Speaking at the Chamber of Minerals and Energy's 2007 Occupational Safety and Health Conference earlier this month, The Intersafe Group principal consultant Roger Kahler provided an ethos that safety officers should adhere to.

With more than 20 years experience working on over 4000 incidents, Kahler has come up with four areas – understanding, insight, wisdom and courage – to bring further awareness to safety officers and decision makers in the risk management arena.

However, it is first necessary for safety officers to have a passion for their job to prevent damage in the workplace, but that passion should and cannot cloud one's thinking, Kahler says.

"There is a human face to tragedy, [these] experiences …. must motivate us, it must bring us to a passion, desire to prevent this level of damage but I'd say in the midst of the passion we need to bring the tools and methods of science," Kahler told delegates.

"We must bring clear thinking and not be obstructed by our emotions by allowing our emotions to empower us.

"We must bring passion, vision, science, strong management and robust systems and we must set these in the core values of love, respect, trust, honesty, fairness and courage."

According to Kahler, safety officers need to understand the "phenomena" of damage – the how and why, and whether it was causal factors or "energies" from human, gravitational, vehicular, machine or objects that caused an injury, disability or a fatality – coupled with asking the right questions to provide insight and the wisdom, and then finally courage to challenge traditional work safe practices.

"I want to bring a perspective to this problem under these headings of understanding, insight, wisdom and courage," he said.

"Understanding in the context that first it is necessary to get some grasp of the size of the personal damage problem at work and what are the critical levels of damage.

"Understanding leads to the need for insight; we must be able to describe what these levels of damage look like, what are the patterns of what is taking place.

"As we drill into those patterns, we must gain an increase in insight into the phenomena of what is damaging.

"Wisdom follows insight. Wisdom allows us to know which of our insights are transferable to our situation.

"We need courage because we need to challenge the existing paradigms and existing norms of behaviour."

Kahler says safety officers need to step away from the rules and dig deeper in the quest to delivering a safer work environment.

In a bid to understand the situation, he said officers need to be aware of the "size" of damage to a person, and he identified five categories – multiple fatalities, single fatality, non-fatal permanent (class one), temporary damage to full recovery (class two), minor damage (class three) – of the nature of injuries a person can suffer in the work place.

Following on from that, Kahler said officers should investigate the causal factors or "energies" that were involved in the damage situation – including electrical, thermal, chemical, radiation and or noise – to gain better insight, which would in turn provide information on what energies can cause what class of damage to a person.

Once categories have been identified, the application of "wisdom" acquired follows, where he urges all safety officers to challenge current mythologies of work safe practices.

This includes the need to ask the right questions.

Kahler says instead of asking "How could you get hurt?" officers need to pose questions that will procure relevant information. For example, asking the employee the condition or grip of the floor or how they were picking up objects.

"As you get real answers, you cannot afford to walk away and leave them unresolved," he said.

Courage is the final ethos pillar that brings forward the link from thinking of different work safe practices to actually implementing it.

Kahler added that while safety rules generally apply to the person changing their pattern of performing duties, perhaps we need to focus on changing the task being carried out or the equipment or even the environment.

"Occupational health and safety does not need more systems, it needs more quality brought to existing systems," he said.