Improvement Strategy

Decision Making for Safety: Part 2

Categorized under: Improvement Strategy, Safe Decision Making™ Articles, Safety Leadership

Tagged as: Organizational Safety, SIF prevention, Thomas Krause

Decision Making for Safety: Part 2 Organizational Improvement Strategies Introduction In the first part of this series, we shared findings from our research on organizational decision making. We are learning more and more about the opportunities leaders have to impact serious injuries and fatalities (SIF). This article explores some of the most significant situations and types of decisions where these opportunities arise. It also presents a new perspective on incident causation with important implications for improvement strategies aimed at SIF prevention. Let’s examine one of the publicly available cases from the study of over 600 decisions leading up to 60 life-altering...

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Decision Making for Safety: Part 1

Categorized under: Improvement Strategy, Safe Decision Making™ Articles, Safety Leadership

Tagged as: Innovation, safe decisions, SIF prevention, Thomas Krause

Decision Making for Safety: Part 1 New Research and Implications for SIF Prevention Introduction The notion that leadership matters to organizational safety is intuitive for most people. Over the years, we have accumulated a thorough understanding of certain aspects of safety leadership, what excellence looks like, and how that leads to safety improvement. Countless books have been written, leadership assessments have been developed, and organizations have entire programs dedicated to developing the safety leadership skills of their employees. Despite this progress, safe decision making is an aspect of leadership that has not received enough attention. Until recently, we hadn’t recognized...

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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...

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How Safety Improvement Works Part 2

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...

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How Safety Improvement Works

Categorized under: Improvement Strategy

Tagged as: Safety Leadership, SIF prevention

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...

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The COVID-19 Challenge — When Complexity Overcomes Capability

Categorized under: Improvement Strategy, Safety Culture, Serious Injuries & Fatalities

Tagged as: Insight 4

In my nearly 40 years of Supply Chain Management I have seen and managed plants and operations with considerably different performance levels.  Some struggled to deliver the basics while others were able to tackle just about any challenge and excel.  This pattern was evident in every company I worked for, regardless of the industry, technology or product line.  Over time, I began to appreciate the need to better understand an operation’s capability, complexity and culture.  Fully understanding each of these three critical components is the key to assessing the current state and essential to improving performance.  Performance excellence is achieved...

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The Five Rs of Effective Leadership for COVID-19 Prevention

Categorized under: Improvement Strategy

As a nation, we are great at responding to catastrophic events: we have systems in place that allow us to react to large- and small-scale incidents and near misses.  In an event’s aftermath, leaders will typically attempt to learn as much as they can about how, why, and lessons learned in an effort to prevent future occurrences with like and similar potential.  With COVID-19, prevention requires ongoing learning by keeping up with a variety of sources of data and expertise.  Having a prevention plan in place for your organization is probably already done, but how has your actual COVID-19 response...

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Developing a Safety Improvement Strategy: Part 3

Categorized under: Improvement Strategy

Tagged as: Thomas Krause

Introduction In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, we laid out the reasons for having a written Safety Improvement Strategy, why an early objective is likely to be to improve the organizational and safety culture, and how to approach the measurement aspect. In this section, we’ll finish with objectives and start on the next part: designing interventions. Set the Right Objective If you think we’re right about the crucial importance of safety leadership (Insight 3 in our book, 7 Insights into Safety Leadership), then you’ll want an objective to address it. Something simple like, “Improve and Sustain Safety...

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Developing a Safety Improvement Strategy: Part 2

Categorized under: Improvement Strategy, Safety Leadership

Tagged as: safety management

In Part 1 of this series, we talked about the importance of having a carefully planned strategy for how your organization will approach safety improvement. We pointed out that many great organizations who are serious about safety improvement, surprisingly, don’t have a coherent, over-arching Safety Improvement Strategy. Here we go on to Part 2: What should your improvement strategy for safety look like and how do you prepare yourself and your organization for successful execution of the strategy? Approach answering these questions with some caution. It would be easy to inadvertently undermine your objective by getting this off your plate...

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What Is a Safety Improvement Strategy: Part 1

Categorized under: Improvement Strategy, Safe Decision Making™ Articles, Safety Leadership

Tagged as: Behavior, SIF prevention, Strategy

What Is a Safety Improvement Strategy and Why Do you Need One? It always surprises me when I see leading organizations who value safety lacking a comprehensive strategy to attain their objectives. The situation is usually something like this: “We are doing a lot to improve safety performance. Our leaders are serious about preventing Serious Injuries and Fatalities, and (we think) we’ve done the things thought leaders have recommended. We’re doing a long list of things aimed at safety performance improvement in general, in fact, our people sometimes tell us they suffer from ‘initiative fatigue’. In spite of all this...

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