Posted byIn response to “too many” 16-year-olds being killed in traffic accidents, many states have toughened the requirements to obtain driver’s licenses. This resulted in a decrease in 16 year old deaths.
The unexpected consequence? An increase in 18 year old deaths.
It seems that many teens are delaying getting their licenses and don’t get as much experience as teens who get their licenses earlier. Thus they make mistakes ad get in serious accidents.
Here’s a link to an Associated Press story about the problem:
http://www.chron.com/news/article/Curbs-on-youngest-drivers-may-have-bad-side-effect-2168417.php
That’s the problem with poorly thought out corrective actions that aren’t based on thorough root cause analysis and careful development of corrective actions. They frequently have unintended consequences.
Are your investigations based on thorough, evidence based root cause analysis? Do your corrective actions go beyond the common three corrective actions (retrain/refresh, revise the procedure, and reemphasize to the employee to be careful)?
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Many 16 yr olds are technically competent to drive.
Many young people up to say 25 yrs old are behaviourally not ..
Comment by John — September 21, 2011 @ 10:13 am
We had a talk about this very topic at one of our previous Summits.
Mark
Comment by Mark Paradies — September 21, 2011 @ 10:23 am
In Virginia, they enacted laws that prevented teens from having more than one passenger in the car. The unintended consequence was that more than double the number of cars were on the road each morning as those teens drove to school, resulting in more accidents.
In a refinery I worked in, there was an incident that had as an action the need to write a procedure for installing or retracting corrosion probes or sample points online. Because the procedure was held up in approvals, an unintended consequence was a near-miss where a pipe holed through at an injection point. The lack of any procedure caused a faulty installation.
Comment by Valerie — September 27, 2011 @ 9:39 am
The unintended consequences that trouble me the most are half measures that placate the public but in the end do not solve the problem. The beauty of finding root causes is that corrective actions are more apt to solve the whole problem.
Comment by Bill Reuland — September 27, 2011 @ 1:50 pm