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The test got done. Where’s the updated logbook and where’s the test results?.
During my time in the corporate world, I was part of a small team looking after electrical compliance for around 2,000 sites and over a million electrical assets. On any given day there would be an electric shock or electrical incident reported somewhere across those sites, and to close off the investigation I needed the latest RCD or appliance test results. That meant an email to the service provider followed by a phone call stressing the urgency. How often did I get them pronto? Nearly never!
For the most part the testing had been done. The results were sitting in a logbook on site, in a spreadsheet, or in a share folder that was only as good as the person looking after it.
It is easy to put this down to people being lazy or disorganised. I recently went looking for the research on why people are so poor at keeping records (yes, there is quite a lot of it) and it turns out the reasons are predictable. Once you know what they are, you can set up a system that works around them.
A Cambridge psychologist by the name of Frederic Bartlett worked this one out back in 1932. He had people read an unfamiliar story and retell it over the following weeks and months. Each time the story got shorter, the odd details dropped out and the gaps were filled in with whatever made sense to the person telling it. His finding was that we don’t play a memory back like a recording, we rebuild it each time from bits and pieces.
In the 1970s Elizabeth Loftus showed how easily that rebuild can be nudged. People who watched the same film of a car crash gave higher speeds when asked how fast the cars were going when they “smashed” into each other rather than when they “hit” each other.
Now think of an electrician who finishes a six-monthly emergency light test at 4.30 on a Friday and writes it up on Monday morning. They will remember that three fittings failed. Which three, on which level, and which one is still waiting on parts are the details memory fills in with a reasonable guess, and in a logbook a reasonable guess looks exactly the same as a fact.
Psychologists have a name for remembering to do something later, which is prospective memory. It is the one that lets you down when you drive past the shops and buying bread was on your To Do list.
Writing up a test is one of these jobs stacked on top of the test itself. A NASA researcher, Key Dismukes, looked at how this goes wrong for pilots and medical staff, and two of the main culprits were interruptions and steps that were put off until later. A step that is put off loses whatever would normally have prompted it. His advice was to use checklists and reminders, and to avoid putting off anything important.
“I’ll do the logbook and test result report when I’m back at the office” is a step that has been put off. So is a logbook that lives in a cupboard on a different level to the switchboard, or has multiple versions saved on a computer somewhere.
The best evidence that a prompt at the right moment works comes from surgery. When the World Health Organisation trialled a simple checklist in hospitals across eight cities, complications after major operations dropped from 11% to 7% and deaths from 1.5% to 0.8%. The surgeons were just as skilled as before, and the only change was a prompt put in front of them at the moment it was needed.
Back in 1949 a linguist named George Zipf put forward the principle of least effort, which says that people will generally take the path that costs them the least work. Record keeping tends to lose under that rule because the cost and the benefit land on different days, and quite often on different people.
The electrician wears the cost at the end of the job. The benefit turns up months later for the building manager dealing with an auditor, an insurer or a safety investigation. One Perth contractor using Know Your Asset tells us it saves their tech electrician two hours of paperwork on a large site, which gives you an idea of what the paper version was costing.
With two hours of paperwork on one site, “I’ll remember later” or “I’ll jot down some chicken scratching on a scrap piece of paper and email it when I have time” are examples of the path that costs them the least work.
Research by Eleanor Rosch in the 1970s found that people don’t naturally sort things into neat boxes. We think in typical examples with blurry edges, and the box we pick changes depending on what we are doing at the time.
Take a thermal imaging report for a main switchboard. It could be filed under the building, the switchboard, the contractor, the year, the insurer who asked for it, or under defects. All of those are sensible, and that is the problem. A filing system only works if everybody picks the same answer every time, including the person looking for it two years later.
This is exactly what I saw with share folders. People can be slow to upload the reports, people leave the organisation, documents can be easily altered, and the individual responsibility is hard to pin down.
Researchers at IBM put some numbers on it 2011. They followed 345 people through more than 85,000 attempts to find an old email, and the people who had set up detailed folders were no more successful at finding things than those who hadn’t bothered. All that filing effort made no difference when it counted.
