"Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed." With those words, Neil Armstrong announced to Mission Control that the primary objective for their mission had been accomplished. Men from the planet earth had successfully landed on the surface of the moon. As with any successful mission, NASA created a vision, developed a strategy, and then placed enormous efforts to accomplish that strategy.
We now invite you to join us on another journey. But this mission will not take you out into space or involve the complexities of a rocket launch. Instead, we will step behind-the-scenes within a much more familiar environment -- Disneyland®, California -- and explore their successful efforts to combat a foe that is common to us all but enormously complex in the way it touches each individual: body motion injuries.
It is the spring of 1997 and the Disneyland Resort Safety Department is huddled in a small conference room with papers, statistics, and years of first-hand knowledge all pointing to one clearly evident problem: body motion injuries are the number one source of injuries to Disneyland Cast Members and are by far the top source of workers. compensation claims costs. This is not some wild, new discovery, and that is just the problem with which this group is wrestling. Complicating the issue is the huge variety of workplace activities that contribute to the statistics sitting on the conference table before them.
Nearly 15,000 employees (or 'Cast Members' as they are called) work here. Their roles include a huge range of the types of jobs you find throughout the rest of the world (and some that you don't): preparing and serving food (from full-service meals in sit-down restaurants to burgers and snacks at quick service counters and outdoor vending carts), bussing tables, selling merchandise, working in stock rooms, handling warehouse shipping and receiving orders, cleaning and preparing hotel guest rooms, dealing with facility maintenance, performing in parades, shows, or character costumes, and scores of other jobs to handle the demands of millions of visitors each year. Each of these roles has their own unique situations. Where do you start? What do you do?
Previous "broad-based" approaches had not created the type of results the Safety team was seeking, so this strategy session was to determine a new approach. a targeted approach. The two most prominent issues being discussed were 1) where do we target? and 2) what approach will we use? The answer that this team came up with was remarkable. Eighteen months later, the Safety Department would be in another strategy session, only this time they are armed with incredibly encouraging results from the targeted area: an 85% reduction in overall claims costs and a 42% reduction in the total number of injuries from the prior year.
