After an incident, we sometimes hear:
“They got complacent.”
Maybe…but that explanation doesn’t get us very far, especially not when we’re trying to make work safer for the future.
People rarely wake up one morning and decide to care less about safety. More often, the environment slowly teaches them that certain risks are acceptable.
Imagine a crew has a procedure that requires equipment to be shut down before clearing a minor obstruction. One day, someone finds a quicker way to do it without shutting down.
Nothing happens.
They do it again. Still nothing happens.
Soon, other people see it. The shortcut saves time, production keeps moving, and nobody says anything about it.
After a while, the shortcut doesn’t even feel like a shortcut anymore. It’s just how the work gets done.
This is sometimes called the normalization of deviance: something that was once recognized as outside the standard gradually becomes normal because people repeatedly experience it without a bad outcome.
From a behavioral perspective, that makes perfect sense.
The safe behavior may require more time, effort, or inconvenience. The shortcut produces an immediate benefit: the job gets done faster. And most of the time, the negative consequence we are worried about—an injury or serious event—doesn’t happen.
So what is the environment teaching people?
That the shortcut works.
This is where leadership matters.
Leaders influence that environment every day through what they ask about, what they notice, what they reinforce, and what they allow to continue.
If a supervisor sees a shortcut and walks past it, that matters.
If employees raise concerns about a cumbersome procedure and nothing changes, that matters.
If production slowdowns get immediate attention while safety concerns sit unresolved for weeks, that matters.
And if leaders celebrate getting the job done without asking how it got done, that matters too.
None of these things necessarily mean leaders don’t care about safety. But together, they can create conditions where deviations become easier, more reinforcing, and eventually normal.
That’s why telling people to “avoid complacency” isn’t much of a safety strategy.
A better approach is to look for the conditions that could allow risk to become normal.
- Where are people regularly working around a procedure?
- Where has an abnormal condition existed so long that people barely notice it anymore?
- Where does doing the safe thing require significantly more effort than taking the shortcut?
- What concerns have employees stopped raising because nothing happened the last few times they raised them?
And perhaps most importantly:
What are leaders doing—or not doing—that may unintentionally reinforce those patterns?
Complacency may look like an individual problem.
But often, what we are really seeing is the predictable result of an environment that has been teaching people, one uneventful shortcut at a time, what is acceptable.