Every logbook entry involves a handful of small decisions about what happened, how much detail to put down, where it goes and who will need it. Psychologists call this cognitive load, and people have less room for it when they are rushed, interrupted or running three jobs at once.
Good intentions don’t make up the difference. A 2016 reviewby Paschal Sheeran and Thomas Webb found that people only follow through on what they intend to do about half the time. Anyone who has chased timesheets on a Monday morning will not need convincing.
The end result is records that are patchy and filled in after the fact. In a compliance logbook that looks like a run of entries in the same pen on consecutive dates, a gap of six months, or a neat column of ticks that nobody can vouch for.
None of this is new. Writing itself is only a bit over 5,000 years old, and around 85% of the earliest clay tablets we have are administrative records listing things like barley, sheep and jars of beer going in and out of the storehouse. One of the first things people did with writing was keep the records they couldn’t keep in their heads.
Before that, knowledge lived in stories and in other people’s memories, so there was never much call for a brain that is good at paperwork. We have always needed a tool for them, and the tool has gone from clay to paper to the bound logbook in the plant room cupboard or floating around somewhere in the digital world.
The current logbook systems stores the information and that is about all they do. It doesn’t remind anyone, it is rarely accessible where the work is, it can’t be easily searched, and it can’t tell you the history of an asset from one day to the next. For the most part, electrical compliance is still in the dark ages on that front.
‘A BRAIN IS TO THINK – A PEN IS TO REMEMBER!’
If the reasons are predictable then so is the fix, and each of the problems above has a practical answer.
Memory fills the gaps with guesses
Remembering to record is a job in itself
The effort is today and the payoff is later
No two people file the same way
Busy days are when the records are put on the backburner
People can’t prove when the data was written
Record the result at the fitting or the board, while the electrician is standing in front of it
Make the record part of the test, and schedule the next test so nobody has to remember it is due
Make the entry quicker than writing it out by hand or typing, and let the owner see it straight away
Attach every result to the asset it belongs to, so there is nothing to file
Ask for the minimum, with mandatory fields in place of blank lines
Date and time stamp every entry and keep the history
This is what we set out to build with Know Your Asset. It replaces the paper logbooks and spreadsheets for emergency lights, RCD testing, appliance testing and thermal imaging with one asset register, and the results are available to every approved stakeholder in real time, the very second the testing electrician has pressed the submit button and well before they have left site.
A word of warning though. There are some good work management systems out there that will store compliance records, but if recording a test takes the electrician longer than using a pen, the pen will win and you are back to relying on memory.
Even if the recording is done right, consider the time it still takes in the office to extract this information and format it into a report so that it is client ready.
Looking back at those 2,000 sites, having the test results in front of me without the need to chase would have saved an enormous amount of time, and given everyone involved (myself included) peace of mind that the sites were safe. If your logbooks have gaps, it is fair to say your people aren’t necessarily to blame. Based on research into how the brain works, the system is asking too much of them.
‘PEOPLE AREN’T BAD AT RECORD KEEPING – THEIR BRAINS WERE NEVER DESIGNED FOR IT’
- Bartlett, F. C. (1932). Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology. Cambridge University Press.
- Loftus, E. F. and Palmer, J. C. (1974). Reconstruction of automobile destruction. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 13(5).
- Dismukes, R. K. (2012). Prospective memory in workplace and everyday situations. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 21(4).
- Pan American Health Organization (2009). Safe surgery checklist drops deaths and complications by one third, reporting the WHO study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
- Zipf, G. K. (1949). Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort. Addison-Wesley.
- Rosch, E. (1975). Cognitive representations of semantic categories. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 104(3).
- Whittaker, S., Matthews, T., Cerruti, J., Badenes, H. and Tang, J. (2011). Am I wasting my time organizing email? A study of email refinding. CHI 2011.
- Sheeran, P. and Webb, T. L. (2016). The intention-behavior gap. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 10(9).
- Proto-cuneiform, Wikipedia, and Spar, I. (2004). The Origins of Writing. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
If you would like to see how Know Your Asset works, get in touch at www.knowyourasset.com.au.
