Seven Famous Laws of Life and Productivity – and What They Can Teach Us About Health & Safety

There are plenty of so-called “laws” that we come across in everyday life.  Some are serious scientific principles; others are observations about human behaviour that have become part of popular culture.

1. The Pareto Principle tells us that roughly 80% of the results can come from 20% of the effort.
2. Parkinson’s Law tells us that work tends to expand to fill the time available for its completion.
3. Murphy’s Law tells us that if something can go wrong, it probably eventually will.

They are not laws in the legal sense, of course. But they can be surprisingly useful when we apply them to the way we manage health and safety.

In the UK, employers have a legal responsibility to protect employees and others who may be affected by their work. Health and safety management is not simply about producing policies and filling in risk assessment forms. It is about identifying significant risks, putting sensible controls in place and making sure those controls continue to work.

So, what can seven of the most famous laws of life and productivity teach us about health and safety?

1. The Pareto Principle – focus on the risks that matter most

The Pareto Principle, commonly known as the 80/20 rule, is the observation that a relatively small number of causes can account for a disproportionately large proportion of the results.

It isn’t literally 80/20 in every situation.

But the principle is extremely useful in health and safety.

Think about your workplace.

You might have:

• dozens of risk assessments
• hundreds of pages of procedures
• a long list of workplace inspections
• numerous items of PPE
• training records
• COSHH assessments
• method statements
• policies and forms.

But which risks are actually capable of causing serious harm? Those are the risks that deserve the greatest attention. A manufacturing business might have hundreds of hazards, but machinery guarding, work at height, vehicle movements, hazardous substances or exposure to dust could account for a much greater proportion of the potential for serious injury or ill health.

The same applies to construction. You may have a very long list of site rules, but if people are regularly working at height, operating plant, excavating, lifting loads or working around moving vehicles, those activities deserve particularly careful consideration.

This is broadly consistent with the HSE’s approach to risk assessment: identify the hazards, decide who may be harmed, evaluate the risks and implement appropriate controls. The objective is not to create paperwork for every conceivable possibility. It is to control the risks that matter.

The health and safety lesson

Don’t confuse the amount of paperwork with the quality of your safety management.

Ask yourself:  “What are the few things we do here that could realistically kill or seriously injure somebody?”

Then make sure those risks are properly controlled.

2. Parkinson’s Law – don’t give safety work unlimited time

Parkinson’s Law is often expressed as: Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.

Anyone who has worked in business will recognise this.  Give someone a week to complete a task and it takes a week, give them three months and, quite often, it takes three months.

Health and safety can suffer from exactly the same problem, consider a risk assessment. There is nothing wrong with taking time to conduct a thorough assessment. In fact, for complex or high-risk activities, proper assessment is essential. But a risk assessment should not become an academic exercise that takes months to produce while the actual hazard remains uncontrolled.

The important question isn’t:  “Have we completed the paperwork?”

It is:  “Have we controlled the risk?”

The HSE is very clear that risk assessment is part of a wider process of managing risk. The controls need to be implemented and reviewed to make sure they remain effective. For example, if an inspection identifies an unguarded machine, there is little value in spending six weeks discussing how to word the risk assessment while the machine remains unguarded  –  Fix the machine, then document what you have done.

The health and safety lesson

Don’t allow safety paperwork to become a substitute for safety action.  Good health and safety should support the business, not create an endless administrative workload.

3. Murphy’s Law – assume that things will eventually go wrong

Murphy’s Law is probably the most famous of all these principles: If something can go wrong, it will eventually go wrong.  Health and safety professionals don’t need much convincing about this one!

• A machine that has operated perfectly for five years can fail.
• A worker who has never previously fallen can trip.
• A delivery driver can take the wrong route around a site.
• A contractor can misunderstand an instruction.
• A chemical container can be left in the wrong place.
• A control measure that worked perfectly yesterday can be bypassed today.

This doesn’t mean that accidents are inevitable, quite the opposite in fact.  It means that effective safety management should anticipate failure.

Ask:

• What happens if the guard fails?
• What happens if the operator makes a mistake?
• What happens if the power fails?
• What happens if the normal procedure cannot be followed?
• What happens if a new or inexperienced employee carries out the task?
• What happens if the contractor doesn’t understand our site rules?
• What happens if someone ignores the instruction?

This is one reason why robust risk assessment is so important.  The HSE advises employers to consider how people actually work, including non-routine activities such as maintenance and cleaning, and to learn from accidents and ill health.  A good control system should not depend upon everybody behaving perfectly all of the time.

The health and safety lesson  Design your controls for real life, not an imaginary workplace where nothing ever goes wrong.

4. Hofstadter’s Law – complex safety work will probably take longer than expected

Hofstadter’s Law is another popular observation about planning:  It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.

This is particularly relevant to complex health and safety projects.

Perhaps you are:

• installing a new production line
• moving premises
• introducing a new chemical
• changing a manufacturing process
• undertaking a major construction project
• implementing ISO 45001
• completing a significant refurbishment
• introducing new machinery.

The temptation is to concentrate on the obvious deadline:  “The new process needs to be operational on 1 October.”

But safety needs to be built into the project from the beginning.

• What about commissioning?
• Training?
• Competence?
• Maintenance?
• Emergency arrangements?
• COSHH?
• Noise?
• Dust?
• LEV?
• Fire safety?
• Access and egress?
• Contractor management?
• Statutory inspections?

