More Prediction and Control will not Break our Flat-line Safety Results

All of these words are very useful in leading and managing people.

Again, Safety Management is critical. Management brings credibility to Leadership, but Management without Leadership is bureaucratic and static, leading to stifling and wasteful execution.

Again, in safety, we are currently over-managed and under-led. As a result, we fall in the trap of using the language and means of Management to work our way out of our current safety predicaments.

Companies that have enjoyed great safety progress and are operating in largely safe conditions will not keep more people safe and prevent more incidents through more Safety Management alone.

Safety and, more specifically, safety improvement needs Leadership commensurate with (and as) an organizing precedent towards Safety Management.

For example:

Laing O’Rourke is a very large global engineering and construction company. Recently, their site manager on one of the largest construction sites in Western Australia presented a Root Cause Analysis (RCA) of a recent occurrence to more than 100 of his industry peers.

But it was not an RCA of an incident.

It was a team-based, “5-Why” approach to a large concrete pour—one successfully executed without any injuries or incidents. Done with the rigor of a serious incident RCA, it explored, at multiple levels, why the pour was successful and incident-free.

The RCA team then passed what they learned on to the teams conducting the next large pour.

The manager concluded his talk by distributing Laing O’Rourke corporate safety brochures, which listed the following new principles:

“Workers are not the problem, they are the solution.

Safety is not just the absence of harm—it is the presence of positives.”

Major resource companies executing Australia-based capital projects, marine operations, drilling on and offshore, etc., have been plagued by serious OSHA and process incidents that appear to result from bad behavior or poor management. To flip those notions on their head in front of a large group, then introduce a new way of working is attention-getting to say the least.

Is Laing O’Rourke’s specific process THE answer? No.

One could argue with some of their wording and quibble over the application of the RCA "5-Why" approach, but to do so in the face of this progress would be a grave mistake in my view—pun intended.

All arguments aside, the fact that a major contractor was willing to take on new territory with the principles that put workers at the forefront of success, then explore that success with the rigor with which we previously only explored incidents: what a breath of fresh air!

Congratulations to the company and Safety Leadership of Laing O’Rourke. They are managing Safety Differently, and are on a journey of change, inspiration, robust worker engagement and so much more.

This will lead far beyond behaviorism.

Thanks for reading. More to come in my next blogs—including additional examples and further exploration of Safety Leadership.

Please join the conversation. I welcome and will respond to your comments!