Problem solving is a survival skill and what humans do everyday. Any doctor, plumber, mechanic, etc. has to be a very successful problem solver. One could say the better a person is at solving problems, the better they survive.
Executives get paid well for preventing problems or for their abilities to quickly solve them.
When I started Future Industrial Technologies (FIT) in 1992, I had just left the world of workers’ compensation and in that world, I had become frustrated. I enjoy problem-solving. The workers’ comp system certainly solves many problems.
However, surprisingly the solution to the ubiquitous problem of painful and costly back injuries is not under the purview of workers’ comp. In fact, it is not under the purview of any insurance line of business. Frankly, there is little incentive for workers’ comp insurance entities to solve this, often times, life-changing problem.
As long as premiums are allowed to increase, solving this problem is not their “problem”. Corporate America (or Canada) on the other hand, owns 100% of the costs of this problem. Increased premiums, or for the self-insured companies, the high costs of back injuries are immediately felt.
So in 1992, we started our company to PREVENT sprain/strains not to “manage” their care and costs. If a problem, any problem persists, you haven’t found the exact cause. So why have back injuries been allowed to plague 80% of our society? It was a monumental head scratcher that the cause and underlying reason for these injuries had never been found.
But that is a story for another day. What we hypothesized was that they were preventable and we set out to solve the problem that no one had successfully done before.
Spending some time in workers’ comp, I had had access to injury data. I had access to a variety of industry operations, how things are manufactured, warehoused, trucked, etc. I saw people of countless professions: police, fire, nursing, distribution, airlines, etc. use their bodies to perform their job duties.
Analysis: the process of breaking something down into parts and examining how they relate to one another.
To solve back injuries, data had be to analyzed to a point of simplicity that no one had ever done before.
The correct cause of most back injuries had to be isolated not just for corporate America, but for the benefit of mankind. No successful solution can be created without the isolation of cause! This vital and huge task was just the first part of solving back injuries.
Synthesis: the process of combining ideas or information to create a whole and understand how they relate to one another.
Analysis and synthesis are opposites.
Problem solving requires both of these concepts. Analyze to break the unwanted condition down into parts and then synthesize concepts, ideas, people, etc, for workable solutions.
You do this every day. Every homo sapiens with a beating heart does this for menial and the most serious of problems.
I must say the analysis of why back injuries occur was the easy part.
The solution required not just the study of the sciences of biomechanics, ergonomics, anatomy and stretching. That was pretty straightforward.
The key, the ultimate necessity, that turned out to be our secret sauce, was solving how to formulate the information and ultimately, how to effectively communicate our solution to the employees, themselves.
Our research with companies showed that “employees don’t listen”; that “training” didn’t work to reduce injuries. Both gross false conclusions because of ineffective training methodologies. Employees will most always listen if they perceive personal benefits.
We developed a training curriculum that in fact worked. How? We made breakthroughs in the employee training realm. Starting off with understanding the precise cause of most musculoskeletal injuries. Once this was isolated the solution had to be created for the workplace keeping in mind that “time” for training employees was expensive and scarce. So the solution had to be fast, impacting, and durable in that it had to involve employees changing their physical behaviors for the short and long term.
Now that is quite a concept!! Imagine being confronted with the task of training employees, some with not the best of morale, with a time limitation of only two hours, and getting them to experience profound realizations that would lead to THEM deciding to change how they work and live their lives off work?
You see, our company’s future depended on this outcome. We knew how to prevent back, shoulder, and other sprain/strains. Our future was linked to our ability to communicate these solutions to workers of every description in a way that they would understand, perceive personal benefit to them (and families) and then to decide to apply these techniques to their jobs and life.
We sure did learn a lot by training police officers, fire fighters, and nurses! We then trained 20,000 flight attendants for a major US airline, 15 at a time. A year later they published the results of a 63% reduction in back and neck injuries and won the top safety award in that industry. And to magnify the level of the employees’ buy-in, flight attendants work 35,000 feet in the air, away from management’s reinforcement of our principles.
Since those early days we have had similar success in most industries that require physical exertion such as warehousing, trucking, transportation, manufacturing, and on and on.
We know how to prevent injuries to people because we found that people don’t like or want pain! And we know what and how to teach life changing principles that every human on earth should know!
Let us help you prevent painful injuries while you experience a tremendous return on your Backsafe® investment. Win win is a great thing! Call us (1-800-775-2225) to discuss your situation. We are very good problem solvers!
Dennis Downing
Future Industrial Technologies, Inc.
dennis@backsafe.com
1-800-775-2225
Prevent Tomorrow’s Injuries Today™!
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