Values

Protecting the worker from harm

Leaders with the skills and ability to successfully lead the safety effort

Simple effective systems

The following reflects my beliefs concerning safety and succcess

Safety is the control of all loss

Leaders cannot manage safety from the office and responsibility for Safety cannot be delegated.

Safety is a leadership discipline and not just something else to do.

Loss and  waste impacts the success of the company. With 10% profit, a company must produce $10 of product to pay for $1 of waste.

All accidents can be prevented. I cannot create systems that target at injuring some people. We must believe and manage for zero.

The key to safety is ensuring the willing worker makes the correct safety decisions throughout the day

Everything that managers and leaders do or do not do impacts the ability of the worker to make the safe decisions.

Too often investigations stop too soon and do not identify the real causes of the incident.

Lack of training and lack of situational awareness, the reasons often listed as causes, are only symptoms and should not be considered causes. Understanding why the worker failed to work safe is the key.

Too many people keep doing the same things over and over and are surprised when nothing improves. To create change, you must change.

Once you reach a state of statistical control, it takes a significant effort to create improvement. Retraining using the same techniques is not a significant change.  Practicing a bad golf swing only allows you to do something really bad really good. It does not improve your score.

Measuring the number people injured is the worst way to measure the success of your program. Too often the improvements we celebrate and the high rates we condemn are nothing but random variations.

A target incident rate of 2.0 is just another way to say for every 100 people who work for us we will injure 2 willing workers.

Many leaders lack the skills required to create improvements in the safety systems. They constantly search for the answers, write too many rules, and start to blame others.

Safety systems are generally far to complex to be effective. Too many rules, too many policies, too much emphasis on compliance, and too much punishment of the innocent

People confuse complexity with effectiveness

The secret is the constant focus on the right things.

Culture is the expression of the beliefs of the leaders though actions. If a leader desires to change the safety culture, they must chagne their actions. Knowing what and how to change is the secret.