October, 1981 and Everything After
In October, 1981, the first mobile telephone network was set up in Sweden, Ayatollah Khamenei was elected president of Iran, and my father, Spiro, crashed his Ford Capri.
Although the crash was on a back street in Cardiff that today would have resulted in some airbags inflating and an annoying insurance claim, in 1981 when nobody wore a seatbelt, it meant my father flying through the windscreen and cutting his eyes to ribbons in the process. Aged just 25, he was effectively blind, his vision limited to shadows and contrast, a 6-month-old baby in tow and a wife who suddenly had to do everything for him. Quite a shock in the second year of a marriage.
The 1980s were not a good decade to be disabled. The provisions that we take for granted today around accessibility, safety and equality either didn’t exist or were inconsistently applied. My father could no longer work as a quantity surveyor. He couldn’t help with raising a new-born. For a year or two he could barely do anything, living in and out of hospitals while surgeons tried to salvage any sight they could. When he returned home and began to rebuild his life, he found little purchase.
And then in the 90s, something miraculous happened. Not a cure for his visual impairment, but something that would have almost as profound an effect on my father and millions, maybe billions of others: the Personal Computer. Although various versions of home computers had been around for a while, the ZX Spectrum, Amstrad and Commodore 64 all becoming commonplace, it wasn’t until 1992 when Windows 3.1 arrived and PCs became affordable that the miracle occurred. Magnifiers, screen readers, voice-to-text — the features that we take for granted today and are built into our phones as standard were new and magical and suddenly made the world accessible for millions.
And not just innovations in accessibility, but also in connectivity. The internet, email, message boards, remote learning. We’ve seen a renaissance in this technology during the pandemic with Zoom and Teams becoming ubiquitous, but the mid-90s is when the world first became connected. My father was lucky enough to enrol on a course that provided him with a Windows PC and the specialist software he needed to use it, a social group of visually-impaired students like him, and most importantly, a purpose. After a decade of darkness he found glimmers of light: work experience at BBC Wales in Llandaff followed, then with the RNIB and finally a full-time job at the Cardiff Institute for the Blind (now Sight Life) teaching other blind and visually impaired people the skills that he had learnt. Technology allowed my father to feel useful, to engage with the world and to finally start the next chapter of his life after his terrible accident.
And that in a nutshell describes my feelings towards technology today: the net good, to me at least, seems to far outweigh the bad. At a time when our feelings and the media can be predominantly negative about technology, the personal memories of my father and people like him who were allowed to feel meaningful again still resonates. And thinking more broadly about the advances in medicine, education, communication, entertainment or even the scientific method, technology has always been at the forefront.
Some other events happened in October 1981. There was a mining disaster in Japan that killed 93 people. A landslide in the Philippines left hundreds of miners dead. A boat broke apart off the coast of Florida drowning 33 Haitian refugees.
And October 1981 is not an anomaly. You can pick almost any month since the industrial revolution and find similar stories of disaster and devastation. Some of these are acts of god: tsunamis, earthquakes, floods. But many others, most in fact, are acts of people.
Nobody sets out to work planning to be negligent or to cause an accident. And yet we are only human. We get tired, distracted and time-pressured. And most of the time this doesn’t matter. But occasionally, when things line up just wrong, the results are catastrophic and we are left with a Bhopal or a Challenger or a Piper Alpha.
And the terrifying thing is that these incidents are still occurring. Deepwater Horizon killed eleven workers and resulted in the largest offshore oil spill in US history in 2010. Copper, Cobalt, Iron Ore and Gold mines in DRC Congo and Brazil have resulted in hundreds of deaths over the last 5 years. And earlier this year, a gas leak killed six people in Surat, India.
Lest we feel the the United Kingdom is immune from these sorts of incidents, the Grenfell Tower Inquiry is still ongoing to examine the circumstances surrounding the night that 72 people lost their lives in 2017.
And there are literally hundreds of other examples from dozens of industries around the world. Despite the advances in HSE policy, regulation, innovation and practices, catastrophes are still commonplace.
In a macabre piece of synchronicity, the thing the caused my dad to lose his sight 40 years ago is the same thing that is still killing hundreds of people today: culture. The culture in the 1980s was not to wear seatbelts. Then, millions of pounds went into advertising campaigns, laws were changed, hearts and minds were won over and today car safety is a primary focus for drivers, passengers and new car purchasers. My dad’s car had a seatbelt — if he was driving even 10 years later, he may have been wearing it.
When I wrote above that disasters are acts of humans that wasn’t quite right: These disasters are often acts of organisations.
All high-hazard organisations today have the equivalent of seatbelts. Barriers, controls, risk models, safety frameworks, training. And yet incidents persist.
Although no organisation has a culture to deliberately ignore safety, often, other factors take priority. Looming deadlines, communication overheads, critical timelines for example. And understanding how we can analyse this culture, surface these hidden error traps and help improve safety is why Gus Carroll and I set up Empirisys.
We feel that there is a massive opportunity to understand the safety culture of an organisation through data science. After 18 months in business we’ve been lucky enough to work with some of the largest companies in the world, helping them to understand their data and drive safety improvement programs that save lives and make them more efficient.
Gus has written previously about his motivation for helping to improve worker safety and has spoken passionately at conferences about it. For me, I hope that Empirisys allows me to add to the net good done by technology and follow in the footsteps of the software that I’ve mentioned above. I think my dad would have liked that.
My dad passed away far too young in 2012. As well as being a computer trainer for blind people he was a writer, prankster, karaoke singer and well known character around Cardiff. I’ve collected some of his writing here for those interested.
And for those interested to find out more about what we do at Empirisys in helping organisations uncover hidden insights in their data, please get in touch with us at pete@empirisys.io or gus@empirisys.io
