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Maybe 1% of businesses we come across are ready for something more than a fundamental approach to safety management. Most have not even given a formal and structured Safety Management System (SMS) a chance to work, or they have stripped down an already very basic SMS to nothing more than “window dressing” and then complained, “It did not work for us” after a year of trying. Somewhere along my career (I believe it all started with BBS Observation programs), we (the safety profession, encouraged by management) started to seek that “silver bullet” approach. I guess it reflects our everyday lives- we tend to seek easy paths. Just look at the pharmaceutical and wellness industries today. We seek a pill to cure our illness rather than a change to our lifestyles. So, I guess I should not be surprised by the desire to find the “silver bullet” in safety performance. But here is the dirty secret to the Infomercials and Consultants peddling their last “fixes everything with no effort” product… |
| Image Source: Muchina T.K |
Folks, there is NO EASY path to safety excellence. There is NO PILL to take to cure our ills in our attempt to manage safety. It simply boils down to developing a solid plan and then executing it. It is as simple as the PLAN→DO→CHECK→ACT model, which has existed for at least 50 years.
But this desire to try and utilize every shiny object that gets dangled in front of us MUST STOP! It is eroding our credibility as a profession and as safety professionals.
Is there room for new approaches and methodologies in managing our SMS/Safety Process? Absolutely; we must always be pushing for CONTINUOS IMPROVEMENTS. However, with that said,
