Skill Beats Luck

A note from our CEO about driver training in truck fleets that’s worth sharing:

I’ve been writing about Safety, Security and Compliance lately. There is an interesting notion in trucking about the 300-30-1 rule. The idea is that if someone performs an unsafe act, 300 times nothing will happen. About 30 times, it causes a close call with very minor damage. And 1 unlucky time, it’ll cause a serious accident that results in really hurting some poor person. Or killing them.

A lot of management in the trucking industry play the odds — they just rely on luck rather than take the pro-active approach of quality training.

Reading this brought back to me the motto of the Field Artillery (where I spent 10 years): cedat fortuna peritis. It means “Skill Trumps Luck.”

How many trucking companies depend largely on “luck” to control their accident rate? A company that trains drivers twice a year? A company whose idea of training is to let older drivers tell “war stories” to drivers once a quarter? A company that picks training that costs the least or takes the least amount of time? Training isn’t mandatory, but neither is survival.