I wrote about “focusing on our fundamentals” this week, which generated a lot of discussions offline amongst my friends and clients. The number 1 question asked was “What should we score in 2026?” My response was “at least 95%”. That means that in 100 LO inspections, we should have a failure rate across ALL items within each inspection of 5 out of 100.
Does anyone think this is an unreasonable expectation in 2026?
If we encounter serious issues, such as a failure to apply LOTO, that would be a showstopper, and we would investigate how that could happen in 2026.
In February of this year, we were asked to perform a detailed audit of a facility’s LO practices. The facility had 3 serious injuries and a near-fatality in just 4 years. The new PM, an old friend and client throughout his career, reached out for help when he took on this new role.
The company had taken many actions after each event, but many of us would call those actions “window dressing,” and far too much emphasis was placed on “the worker” failing in some manner. Sound familiar? So he wanted an unbiased examination of the entire LOTO program/process at his new plant.