We have a few steps (3 sets with 5 / 6 / 12 steps) in the yard. The incline is very shallow & the steps over 700mm wide The front edges have been regularly painted yellow for the last 3 years. The paint gets weathered & slippery when wet - so we decided to place the state-of-the-art 2" edge protection, bright yellow and non-slip surface onto each step - task completed last week. First trip accident / injury ever happens on step today as a lady in flat shoes, dry conditions trips as she is climbing said steps!!! Immediate outcry from staff - new safety edge protection is DANGEROUS. I can't win sometimes !!!

evans Your report suggests that you may be inventing an innovative paradoxical way of attention, depending on the severity of any injury to the lady you referred to; short of an unlikely fatality, you may well have conducted a good experiment in probability, the root of risk management. In another response today, a respondent outlined a company initiative to distribute tyre tread safety gauges to all staff to promote safety. The event that a member of staff is involved in a road accident during the coming week there's a minimal probability that it has any causal connection between being given a tread gauge and the bump. If you have a regular e-letter or newsletter, perhaps you might take the opportunity to run a competition to engage staff to consider the paradoxes of probability of safety (and health) incidents, in relation to the three ways in which levels of probability are attributed to any event. While the reaction you outline is a common subjective one, one of the other two classes of assignment of probability may well have guided your decision to paint the steps. Instead of allowing the subjective form of assessment of probability of risk, that dominates the mass media you've created the opportunity to educate your folk in the empirical and in the classical a priori approaches to assessing probability. This opens the chance to persuade your directors to provide a fair and attractive prize for a competition about rational ways of appreciation the simple yet complex realities about probability at the core of your safety management.