The ideas behind the way we work, and behind everything we write.
We work with people whose job is to keep other people safe at work: on quaysides, in warehouses, on factory floors. Over time we have come to hold a small number of ideas about that job. They shape what we build, and they are the starting point for everything we publish. Here they are, plainly.
Every safety management system, whatever its name, comes down to the same thing: identify what could cause harm, put something in the way of it, and keep that something working. The hierarchy of controls, the risk assessment, the bowtie, the permit — all of them are ways of deciding what the control should be. Most of the thinking in safety has gone into that decision, and rightly so. Far less has gone into what happens next.
A control that was right in January is a line on a diagram by June unless someone has looked. Barriers get moved, routes get changed, habits drift, and none of it announces itself. The honest truth is that checking controls across a whole site, on every shift, for months, has always been too expensive to do except by sample. So it gets sampled, and the sample gets treated as the picture. We think the gap between the sample and the picture is where most of the remaining risk lives.
Incidents and near misses are lagging indicators. By the time they are counted, they describe a site that has already moved on. They matter — they are the only outcome anyone can point to — but managing by them is steering by the wake. The leading indicators are the ones that say whether the controls are holding today, and those are the ones that are hard to collect.
When near-miss reports go up, something is usually going right. People report what they believe will be acted on and not held against them. So a reporting rate says more about the culture around it than about the hazard. We would rather see more reports than fewer, and we would never build anything that made someone less likely to speak up.
Work as it is written down and work as it is actually done are never quite the same, and the difference is not usually carelessness. It is people adapting to the day they are given. Seeing that difference without judgement is the start of improving either one.
If checking is the hard part, the useful question is what would make it affordable: seeing how controls hold on a whole site, every shift, without someone standing there with a clipboard — and having what the cameras see and what people report in one place, so that neither is the only version of events. That question is the one we keep coming back to, and it is why our writing returns to the same few themes.
If any of this sounds like how you think about safety too, the articles in Insights take each idea further.