The US election is currently stumbling towards some sort of eventual conclusion with accusations flying around based far more on existing, entrenched positions than on any set of rational observations and facts. If this sounds familiar to safety people, it may be because the whole world seems to be moving in that direction, or it…
I spend much of my professional life trying to get people to acknowledge and accept complexity – people who have spent their whole career being fed the lie that safety is simple. As if anything that involves people could ever be straightforward. The problem with treating a problem as simple is that you tend to…
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…
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…
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…
SafetyQuo.com 