After what seems (actually, what is) a very long time, Challenging the Safety Quo is finally published this week through Routledge. Note that this is mainly due to the couple of years it took me to get it from ‘I mostly know what I want to say’ to ‘something vaguely readable’. It is not due…
A recent photo posted on LinkedIn featured a hi-viz vest with a transparent pocket bearing the words “Why I work safe” above it. The idea is that individuals can put photographs of their family / children / cat or whoever is meaningful to them as a reminder to keep safe at work. This has resulted…
First published on Safety Differently A little while ago, I participated in a workshop for CEOs discussing health and safety matters. We did the usual workshop thing of breaking into table discussions and feeding back to the group in time-honoured fashion. It is relatively rare to bring together such a large group of influencers, so…
In August of 2015, a flooring company worker was badly burned when flammable vapour from glue he was using ignited due to another worker nearby using a blow torch. The company was subsequently prosecuted and found guilty under New Zealand legislation. What I found remarkable about this story was not the fact that the hazard…
I was halfway through writing a blog on the use of lost time injuries as a metric in safety, when David Broadbent posted one that was far better, so I abandoned it. Read David’s here. I’m not going to repeat the arguments, but at the end of the article, David poses the question of why…
In safety, we often talk about “leadership at all levels” as there are people anywhere within a business that can provide leadership. I have some general misgivings about this. Not as a philosophy, but as a practical reality. It falls under the same umbrella as “empowerment” and the oft-quoted “safety is everyone’s responsibility”. Unfortunately, while noble…
This article was first published in New Zealand in the March/April 2016 issue of Safeguard magazine. December 1984. The Union Carbide factory in Bhopal, India released a cloud of methyl isocyanate that spread across the region. The official immediate death toll was 2259. July 1998. An explosion and fire ripped through the Piper Alpha oil platform…
Safety in Numbers “What gets measured gets done.” This phrase, or some version of it, has been attributed to a number of different sources going all the way back to renaissance mathematician and astronomer Rheticus. Whatever its true age and provenance, over the last few decades it has been memetically embedded into pretty much every…
For those of you who are unfamiliar, the All Blacks is the nickname for the New Zealand rugby union team. They are (apparently) statistically the most successful team in any sport. For a small country in a far flung corner of the world, this is a source of great pride. Rugby is of huge importance…
This was first posted on Safety Differently. My grandfather was a Military Policeman in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War. My father was a Royal Marine. I remember as a child seeing a clipping of an old article in a national newspaper with a large photograph of him captioning a story of…
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