How and why, in a vacuum, are three-letter words. Add a question mark after each, and they could become the most confusing or convulsion-inducing words in the English language. It is often, not just in safety, that "how" and "why" questions can be the most difficult to answer. They usually are the kinds of questions [...]
Fred Manuele has a lot of respect for the work of Erik Hollnagel and Sidney Dekker. And why not? These two have been part of the movement in safety to stretch all our thinking when it comes to incident investigations. I have been taking you on a journey through Manuele's article which appeared in the [...]
Have you asked yourself those hard-to-answer, but necessary-to-answer-honestly questions? If you are new to this blog today, then you really should read my archive. Those of you who have been regulars here know that I essentially (without actually specifically mentioning it) gave you homework over the weekend. The goal was to help you understand the [...]
Safety officers are supposed to be preventative, not rehabilitative. Our mission is to keep our workers safe, not to fix something that was already broken. We do our best to implement and execute safety protocols and procedures whenever possible. But yeah, the truth is that incidents do occur. And when that happens, it is our [...]
In risk assessment, how you determine the risk and locate it can count as much or more than the risk itself. After all, the risk you don't know or can't figure out is usually the one that is most dangerous. And not all risks are obvious; safety officers and safety committees make their money by [...]
Risk assessment can be an artful science, or a scientific art. Or at least, it should be. I started to establish for you what risk assessment entails in the first post of this series, which is a breakdown of an interesting article by Bruce Lyon and Georgi Popov in the March 2016 issue of Professional Safety magazine. [...]
We like to think of ourselves as scientists. After all, safety officers love spreadsheets and taking down figures and expressions to represent risks and hazards in a worksite, and to track incidents with empirical values so as to try to figure out what went wrong and how to prevent the same issue from occurring in [...]
If only the headline referred to a car. Seems like it should, right? Wouldn't we all want that great Z car, and just be so excited that it gets a new model with upgraded features, maybe some leather seats, surround-sound stereo ... Wait, what? Sorry, got distracted. It's not a Z car? Oh, right. [...]
Safety is, in some way, about control. Yes, we can admit that as safety officers, we really do not like free thought when it comes to workers. We would much rather have control over every worker's motions and movements and attitudes so they are always safe and removed from any illness or injury risk. [...]
Our old friend Robert Pater is at it again. The guru of safety leadership has been one to provide great insights into developing safety leadership and safety leaders within organizations, and has been active in providing thought-provoking articles in Professional Safety magazine that explore safety leadership in a number of ways and helping us understand the [...]
