Zero Harm Is Not Harmless

In short: prescribing exactly what to do for every situation doesn't just create compliant staff — it creates staff who can't cope the moment something falls outside the script. I call this trained incapacity, and it's costing you more than the compliance programme is protecting you from.

This is one thread in the fuller picture of why capable teams get bogged down — the same trained-incapacity pattern also shows up in our council operational performance overview, if you want the public-sector-specific version.

Zero harm is not harmless. We can all see this. We're all frustrated by it. So why does it persist? Why are leaders so unwilling to insert some sensible limits?

For the record, we need health and safety frameworks. Our current approach to them, though, is fundamentally flawed.

Last week I flew for the first time in a while and noticed something new in the safety briefing: "Please take care when stowing your tray table and ensure children's fingers are clear." We all know exactly how that line got added to the script. Someone met a KPI. Did we create a valuable outcome?

Trained incapacity

Here's the pattern I keep coming back to, across health and safety and well beyond it: when we prescribe exactly what to do for every situation, we don't just make people compliant — we make them less capable of coping with anything the script didn't cover. Sociologists have a name for this: the economist Thorstein Veblen coined the term trained incapacity, and Robert Merton later used it to explain a specific failure mode in bureaucracies — strict rule-following gradually turns the rules into the goal itself, rather than the means to one, and people trained this way lose the ability to respond well once a situation falls outside them. I see the same pattern everywhere I look: the slow erosion of judgement, confidence and problem-solving ability that happens when people are trained to expect instructions rather than to think.

When you're trained to expect a dozen road cones for any road hazard, what happens when an unmarked hazard suddenly appears in front of you? Nature doesn't provide neon signs telling you not just to look out, but exactly what to do in response.

• Our readiness for the unexpected drops.
• Our capability to respond well when it does happen is diminished.
• The stress we carry as a result goes up.

And this isn't just a health and safety problem. Consider car manuals fifty years ago compared with today — the assumed competence of the customer has dropped enormously. Maybe that's a legal team's caution more than a genuine belief people can't cope. Either way, the outcome is the same: trained incapacity. The assumption becomes real, because people are never given the chance to build the competence in the first place.

The hidden assumption

What intrigues me most is how intractable this problem is, despite near-universal frustration with its cost. I think it comes down to an assumption we don't even notice we're making: that compliance with a tightly prescribed process is the most efficient and effective way to get a result.

That assumption holds up in closed-loop systems like manufacturing, where inputs are controllable, or in genuinely low-maturity settings where people don't yet know what they don't know. Beyond those two cases, it breaks down fast. For most of us, working in a complex and fast-changing environment, a compliance focus — in health and safety or anywhere else — simply doesn't perform.

It persists partly because our performance metrics usually track how busy we are, not how well we're serving the outcome. So the assumption is rarely tested. Worse, it sets up a perverse incentive: following the prescribed steps protects the individual, even when it doesn't serve the person or the outcome in front of them. "Doing it properly" and "doing it well" quietly become two different goals — and nobody's measuring how much slower that makes everything.

There's a real financial cost here too. Francois Barton, CEO of the Business Leaders' Health and Safety Forum, has argued that a compliance-based approach to health and safety is expensive and comparatively ineffective, and has pushed for a shift toward understanding how work actually goes right, not just cataloguing how it goes wrong.

Asleep at the wheel?

We need to be awake to our assumptions about compliance. It's easy to convince ourselves we're outcomes-focused simply because we want good outcomes — everyone does. What do your practices, behaviours and incentives actually say about your commitment to outcomes versus your commitment to compliance? You can't fully commit to both.

This is exactly the kind of friction I help organisations find and remove — not by scrapping the rulebook, but by working out which parts of it are actually protecting people, and which parts are just protecting the process.

Is your organisation awake, or asleep at the wheel?

If you're not sure, the Friction Factor survey is a fast, free way to find out.