The term “near miss” was coined by J.T. MacCurdy in a book called The Structure of Morale. He was a Canadian psychiatrist describing how a population subject to bombing, like the London Blitz, comprise three groups of people. 1 – the people killed, 2 – the near misses, and 3 – the remote misses. The near misses survive but are deeply impressed or traumatised by the experience psychologically. They aren’t injured but they’ve witnessed destruction first hand and experienced the horrors. The remote misses are those people who hear the bombs exploding and the sirens wailing but they aren’t caught up in the bombing event itself – it’s in the next street or further away. This group of people respond in the completely opposite way to the near-misses. MacCurdy describes their experience as “a feeling of excitement with a flavour of invulnerability.” The more times this latter group are exposed to remote misses, the more invincible they believe themselves to be.
It’s curious that we’ve adopted the term near misses for a category of safety events in the process industries. These are unplanned events that have the potential to cause, but do not actually result in harm to humans, or damage to the environment or equipment. But what of the majority of us – the people on site, but particularly engineers and managers working remotely from where the events occur? Are these events near misses, or are they in actual fact experienced as remote misses? And if the latter, what effect does this have on the organisation at large in how it thinks about its vulnerability to one of these events becoming much more serious?