The complexities and conflicting messages related to Covid, the shortages of skilled people to fill jobs, along with the related excessive overtime and the emerging supply-chain mess are driving stress through the roof.

This stress is hitting all sorts of businesses and organizations.

According to a recent AP story, a major hospital in Missouri has seen a big jump in violence related incidents. In 2019, they had 94 violence related crimes, including 43 assaults and 17 injuries. In 2020, they had 152 violence related crimes, including 123 assaults and 78 injuries. The American Hospital Association reports a big increase in violence related problems, but since most are not reported to the police, so the numbers are unclear.

Many businesses are struggling to get people to fill their open positions as business activity grows. But since the openings remain, the employees are forced into excessive over-time. Some organizations are running at close to 20% overtime, which is wearing the people out. In one organization we know, many people have been required to work seven-day schedules for weeks, which is not the right way to treat people. This causes excessive fatigue and is very hard on the families.

Now we have an emerging supply chain crisis. There are over 60 ships awaiting to dock and unload in Los Angeles because there are not enough truck drivers to move the freight out to customers. This is impacting businesses of all sizes.

In one automobile agency, I heard a salesperson telling a customer that she would have to wait for her car until at least January 2022. I was talking with a small business owner whose business is etching decorative glassware. He said he was suffering in his business because he can’t get glass ware for his customers.

All this increasing stress is leading to more injuries and incidents. All of us in each of our businesses and organizations need to be very cognizant of this and try to keep stress levels to a minimum. We need to help each other and care for each other. We are all in this together so let’s make the best of this and go the extra mile in being patient and helpful.

A different approach to solving our problems is needed.

In the scientific and technical world in which most safety people have grown up, the dominant approach to problem solving has be a reductionist one. We were taught to look carefully at a problem, dissect it, understand the parts, and fix what is needed. We were taught to depend on fundamentals like Newton’s Laws, for example. Using the reductionist approach to solve safety problems may be reaching its limit, based on the fact that, the number of fatalities is gradually increasing and the rate of drop in all injuries I very slow.

The speed of change and the complexity of the problems has increased so much that we need a different approach to solving problems. This different approach has been developing over the last 50 or so years. This is called systems thinking.

In this approach, we are taught to look at the whole and the parts together and try to understand their inter-relationships and interactions. All the problems are connected so we can only understand the system using a different thinking approach. In systems thinking we look at relationships, patterns, and processes, asking question about how things are related, about the recurring patterns of behavior you see and what are the processes of interaction happening over and over. This is a big shift from looking at things, to looking at how people are interacting.

It can feel like we are giving up our quantitative approach to something that is more qualitative. It felt like this to me at first, but as I shifted my focus away from things to the way people interact, our safety and business performance improved. As I shifted my focus and way of thinking, I found that everything changed. As I worked with people using this systems’ thinking approach our safety and total business performance quickly improved.

Systems thinking is something you need to learn in order to develop a higher level of your own performance.

If you read my book, The Leadership Dance: Pathways to Extraordinary Organizational Performance, available from Amazon, you can read about my own journey into learning about systems thinking, as well as offering some useful complexity tools.

This is a powerful, effective way of working, which I highly recommend.