The HSE’s Plan, Do, Check, Act approach is deliberately cyclical. Health and safety arrangements need to be planned, implemented, monitored and reviewed rather than treated as a one-off exercise.

The health and safety lesson  If a change is important enough to the business to require a project plan, it is important enough to have health and safety built into that plan from the start.

Don’t bolt safety on at the end.

5. The Peter Principle – competence matters

The Peter Principle is the humorous observation that people in organisations can be promoted until they reach a position at which they are no longer competent.  There is a serious health and safety lesson here.

Being good at one job does not automatically make somebody competent to manage the safety risks of another.

1. A highly skilled engineer isn’t necessarily a competent health and safety adviser.
2. A brilliant machine operator isn’t automatically competent to design a machinery safeguarding system.
3. An experienced employee isn’t necessarily competent to carry out a specialist LEV examination.
4. And someone who has completed a short training course doesn’t necessarily have the experience required to manage a complex, high-risk activity.

The HSE defines competence in terms of a combination of training, skills, experience and knowledge, together with the ability to apply these appropriately. It also stresses that competence needs to be relevant and proportionate to the work being undertaken.  This is particularly important when appointing contractors and consultants.  The cheapest person on paper isn’t necessarily the cheapest option if their advice is unsuitable or fails to identify the significant risks.

The health and safety lesson  Competence is about more than holding a certificate.

Ask whether the person actually has the knowledge, experience and practical ability needed for the task.

6. Goodhart’s Law – when a measure becomes a target, it can stop being a good measure

Goodhart’s Law is particularly interesting for health and safety.

It is commonly expressed as:  When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Imagine a company decides that it wants to improve its safety performance.

It introduces a target:

“Zero accidents.”

That sounds excellent.

But what happens if employees become reluctant to report minor accidents or near misses because they don’t want their department to lose its “zero accident” status?  The statistics might look better.  The workplace might not be any safer.

The same problem can occur with:

• number of safety observations completed
• number of inspections
• number of toolbox talks
• number of audits
• number of risk assessments completed
• number of training hours.

These figures can be useful, but they are leading indicators, not proof that risks are actually being controlled.  The HSE emphasises the importance of monitoring and reporting health and safety performance, but the purpose is to understand whether the management system is actually working.  A company could complete 500 inspections and still have an unsafe workplace.  Alternatively, a company might complete fewer inspections because its risk profile is different — while still having excellent control of its significant risks.

The health and safety lesson  Measure what matters, not simply what is easy to count.

Don’t ask only:  “How many safety activities have we completed?”

Also ask:  “What has actually changed as a result?”

7. Occam’s Razor – the simplest effective control is often the best

Occam’s Razor is the principle that, when faced with competing explanations, the simplest one is generally preferable, provided it adequately explains the evidence.  There is a useful parallel in health and safety:  Don’t make safety more complicated than it needs to be.

The objective is not to eliminate every possible risk from existence, the objective is to control risks so far as is reasonably practicable.  That distinction matters.

Suppose employees regularly trip over a trailing cable.

You could produce:

• a new policy
• a detailed risk assessment
• a training presentation
• a toolbox talk
• an inspection checklist
• a warning poster.

Or you could ask:  “Why is the cable there?”

Perhaps the better answer is simply to move the equipment, reroute the cable or install a suitable fixed connection.  The HSE’s guidance is clear that risk management should focus on practical measures and that employers are not expected to eliminate every risk. Controls should be sensible, proportionate and reasonably practicable.  Sometimes the best safety solution is surprisingly simple.

The health and safety lesson  Before writing another procedure, ask whether you can remove the hazard or control it at source.

Bringing the seven laws together

When you put all seven principles together, they produce a surprisingly useful approach to health and safety management.

1. Pareto

Focus on the risks that matter most.

2. Parkinson

Don’t let paperwork expand indefinitely.

3. Murphy

Expect things to go wrong and build resilience into your controls.

4. Hofstadter

Allow enough time for safety to be properly considered when things change.

5. Peter

Make sure the people responsible are actually competent.

6. Goodhart

Don’t mistake safety statistics for safety performance.

7. Occam

Use the simplest effective control wherever possible.

And there is an important point behind all seven.  Good health and safety management is really good management.

The HSE’s HSG65 guidance describes health and safety management as an integral part of good management rather than something that should sit separately from the way the organisation is run. Its Plan, Do, Check, Act model provides a practical framework for doing exactly that.

The final law: make it work in the real world

There is one final principle that perhaps matters more than all the others:

A safety system is only as good as its implementation.

• You can have excellent policies.
• You can have beautifully written risk assessments.
• You can have impressive training records.
• You can have an excellent safety management system.

But if the controls don’t work in the workplace, they are not doing their job.  The HSE itself advises that competent health and safety advice should be specific to the risks in the workplace, concentrate on practical action and avoid generating paperwork simply for its own sake.

That is why we believe good health and safety consultancy should be practical.

• It should help you understand the risks.
• It should help you prioritise them.
• It should give you sensible solutions.

And, most importantly, it should help you put those solutions into practice. After all, the purpose of health and safety isn’t to produce a perfect folder.

It’s to make sure people go home safe at the end of the working day.