Articles & Blogs by Filip Coumans

How Safety Improvement Works, Part 3

Categorized under: Improvement Strategy, Safe Decision Making™ Articles

Safety-Related Decision Making and Implications for Serious Injury and Fatality Prevention In the first and second article of this series, we explained the importance of safety leadership to initiate and drive safety improvement. We showed how leaders can impact safety performance through continuous improvement processes like meaningful safety conversations and strategic risk reduction. This approach not only prevents fatalities but also creates the kind of culture that transforms the business. 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...

Read More

How COVID-19 Might Kill People in Ways You Didn’t Expect

Categorized under: Other

Tagged as: Insight 7

Introduction By now, pretty much the whole world is focusing on COVID-19. Most European countries have put in place some drastic measures flatten the curve. That is to make sure that the virus spreads slower so our healthcare system does not get overwhelmed. The most widely used strategy is ‘social distancing’, a term most of us had never heard of 2 weeks ago? This includes shutting down shops, closing factories, confining people as much as possible to their homes. Every day, we are surprised about how quickly things are happening and how we are quickly adapting to the new normal....

Read More

Why Mindfulness will not Improve your Safety Performance

Categorized under: Behavior-Based Safety, Safety Leadership

Tagged as: Behavior, Insight 6

When people talk about how safety performance has improved over time, they typically focus on three phases: Technical – improvements in machine and equipment safety; Organizational – a concerted effort to improve the safety of all systems and procedures employed in the workplace; and Behavioral – a specific focus on the behaviors of frontline employees. Each of these phases was initially characterized by a marked improvement in safety performance. These improvements were then followed by the hitting of a plateau, whereby any further gains became marginal. Many safety leaders have the feeling that we have reached another plateau with the...

Read More