Sandman will give two talks at Los Alamos National Laboratory on Tuesday, (Aug. 18) that will explore the issue of risks.
The first talk, "Risk = Hazard + Outrage," is at 8:10 a.m. and is free and open to the public. The second talk, "The Other Side of Risk Communication: Alerting People to Serious Hazard," is at 10 a.m. and is for Laboratory managers. Both talks are in Los Alamos' Administration Building at Technical Area 3.
Sandman posits that the public defines risk more broadly than do risk management professionals in business, government and industry. To get a better handle on how risk is perceived, Sandman said it needs to be redefined.
He suggests that the death rate be called "hazard" by risk management professionals, and that everything else the public considers risk be called "outrage."
In his talk, he will present six strategies to help managers handle outrage. Sandman's strategies include acknowledging prior public or organizational misbehavior and current problems, giving others credit for achievements, bringing unacknowledged concerns to the surface, sharing control to improve accountability and staking out the middle rather than the extreme.
In the talk to Laboratory managers, Sandman will talk about four kinds of safety problems: unsafe policy that leads to accidents; safety training; attention to safety; and safety attitude problems that lead to unsafe practices in the workplace.
A professor of human ecology at Rutgers University, Sandman founded its Environmental Communication Research Program. He is the pre-eminent risk communication speaker and consultant and his clients include corporations that have dealt with issues ranging from oil spills to labor-management disputes.
The talks are sponsored by Los Alamos' Environment, Safety and Health Division, the Integrated Safety Management and Public Affairs offices at the Laboratory.
For more information, call Harry Otway at 7-5101.
Los Alamos National Laboratory, a multidisciplinary research institution engaged in strategic science on behalf of national security, is operated by Los Alamos National Security, LLC, a team composed of Bechtel National, the University of California, The Babcock & Wilcox Company, and the Washington Division of URS for the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration.
Los Alamos enhances national security by ensuring the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile, developing technologies to reduce threats from weapons of mass destruction, and solving problems related to energy, environment, infrastructure, health, and global security concerns.