Solutions, not Blame

We think of the New Year as something of a natural event. After all it highlights the fact that the earth has completed another revolution around the sun. Of course the date we pick to celebrate this event is arbitrary. In ancient times, it was often celebrated in the spring to commemorate the fact that there was a rebirth of the world, symbolized by new growth. The spring is clearly a more logical choice, but our use of January goes back to the Romans and has been incorporated into our modern calendars.

We like to reflect on the New Year and consider areas that we could improve. Many of us do this individually. We also see many articles about things we can do better as a society, or ways to improve our finances, lose weight, meet members of the opposite sex, etc., etc.

The general idea is that reflection can lead to improvement, if we consider what didn't work and what did. However, human nature being what it is, you can most likely reprint the very same self improvement articles/blogs every year since we continually make the same mistakes.

There is one thing that we, as a society, could do that would help improve our future and the future of our children. That would be to adopt a forward looking approach and not a backward looking one. Unfortunately, it is much more common, because it is generally much easier to assign blame than it is to fix a problem.

Now clearly wrongdoing should be punished, but honest mistakes are not wrongdoing. When you consider the spill in the Gulf, the majority of the coverage both at the time and afterward was about how someone was at fault. I read an article the other day that depicted the last moments on the rig before it exploded and while interesting it ignored what was the real issue. The failures to act were the result of what proved to be poor decisions. Poor decisions are unfortunately something that humans do. Of course had the specific scenario been anticipated and if enough information had been available, perhaps an action could have been initiated to prevent the explosion and much of the resultant spillage. However these actions were drastic and the fear of overreacting is often the greatest fear of all.

What should happen now is that lessons learned from the event should help improve future training and improve future decision making. Hopefully this is going on at all the major drillers and it should make future drilling safer, not foolproof, but safer.

We usually don't know when catastrophes are avoided. I often read criticism of our anti-terrorism efforts as being ineffectual. Of course the criticism is usually voiced by someone with a vested interest. What matters is the absence of terrorist acts. Yes, our countermeasures incorporate reactive strategies, based on known terrorist attempts, but these strategies have prevented a repeat of 9-11 for almost ten years. The terrorists haven't taken a vacation but clearly we have become a more difficult target. Could we be better? Of course we could and suggestions to improve our efforts could be valuable, but criticism for political or economic gain is unproductive.

We are faced with plenty of problems to solve. Instead of spending so much unproductive time trying to blame someone, we need to focus on solving our problems.