Jan 17, 2023
Categorized under: Improvement Strategy, Safe Decision Making™ Articles
Recent studies have made something new and exciting clear: The central theme, the through-line most useful to SIF prevention, is all about decision making for safety. Yes, reducing exposure to risk and improving the culture are crucially important. But how do leaders at different organizational levels influence those things most effectively?
Sep 13, 2022
Categorized under: Improvement Strategy
Continuous Improvement Through Meaningful Safety Conversations and Strategic Risk Reduction In the first article of this series, we explained the importance of safety leadership to initiate and drive safety improvement. This approach not only prevents fatalities but also creates the kind of culture that lifts business performance. In our experience, starting at the top is the best and fastest way to build and develop the desired culture. On this journey, there are two continuous improvement mechanisms that leaders should establish and get involved in themselves: Meaningful Safety Conversations surface information about risk, while Strategic Risk Reduction invokes collaborative problem solving to address difficult...
Aug 29, 2022
Categorized under: Safety Leadership
Why Your Safety Dashboard Deserves Executive Attention On the day of his retirement, the head of EHS at a large, global manufacturing company sent a note filled with advice for his friends and colleagues. This note summed up his decades-long experience. The first item on this list was “Stop the Spitting Contest,” or something to that effect. He wrote about a Vice President from his early career who had regular safety scorecard reviews with his CEO. Unfortunately, the exercise amounted to little more than a ‘spitting contest’ among the VPs, a contest nobody wanted to lose. A great deal of...
Jun 3, 2022
Categorized under: Improvement Strategy
As a business leader, how would you approach a major change in business strategy? Would you delegate the topic to a functional department to create some tactical activities and implement them? Or would you discuss and align across senior leadership on vision and objectives and develop a strategy together? Probably the latter. How would you then lead the implementation of the change? Would you rather focus on key issues or on general items? Working with companies to prevent workplace injuries, we learned that safety improvement works the exact same way. Moreover, safety is the ideal topic to build relationships across...
Aug 13, 2020
Categorized under: Behavior-Based Safety, Safe Decision Making™ Articles
Whether sitting at the local, regional, or company-wide levels of your organization, leaders who want to develop and sustain high levels of reliability around the Covid-19 safeguards need to do these four things.
Aug 13, 2020
Categorized under: Behavior-Based Safety, Safe Decision Making™ Articles
Here's a 5-step method for an ABC analysis, with an example. Step 1 Pinpoint a single action that you want to change. Be extremely specific. Think of a specific person, at a specific point in time, in a specific situation. Step 2 Identify as many antecedents that were present in that specific situation. Antecedents are signals, events, and cues that triggered the person to do what they did. Reminders, email, conversations, signs, training and rules are all common attempts to trigger behavior in organizations. Step 3 Identify as many consequences that were in play in that specific situation. A consequence...
Jun 11, 2020
Categorized under: Behavior-Based Safety, Safe Decision Making™ Articles, Safety Culture, Safety Leadership, Serious Injuries & Fatalities
Long before COVID-19 upended life as we know it, there were organizations demonstrating exceptional safety leadership. We are proud to have worked with countless safety professionals and leaders, from small companies and major global organizations alike, who ‘Get It’ when it comes to safety. We even wrote a book about what distinguishes a leader who is very successful in safety from one who struggles, called the 7 Insights into Safety Leadership[1]. Then came COVID -19 which threatened us all and changed everything. Every leader and every worker, in every company we knew, turned their full attention to maintaining business continuity,...
May 22, 2020
Categorized under: Safe Decision Making™ Articles
Most of the time leaders make decisions easily and quickly. The situation presents itself and I know what to do. Or I take action more or less automatically, without thinking much about it. But important, sometimes pivotal decisions also present themselves with uncertainty. COVID-19 has given us plenty of these. Is Mary the best person for the job or John? Under budget pressure should we defer maintenance or bite the bullet? Are the COVID-19 protocols we’ve developed as we return to the workplace sufficient in themselves and will they be followed? What data should we monitor to know if employees...
Apr 23, 2020
Categorized under: Behavior-Based Safety, Safe Decision Making™ Articles
Within the network of causal factors underlying incident causation are two points of intersection: the safety related decisions that are made, and the safe behaviors performed. This applies across levels, from the board of directors to the front-line worker, but the dynamics change depending on level and role. In order to craft and execute optimal SIF prevention strategies, including COVID-19, our leaders need to understand the dynamic relationship between decision making and behavior, at all levels.
Apr 21, 2020
Categorized under: Improvement Strategy, Safety Culture, Serious Injuries & Fatalities
Overnight, the COVID-19 pandemic has greatly disrupted the balance of every organization’s capability and complexity pushing them to the left. Complexity has increased exponentially as companies are faced with never seen before dangers. Current capability to fully address the challenge is lacking…
