Knowing my audience like I think I do, you have probably all been right on top of the recent theme of the blog which has focused a lot of time and energy on construction safety. And in many wys, rightfully so. This is not to say the construction trades haven't done enough about improving safety [...]
As we come out of the U.S. Labor Day weekend and head into the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City, I want to take this minute to thank everyone who labors every day to keep our economy moving, whether on work days, weekends or even holidays. [...]
Framing is vital to a house, vital to photos we treasure, and it's vital in virtually any area of assessment or evaluation. For most of us, it's about structure. When there is a sense of order in a process, the process not only goes more smoothly, but information can be gathered more quickly and the [...]
Near-misses can be wake-up calls. If we choose to wake up. If we instead choose to thinkk of them as just a dream, as something that could have happened, but did not, and we just count our lucky stars, we could well be missing the most instructive event to occur on our work site. Oh sure, [...]
I know what many of you think when one of these happens. "Phew! Thank goodness for that near-miss. Let's just be a little more careful. Would hate to have to fill out incident paperwork!" {Photo courtesy of Flickr user Drew's Photo Shoots via a Creative Commons license] The Missing Piece? OK, so maybe that last [...]
I know, I know. I have been conducting this latest series of posts about the two most difficult questions to get honest answers for in regards to an incident investigation, and rather than embracing the difficulty of the questions, I present ou with one of the difficult questions five times over? Am I sadistic? Well, [...]
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 [...]
