The news media are consumed with critical incidents in the workplace. Before these incidents are thoroughly investigated and reported on, media outlets jump in, aiding and abetting emotional aspects that incite and seemly encourage an outpouring of negative behaviors.

Accidents in the industrial world can perpetuate similar crossings of rational and irrational challenges within a workforce. If management reacts before a thorough investigation has been completed, employee emotions can be triggered, and information for proper and advancing results may never surface.

In many ways, discussion and reaction regarding a situation can be compared to root cause analysis, a leading program used by industry to assess the reasons an accident or incident occurred. Sadly, analysis ends with "shoulda" or "coulda" results, often aimed at blaming a person or condition, and true prevention takes a back seat.

The challenge is that these "talking heads" take their facts and turn them into an emotion-filled "blame cause analysis." Media outlets try to be "the first to report" and spend so much time on what someone should or could have done to prevent the incident. None of these reporters were there at the time of the incident, but they sure know what should have been done to prevent it. In sports, this is referred to as "armchair quarterbacking."

Employees are professionals at their jobs. Having been adequately trained, their errors are expected to be limited. Giving them an active role in the problem-solving activities will not only encourage precipitating information, but will also bring forth prevention aspects from those who have immediate and hands-on experience.

Blame is a waste of time and energy. The event has occurred; it is time to find ways to make sure it does not happen again.

A question that needs to be pursued or answered is: Why did this condition exist? Answers to this question allow data related to the condition to be collected, before reacting to behavior actions.

This is not to say the behavior was inappropriate, but the factors leading to the behavior are significant. In 99.9 percent of incidents, the perpetrator did not willfully create the problem. Something occurred before hand to bring on the incident.

Creating fear of retribution will limit the generation of good and complete data. Provide the involved professionals with a change to sort out the details before imposing reactionary devised rules and regulations. Avoid emotionally charged reactions as they waste time and influence those involved to be less likely to report the whys and hows of the incident.

The event is over and is now recorded history. No amount of discussion or analysis can keep that event from happening. The goal is to find best solutions for preventing such events from happening in the future.

Many situations leave us with tragic results, but they do offer an opportunity. That opportunity is to focus on "what we can do right now" to make sure similar situations are never allowed to happen again. This makes sense since we can't go back in time or history. All we can do is learn from our experiences and hopefully never repeat events and conditions that lead to such incidents.

A lesson to be learned from incidents is that there is enough blame to go around. It's really bad that the person who, in most cases, was doing his/her job when the incident occurred bears the ultimate burden and a legacy of failure. This legacy is left behind by analysts made up of "armchair quarterbacks" and intellectual "experts" who have never put their boots on the ground, along with the "legal eagles" with their soiled mops left to clean up potential messes.

The behavior from the person conducting the final act of an incident is not the only behavior that needs to be investigated and understood. Moving away from "blame analysis" is the first step. The second step is to determine what can be done right now to prevent future occurrences.

Take those steps. If and when this is understood and implemented, prevention will be an achievable goal.