like it settles the matter.

It doesn’t settle anything. And the strange part is that it’s almost never true.

The job didn’t stay the same. It drifted.

I’ve never once walked into a place and found a routine job being done exactly the way it was set up. What actually happens is small changes. A step gets skipped because it saves two minutes. A cover comes off because the part kept catching. Someone leaves, the lad who takes over learns it slightly wrong, and then teaches it on slightly wronger again. None of it looks dramatic. Each change on its own looks like nothing.

Do that for five years and you’ve got a job nobody designed, being run by people who are certain it’s always been like this.

Here’s the bit that catches firms out. Because there was never a written procedure, there’s no baseline. Nobody can point at a document and say that isn’t how this job runs. You can’t show that something has drifted when you’ve got nothing to measure it against. So the job quietly moves, and “we’ve always done it that way” ends up being the only record anyone has. That’s memory, not evidence.

That’s why I go on at people about writing the thing down and putting a proper risk assessment behind it. Not for the folder. So that in three years somebody can tell whether the job has moved.

They’re not being awkward. They just can’t see it any more.

When I challenge how something’s done, most people genuinely don’t think there’s a problem. They’re not defending a bad habit. They’ve simply got used to the risk that sits inside that job. It’s been there so long it’s stopped registering.

That’s normal. You’d be the same. Do anything a thousand times and your brain files it under fine.

So the way you raise it matters. Come in heavy and you get the shutters down and a room full of folded arms. Challenge it properly and you get a conversation, and the conversation is where the value is.

What I say when the MD isn’t convinced

Sometimes I get the pushback from the top. We’ve run this line for fifteen years, nobody’s been hurt, what exactly is the problem.

My answer is that they might not be seeing what they think they’re seeing. The near misses that would have told them a job was heading somewhere bad often don’t get reported. So the number they’re looking at, no accidents, isn’t a measure of how safe the job is. It’s a measure of what got written down. The risk can be sat there in plain sight and the paperwork will still look clean right up until the day it doesn’t.

Sometimes it’s just luck. And luck won’t stand up in court when someone’s asking how you decided this was safe.

That tends to land better than any poster ever has. I’ve no time for scaring people into compliance. It doesn’t hold, and it teaches them nothing. Give someone the actual picture and they’ll usually do the right thing on their own.

Talk to the operators first

Whenever I look at a task like this, the first thing I do is go and talk to whoever does it. Not the manager. The operators. They know that job better than anyone in the building.

My side of it is explaining the risk, because that’s the part they’ve stopped seeing. Their side is the fifty practical reasons the job runs the way it does, and half of those reasons are ones I’d never have guessed from a clipboard. Put the two together and you nearly always find something workable in the middle that’s also safe.

More often than not they come up with the better way themselves once it’s being discussed. They just needed someone to open the conversation. That’s the whole job really, and it’s the same thinking behind how we build safety culture into a business rather than bolting it on.

Sometimes the answer is that it stays

I’ll be straight about this, because plenty of consultants won’t be.

We’ve looked at tasks plenty of times and not been able to improve them. Either the cost isn’t there, or the change makes the job so slow it stops being commercially viable. In that case we don’t pretend. We record the risk level honestly, we accept it for now, and we keep working down the hierarchy of controls until something opens up that lets us take it further.

That’s a decision. It’s written down, it’s justified, and someone put their name to it. Completely different animal to a job that drifted for a decade while everyone assumed it was fine.

The line to remember is this. “We’ve always done it that way” isn’t a reason. It’s the absence of one.

If you want a quick sense of where your own jobs sit, the free self-assessment checklists on our documents page are a decent place to start.