Safety Management System

Do you agree with this “safety leadership” quote?   “A system or a procedure never achieved anything, it is people being committed to implementing the system that achieves the performance needed.”   It comes from the Safety Leadership Group (SLG) of which I am a fan.

WTH?  Did Haywood just say that?  Yep – I am afraid I did and I mean it.  Now my personal actions do not reflect that belief, as I am a safety professional and I want every decision you make to be one based on YOUR SAFETY.  But as a business, safety can never be #1! 

Buzz words… oh how I have come to hate them.  In my earlier days in this profession, it was called “flavor of the month safety” as we had some catchphrase or “program” we’d implement to try and break through the “mental fog” that caused workers to work unsafely.  Then came along the “silver bullet of

From Oxford’s Dictionary… priority the fact or condition of being regarded or treated as more important. value a person’s principles or standards of behavior; one’s judgment of what is important in life.   Which do we want safety to be? 

A safety aspiration is something like… “I don’t want anyone to get hurt”   Safety goals are…

Corrective action and change management programs secure the proportionate, prioritized close-out of actions arising from monitoring, investigations, audits, and safety management system reviews. Taking from the “Five Themes for Excellence in Safety Management Systems (SMS),” we can look at a facility’s approach to its Corrective Action Plans (CAP) process through this lens of excellence and

Have you ever seen the Wizard of Oz?  It is a classic and I highly recommend it, even as an adult first-time viewer.  But the theme of the movie can relate to the safety profession.  During my internship in the summer of 1992, I worked with a great safety professional, Garth Newman.  Garth was preparing

Be careful, experience shows that most who read this will find it offensive… Meet “Ed”, he is just a maintenance worker I meet in 1994.  My first impressions of Ed were he was safe (i.e. always followed the safe work practices, always had on his PPE properly, etc.) based on my personal observations.  One day

The gaps in the defense arise for two reasons – active failures and latent conditions – occurring either singly or in diabolical combinations. They are devilish because, in some cases, the trajectory of accident liability needs only exist for a very short time, sometimes only a few seconds:

Keep in mind the following was published in 1997 in Managing the risks of organizational accidents by James Reason.  And he was not the first to say it, but he may have been the best at explaining it!  Many organizations could make substantial improvements in their safety performance if they would just start measuring the

We all have one (1) common bias, psychologists call it the “fundamental attribution error.”   The fundamental attribution error is the tendency for people to over-emphasize dispositional or personality-based explanations for behaviors observed in others while under-emphasizing situational explanations.  And we have ALL DONE IT at some point in time after an accident.  In fact,