Extensive Research

From Krause Bell Group

Search for articles

Discover
Show me articles on
  • Why Safety Procedures Don’t Always Lead to Safe Behaviors

    • March 20, 2025
    For most of the last 70 years or so safety leaders have emphasized the importance of safety-related behavior. On the surface, it seems obvious that their approach is the right way to think about it. Following a safety breach, the line of questioning centers around why the incident happened. And the answer usually comes down…
    Read More
  • Getting to “Yes.” 10 Questions to Ask About your SIF Elimination Plan

    • March 10, 2025
    Eliminating serious injuries and fatalities (SIFs) in an organization is difficult and takes collaboration across all organizational levels and all work areas. A good plan makes things easier to accomplish – even if you need to flex once you start executing the work!Start building your plan by asking these 10 questions. They may appear deceptively…
    Read More
  • Chapter 4: 7 Insights into Safety Leadership

    • February 10, 2025
    Culture Sustains Performance — For Better or For WorseThis is an excerpt from Chapter 4 of Tom Krause and Kristen Bell’s book “7 Insights into Safety Leadership.”We’ve never met a leader that didn’t want a better culture for their organization. Statements like, “we need to change the culture,” are heard every day in the life…
    Read More
  • 4 Questions Board Members Should Ask About Safety Culture

    • January 6, 2025
    It was 1993 and Paul O’Neill was attending his first board meeting as a Director at one of the largest companies in the world. Just as the meeting was coming to a close, O’Neill asked, “Where is the safety report?” As the story goes, no safety report was planned but the question had profound effects. It set the company on the path to creating safety excellence and embedding safety as a cultural value. Board member influence can do that — uniquely — and it saves lives while creating business value.
    Read More
  • 5 Essential Building Blocks for Improving Organizational Culture

    • December 11, 2024
    Few leaders can honestly say they know how to create, maintain, and enhance their culture. At the same time, the success of a culture change effort depends on the degree to which leaders understand and relate their own decisions, behaviors, and thought processes to the culture itself.The most challenging part of culture change is often…
    Read More
  • CASE STUDY:  The Davis H. Elliot SIF Prevention Story

    • December 5, 2024
    Zero Fatalities, $5 Million Saved: The Power of Proactive Safety MeasuresDespite years of rigorous safety protocols and declining recordable incident rates, Davis H. Elliot faced serious injuries and fatalities that continued to haunt the company. The question wasn’t about reducing minor injuries—it was about preventing the life-altering events that were too common. This issue could…
    Read More
  • What Does The Practice Of Accountability Mean?

    • October 28, 2024
    When leaders are asked what they would like to get better at, the answer is often accountability. Usually, it’s thought to be about holding people accountable for non-performance, but the leadership practice of accountability can be so much more! Yes, it is about holding people to account, but it is also an opportunity to grow…
    Read More
  • How to Change Organizational Culture and Avoid Catastrophes

    • October 16, 2024
    Catastrophes are a risk in organizational life. From a quality issue that causes consumer fatalities and brings reputational damage to a hostile working environment leading to harassment or to employees becoming seriously or fatally injured. These things are usually a surprise to the senior-most leaders. “I knew we had some issues at that facility, but…
    Read More
  • Organizations Are Built on a Cultural Infrastructure

    • October 9, 2024
    Organizational culture has been defined in numerous ways. To some, it’s about what we as a group really value — production, quality, technical excellence, safety, diversity, growth, profit, engagement, goal attainment, and efficiency.From this perspective leaders start by understanding what they value, then develop what they think we should value. Then they develop a strategy to…
    Read More
Featured

Here you will find some of our best insights into safety leadership, culture, SIF Prevention and decision-making.

Organizational Decision Making for Safety: Part 2

When we think about the sheer numbers of decisions made by leaders the task of improving them all seems quite daunting. The study identified a subset of decisions which had the greatest impact on 60 serious and fatal events. This article outlines an improvement strategy for organizations based on the findings.

Organizational Decision Making for Safety: Part 1

The notion that leadership matters to organizational safety is intuitive for most people. Despite this understanding, safe decision making is an aspect of leadership that has not received enough attention.