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Category: Creating Safe Work
June 21, 2019
Telling it like it is This seems at first glance to be an odd title for a blog about safety, leadership or coaching – the stuff of my usual blogs – but please bear with me. I have spent a lot of time thinking about, and talking with leaders about how to set up workplaces …
March 25, 2019
Controlling risk – My Top 9 techniques I was re-reading one of my favourite books the other day – Controlling Risk in a Dangerous World: 30 Techniques for Operating Excellence. Written by Cpt. Jim Wetherbee, Morgan James Publishing. 2016 – and was trying to distil from it what I felt are the most important themes …
January 2, 2018
The trouble with labels – combining ‘Resilience Engineering’, ‘Standardized Work’, ‘Procedural and Practical Drift’, and ‘Human Factors / Ergonomics’ (HF/E). There are so many buzzwords in the world of ‘safety’ and the provision of safe work that it is sometimes hard to differentiate them or make sense of them – either together or as separate …
Does labeling concepts, theories and ideas really help us much in safety? Read More »
August 25, 2016
Milking stools, or any other three legged stools for that matter, are very stable when all the legs are in place and working and are held together solidly by the seat part of the stool. It falls over very quickly if any component is defective or missing. They are pretty stable though, even when the …
September 14, 2015
I am not fond of triangles to explain models, especially in the safety world. I also looked at three intersecting circles, which was better than the triangle but still not quite what I wanted. In the end I settled for the analogy of a milking stool. These three legged stools are very stable when all …
June 4, 2015
Thinking about how we think about ‘Safety II’ and the ‘New View’ in Safety before we have an incident: A good starting point for any of these sorts of conversations is thinking about our mindset with respect to safety generally. The definition of ‘Safety’ as described by Sidney Dekker in Just Culture – Balancing Safety …
April 17, 2015
Half a dozen things to think about before and during Investigations. This is designed to be used as a guide for use in investigations and also for leaders in the field. Use it as you explore what is going on that has driven a gap between Work-As-Done and Work-As-Intended. (All of the concepts below are …
October 20, 2014
How we should talk about and promote Safety Differently All of the concepts below are from the great works of Sidney Dekker, Eric Hollnagel, Todd Conklin and Daniel Kahneman. Defining safety as the presence of positive capabilities, capacities and competencies that make things go right and not as the absence of things that go wrong. …
July 8, 2014
So where is a good place to start when talking about Resilience? There are a couple of authors who will be far more eloquent in their descriptions of Resilience than I ever will be. Eric Hollnagel and Sidney Dekker both talk a lot about Resilience and I recommend them to you if you have an …
What does ‘Resilience’ mean in the safety world? Read More »
March 2, 2014
Unfortunately when we go out, there is still a tendency in many areas and by many of our leaders to focus on finding things wrong, on finding hazards that the guys and girls doing the work may have missed and more often, of looking for when people are not following the procedures and work instructions …
Murphy’s law is wrong. Everything that can go wrong usually goes right. Read More »