Safety is a Metric of Management

From very early in my career with the U.S. Coast Guard, we learned to live by the credo,

“You have to go out, you don’t have to come back.”

Those experiences taught me that safety wasn’t any one “thing” or process applied to our regular plans of action. Instead, it was the outcome of all the things we did as individuals and collectively from launch to return. There was much we didn’t know and we remained keenly aware of the presence of impending failure. In looking back at those experiences, and in so many opportunities since, I’m convinced that safety emerges as a qualitative characteristic of system performance. Safety is a measure of management effectiveness from the Boardroom to the Break Room.

I know many believe that safety is a matter of following the rules or paying more attention than what was originally afforded at the time of the event. While tidy, that approach always fall short in several ways. When we consider that rules, particularly safety rules, are written in reaction to conditions of work it should become clear that rules fall short when addressing the unknown or unrecognized. We don’t know things until we do and until then, rules will only address what we know and then only to the degree the rule imagined the conditions of where the rule is applied. 

To facilitate our adaptive capacity necessary to bridge the gaps between those work as imagined and the realities of work as it's inevitably done we need a set of principles or shared values that intrinsically guide us when confronted by the unimagined or ambiguous. In my experience, the principles or what I call the “7C^D for Safety” that are common to creating and maintaining a culture of safety are described below: 

• Commitment – From the Boardroom to the Break room, the organization’s membership has an implicit responsibility for the elimination of waste, damage, loss, and yes injury, throughout the enterprise.
• Compliance – Compliance addresses the known, the obvious and the simple while representing the baseline measure of acceptable performance. 
• Compromise – It’s not a perfect world and the best of plans change. When compromise happens, and trade-offs occur, acknowledge the additional risk and communicate the compromise to allow for the acceptance or rejection of increased risk in advance of activity.
• Competence – You can’t work without it and there’s no substitute for it. What we learn today may mean the difference between survival and extinction tomorrow. Competence shows us what needs to go right while reminding us of all that can go wrong. 
• Caution – We know a lot about a lot of things and the volume of knowledge that increases every day also teaches there is much we don’t know and might never know. The unknown can be humbling and maintaining cautious pre-occupation with failure helps fuel the characteristics of resilience.
• Communication – The life’s-blood of organizational performance. The extent and expedience to which information and intent, including contrarian, are freely exchanged throughout the organization will largely determine how well the participants detect, report and learn from the contextual precursors to breakdown or disruption.
• Community – The extent to which the individuals, departments and divisions of an organization recognize their interdependence and come together toward the common goal of eliminating injury, waste, damage and loss.
• Deference – It’s an imperfect world and we’re fallible creatures trying to survive in it. extent to which the organizations membership defers to these values particularly when presented with the challenges of complexity, personality or position that facilitate or undermine the emergence of safety.

It’s important to note that the enterprise system exists to perform a specific function to fulfill a need that provides some form of return on investment to the both the shareholders and stakeholders while minimizing the risks of system function to the greatest extent possible. Maximizing profits while ensuring the survival of the organization carries with it the implicit responsibility for every member to eliminate waste, damage, loss and injury. 

If you rely on the reactive metrics of where safety wasn’t while trying to ensure its presence, my advice is to stop playing the “Whack-a-Mole” game of chasing injuries and focus your efforts on the “7C^D for Safety.” If you want to ensure your culture is one characterized as safe, or need help determining how, let me know.

Ron Butcher

[email protected]

#lifeisrisky #leadership #safetydifferently #integration #communication #psychologicalsafety #resilience #complexity