June 1, 2022 | Mark Paradies

Have You Saved a Life Today?

When Was the Last Time You Saved a Life?

I remember the first time I saw my daughter, Amy, who had a summer job as a lifeguard, save a man and a boy from drowning in a lake. Afterward, I talked to her. She didn’t see it as a big deal. She said she did rescues every week. She didn’t consider it heroic. It was just part of her job.

lifeguard stand at lake

Direct Feedback

About 20 years ago at the TapRooT® Summit, a TapRooT® User approached me to thank me. He said that they had stopped fatalities at their site after learning to apply TapRooT®. He told me that improved performance meant that, over a period of several years, they had saved about five lives at their refinery. He then said …

“Imagine how many TapRooT® Users there are
applying TapRooT® RCA around the world …
Easily there are hundreds of lives saved every year!”

But the example above wasn’t the only time this happened. Just a few weeks ago, I had this experience repeated at the 2022 Global TapRooT® Summit. This time the TapRooT® User had calculated that they had saved approximately 7 lives since they started using TapRooT® RCA.

Each time someone thanks me, it helps me appreciate the work of everyone here at System Improvements just a little bit more because they are all participating in the work our clients do to save lives.

Are You Saving Lives?

Have you found and fixed the root causes of precursor incidents that could have repeated and become fatal accidents at your site? Then you too are participating in using TapRooT® Root Cause Analysis to save a life – or maybe more than one life.

Try not to become complacent about the lives you are saving. Celebrate your success. Let us know what you have achieved. Tell others about the good job they are doing. Make sure that management knows about the lives saved.

And never stop improving.

As my boss in the Navy, Captain Willian J. Rodriguez, told me:

“If you’re not pedaling, you’re going downhill.”

Don’t become complacent about saving lives and coast downhill. Be vigilant and keep up the hard work. And when you can, enlist others in this great cause.

By the way, the picture below is a recent picture of my daughter. She isn’t a lifeguard anymore. She works for System Improvements helping people implement TapRooT® Root Cause Analysis. You could say she carrying on a tradition. She is a part of the team at SI that is helping people around the world save lives.