Safety Management System

In our profession, we live and sadly die by rules.  Whether they are government regulations or company rules, unfortunately, our profession and our approach to safety were based on compliance with these rules.  Luckily, by the time I came around in the early 1990s, we saw a serious shift in the chemical process industry with…...

A professional life lesson in our safety profession, from Dr. E Scott Geller…   Dance with those who want to dance!   Probably the best bit of advice I have ever received from a mentor. Some folks are not on board with real safety management principles; most of the time, we know who is with…...

In almost all of the accident investigations I have been asked to participate in, the local management team was very quick to blame “active failures”.  This almost always involves some blame being placed on the human; after all, they were directly involved, and had they “not made the mistakes,” the accident would not have occurred. …...

I have been preaching one simple approach to safety management my entire career after having learned it from the master himself… Claude Bloom.  BALANCE is the KEY.  There is no one magical approach to managing safety in the workplace.  These days the big catchphrases are HOP and Psychological Safety.  I am a believer in both…...

As one of my favorite authors said in his book “Risk Makes Sense”… Remember that the biggest danger in risk assessment is not the threat itself but the mind space of the person who overlooks, underestimates, ignores, or is perhaps deluded in their assessment of that risk.Dr. Robert Long, Risk Makes Sense If you have…...

The three C’s of Behaviors In full disclosure, I am not a behavior specialist or a psychologist, just a safety professional who has spent the last 30+ years studying human behaviors. This 3-C model attempts to demonstrate how workers go from the CONCERNED state, the first of the C’s, to the CONFIDENT state, the last…...