The Feeling You Can't Evidence

Every HSE professional knows this one, though almost nobody writes about it.

You walk onto a job front and something's off. Nothing you could put in a report. The crew's a bit quiet. Someone answers a question slightly too fast. The housekeeping's not what it was last week. There's no breach, no finding, no photo to attach. Just a feeling that you'd struggle to defend if someone asked you to justify it.

So what do you do with that?

Raise it, and you're the bloke who stopped a job over a vibe. Sit on it, and you carry it around for the rest of the swing. Neither option is comfortable, which is why most of us do the third thing: we file it away and wait to see if it shows up again.

I'll be honest — that's been my pattern. I hear something once and I note it. Sometimes I react, and when I hear it a second time I definitely react. It's served me reasonably well, and it's also made me slower than I should have been more than once. By the time a signal repeats, the thing it was warning you about has had another week to bed in.

A recent one was an operator who'd been pulled out of the field and put on issuing permits. He wasn't happy about it and he let me know — frustrated about the role, and complaining about the line of blokes stacked up waiting on him. Nothing was wrong. Every permit was correct. But the man holding the gate on control of work was frustrated, under queue pressure, and somewhere he didn't want to be.

That's not a finding you can write up. It's just a combination worth a second look.

Why the feeling is real data

Worth saying clearly, because our industry is uncomfortable with anything that isn't a number: the feeling is pattern recognition running faster than your ability to articulate it.

High-reliability organisations research has a name for what good operators do — sensitivity to operations and preoccupation with failure: close attention to small signs of potential failure before anything breaks down. Twenty years on a job front builds a model of what normal looks like, and your gut flags a deviation from that model long before your conscious brain can name it.

The reason it matters is what happens if nobody acts. Diane Vaughan's work on the Challenger disaster gave us normalisation of deviance — where deviations repeat without consequence until they stop registering as deviations at all. That's the mechanism. Not one bad decision. A hundred small ones, each of which felt fine, until the baseline had quietly moved. NASA's own Administrator put the human cost of it plainly years later: they begged their management, and their management ignored it.

There's a related line worth pinning up: a long run without incidents tells you far less than it feels like it does. A clean scorecard and a drifting system look identical from an office.

The real bind

Here's the bind, and it's real: if you escalate every soft signal, you burn through your credibility and management's patience in about a month. People stop taking your calls. Warning fatigue isn't just a dashboard problem — it happens to humans with reputations.

Senior people aren't always ready to hear it, either. Not because they don't care — most do — but because "I've got a feeling about the night crew" isn't something they can action, budget for, or explain upward. You're handing them something with no shape.

So do you react to everything, or wait for the second signal? Neither. That's a false choice, and it's the trap.

PACE: react every time, at the right volume

Aviation, healthcare and maritime solved this years ago with something called graded assertiveness — most commonly PACE. It's designed exactly for raising safety concerns across a power gradient without either staying silent or detonating.

Four gears:

• P — Probe. Ask a question. "How's the night crew going with the new sequence?" Costs nothing, threatens nobody, and half the time it either dissolves your concern or someone hands you the real problem unprompted.
• A — Alert. Name what you've noticed, neutrally. "Housekeeping's slipped on that front since Tuesday — worth a look." Still no accusation, but now it's on the record and it's someone else's awareness too.
• C — Challenge. Make it explicit and ask for a decision. "I think we've got a problem on that front and I'd like us to look at it before the next shift."
• E — Emergency. Stop. Unambiguous, immediate, no softening.

The reason this dissolves your dilemma: you can respond to every single soft signal — as long as you respond at the lowest gear. Probing isn't escalation. It doesn't spend your credibility or management's endurance. It's just a question.

So the answer to "when do I react?" is: every time, at P. Then let the response tell you whether to change gear. If the answer's satisfying, you've lost nothing. If it's defensive, vague, or you hear the same thing again from a different direction, you've now got your second signal — and you move up. That's the same instinct, made faster and cheaper. Probe on the first. Escalate on the second.

On management's appetite

Does management have the endurance for it? Honestly — some do, most have a limit, and that limit is a function of how you've spent your credibility to date.

Which is the strongest argument for PACE there is. A person who probes constantly and escalates rarely becomes the person management listens to immediately when they finally do escalate. That's the account you're building with every low-gear conversation you have.

The feeling you can't evidence is data — it's your experience recognising a deviation before your language catches up. Don't sit on it waiting for proof, and don't fire the loudest flare you've got. Ask a question. Today. Then let the answer tell you what gear you're in. You'll be wrong sometimes. That's the cost of being early, and it's a much cheaper cost than being right too late.

Further reading

• PACE: graded assertiveness, Psych Safety. The four gears used across aviation, healthcare and maritime.
• Normalisation of deviance, EcoOnline. How deviations stop registering as deviations.
• Amplifying weak signals, Psych Safety. Practical ways for leaders to build the channel, rather than relying on individuals being brave.

First published in The Field Note on LinkedIn.

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