I am never disappointed in social media’s ability to tell me daily just how bad traditional safety practices are. I am also wondering if there is an aspect of business management that gets beat up and denounced more than safety. It seems we are never without so many new options/directions in safety, and unfortunately, many of these new options and directions claim to be the silver bullet – the sole tool we need to make safety whole.
From psychological safety to HOP, to Safety Differently, Safety 2.0, Zero Harm; heck, the list could be endless these days. But I have come to a simple conclusion:
Over my past 20 years traveling the world, I have helped organizations improve their safety performance. Maybe 2% of those organizations had an actual FUNCTIONING Safety Management System (SMS) that was FULLY INTEGRATED with the business functions (Operations, Maintenance, Engineering, etc.).
Maybe my sampling is skewed based on the types of facilities I work with. Still, these organizations range from millions to billions in sales and from hundreds of employees to hundreds of thousands of employees, and they almost all were missing a STRUCTURED, FUNCTIONING, and INTEGRATED SMS.
So, for all these academics/experts, many of whom have zero to minimal practical experience developing, implementing, and managing an SMS, I find it difficult to buy their sales pitch(s). Even their “data,” in which they claim almost everything Industrial Safety has put in place in the past 50 years, is not only “not helpful” – some even claim it has cost us lives. But I am left scratching my head and wondering…
