Documenting Common Sense

Documenting Common sense? Isn't that an oxymoron?

Common sense shouldn't need to be documented - it should come naturally.
Well guess what! It ain't so, not least of all in the eyes of the law.

Risky Business SOS is an application designed to help you document the common sense aspects of working safely at your business. 

So what do I mean?  Working Safely is about common sense.  You don't come to work to get seriously injured. You work carefully but what seems like obvious common safety sense for a person who built a business from scratch will not necessarily seem like common sense to a trainee.

Not every one has the same background (language skills, balance skills, eye-sight, fore-sight, body height, over bite) and so we all see the world from slightly different angles and at slightly different speeds.  Risky Business SOS tries to document this common sense (and simplify) the requirements of the business owners to inform everyone in the organisation about this common sense safety aspect, at their own pace. It is a big ask.  Firstly, it takes a significant commitment from busy business owners to stop and do a brain dump of their experience into a form that employees can use. Secondly, every employee deserves the right to have the capability to do the job in the same way as an experienced boss. No employer has the right to ask workers to not protect themselves at work, and Governments agree. It is an intractable and unavoidable component of modern business practices. So for busy business owners there is no option other than documenting your processes, assessing the risk of potential hazards and training you workers. Governments insist that you do this!  


Risky Business SOS application was designed:
(a) to make sure that you document the minimum business logic and common sense information;
(b) to make it easy to use and accessible to every employee, from those adding the information, to the employees who need to be made aware in a timely fashion  and to be able learn the information 'at their own pace'. 
(c) designed to give you some protection against draconian laws.

It's a big ask Documenting Common sense.

© Dr Gerard Hammond  PhD Thesis