10/05/2026
Drift happens to us all. Learning and improving is vital. Systems drives behaviors, so if the system needs improvement, let’s find the improvements to prevent normalization of deviation. If you see something, say something it could make a positive difference in work practices, tooling, equipment, etc.
Safety Sunday: Complacency... The Word We Use for Damn Near Everything
I’m gonna take my JL hat off for a minute this morning and put my safety man hat on.
Well... maybe not completely.
After enough years doing both, I don’t know that I can separate the two anymore. The JL in me still looks at the work like a hand. The safety guy in me just tends to ask a few more questions about why we do things the way we do.
And there’s one word we use in this industry that I think deserves a few more questions.
Complacency.
I saw somebody make the comment the other day that complacency is the number one cause of incidents in the powerline industry.
I don’t agree with that.
Not because complacency isn’t real. Hell yes, it’s real. I’ve seen it, and I’ve probably been guilty of it myself more than once over the years. You do dangerous work long enough and there’s always a chance that something that used to make the hair stand up on the back of your neck starts feeling normal.
But that ain’t the same thing as saying complacency is the cause every damn time something goes wrong.
And that’s where I think we’ve gotten lazy with the word.
Something happens and before we even know the whole story, somebody somewhere is already saying it.
“He got complacent.”
An experienced hand makes a mistake, so we call it complacency. A crew starts cutting a corner, complacency. Somebody misses something on a job briefing, complacency. A hand gets inside something he shouldn’t have been inside, complacency.
Hell, something can be done wrong on a crew for fifteen years, everybody on that crew can believe they’re doing it right, and we’ll still find a way to call that complacency after somebody gets hurt.
We’ve used the damn word so much that it’s almost become an answer all by itself.
That’s the part that bothers me.
Because when we say somebody got complacent, we’re making a pretty specific claim. We’re saying they got too comfortable, stopped respecting the hazard, knew better and quit paying attention.
Maybe they did.
But how the hell do we know?
A hand can know exactly how dangerous something is and still make a mistake. He can be tired. He can misunderstand something. He can be working with bad information or have his attention pulled somewhere else at exactly the wrong time.
He can also be following the same practice everybody around him has followed for years. Hell, he may be doing exactly what another JL taught him to do twenty years ago.
None of that automatically means he stopped respecting the hazard.
And this is where putting that safety man hat on changes the question a little bit.
The JL in me can look at something and say, “He knew better than that.”
And maybe he did.
But the safety guy in me has to ask, why did what he did make sense to him at the time?
That’s where things start getting more complicated than just saying somebody got complacent and moving the hell on.
Sometimes people just make mistakes. Sometimes the training isn’t what we think it is. Sometimes the procedure doesn’t match the actual work. Sometimes production pressure changes the way a job gets done without anybody ever saying the words, “Hurry up.”
And sometimes the work just slowly moves away from where it started.
That’s drift.
And no, I don’t mean sliding the damn bucket truck sideways into the right-of-way.
I’ve talked about this before as the normalization of deviance. Same basic conversation. Drift is just a simpler way of saying it, and it’s a term you’ll hear when we start looking at Serious Injury and Fatality data, precursors, and how work slowly moves away from the standard before somebody gets seriously hurt or killed.
The important thing about drift is that it usually doesn’t happen all at once.
Nobody shows up on Monday morning and says, “Boys, starting today we’re gonna do this s**t wrong.”
That ain’t how it happens.
Something moves a little. Maybe it saves a few minutes. Maybe it makes the job easier. Maybe somebody watched another crew do it. Maybe the procedure never really matched the way the work was being done in the first place.
So they try it, and nothing happens.
They do it again, and still nothing happens.
After a while, it isn’t even a shortcut anymore. It’s just how they do it.
Then an apprentice gets put on that crew and watches the JL do it that way. He doesn’t know anything drifted. He doesn’t know somebody changed something ten years ago. As far as he knows, that’s just how linemen do it.
Then he turns out, and a few years later he’s teaching somebody else.
Now you’ve got two generations of hands doing something a certain way and nobody involved thinks there’s anything wrong with it.
That’s the normalization of deviance.
That’s drift.
And from the outside, after something goes wrong, it can look an awful lot like complacency.
We see an experienced hand doing something he “should’ve known better” than to do, and we assume he got too comfortable. But what if he thought he was doing it right? What if his whole crew thought they were doing it right? What if they’d done it that way a thousand times and nothing ever happened?
Were they complacent?
Maybe.
Or maybe wrong had slowly become normal.
That distinction matters because you don’t fix those two things the same damn way.
If somebody truly got complacent, that’s one conversation. If a crew has drifted away from the standard over ten years, that’s another. If the training was wrong, that’s another. If the procedure doesn’t match the work, that’s another. If production pressure has quietly changed how the job gets done, there’s another one.
If we call every one of those things complacency, we don’t learn a damn thing.
We just found one word big enough to cover all the bulls**t underneath it.
And one of the things that makes this trade so unforgiving is that electricity doesn’t correct you every time you’re wrong. Neither does gravity, stored energy, traffic, suspended loads, or any of the other s**t we work around every day.
You can do something wrong today and nothing happens. Do it tomorrow and nothing happens. Do it for five years and nothing happens.
Every time nothing happens, it gets a little easier to believe what you’re doing must be okay.
That’s the trap.
We start confusing a successful outcome with doing the job right, and they ain’t always the same thing.
Sometimes nothing happened because everything was right.
Sometimes nothing happened because nothing happened.
There’s a difference.
So when something does happen, maybe we ought to slow down before we reach for that familiar word. Maybe complacency belongs in the conversation. I’m not throwing it away.
But it damn sure shouldn’t end the conversation.
Ask what changed. Ask how long it had been done that way. Ask who taught it, who watched it happen and thought it looked normal, and what everybody had been getting away with before the day it finally caught up with them.
And maybe ask the question that gets uncomfortable on both sides of the fence.
Did the hand fail the system, or did the system also fail the hand?
Sometimes the answer is both.
That doesn’t erase personal responsibility, and I don’t believe in pretending it does. We’re linemen. What we do matters. Where we put ourselves matters. Position matters. Cover matters. Distance matters. Communication matters. The way we set a job up matters.
Every hand owns his part of it.
But if one mistake by one human being is all it takes to kill somebody, then there’s probably more worth looking at than just that human being.
That’s the part we miss when we label something too damn quickly.
“He got complacent.”
Okay. Maybe he did.
Now what the hell did we actually learn?
Because if all we do is retrain everybody, hold another stand-down, tell people to pay more attention, and send them right back into the same conditions tomorrow morning, we didn’t fix much.
We just found a familiar word and moved on.
And that’s really my point this Safety Sunday.
We’ve damn near worn the word complacency out.
Maybe it’s part of the story. Sometimes it probably is. But don’t let it become the whole story just because it’s easy.
Look deeper. Look for the drift. Look for what slowly became normal and what everybody has walked past a hundred times because nothing happened the first ninety-nine.
Keep asking why.
Because complacency might be part of the story...
but complacency isn’t an investigation.
And if that word is where we stop looking, there’s a damn good chance we stopped before we found the part that might actually keep the next Brother or Sister from getting hurt.
Be Your Brother’s Keeper.
The Truth Lives Here.
~Kevin
Lineman Bull$hit™ Academy
