Insights
Ideas, observations and practical thinking about health, safety and human performance.
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Stop counting controls.
A bowtie with eight controls doesn't necessarily provide eight layers of protection.
Your procedure isn't the work.
The people doing the work encounter everything the procedure couldn't anticipate.
Psychosocial risk is a work design problem.
But where work itself is creating harmful exposure, support isn't enough.
Your management system doesn't manage the work.
The real question is how effectively the system supports what happens next.
Verification isn't a checklist.
A completed verification tells you that an activity occurred.
A control on paper protects no one.
A control can exist in a procedure, risk assessment and verification system and still fail when someone needs it.
Challenge the green.
When dashboards are dominated by successful verifications, the useful question isn't whether the organisation should celebrate.
Before you verify a control, define what good looks like.
Verification questions are often written too early.
People make sense.
An action can look irrational once we know how things ended.
Stop asking why they didn't follow the procedure.
It's not always the wrong question.
Most work goes right. Study that too.
People successfully navigate complexity every day.
A survey isn't a risk assessment.
It can reveal patterns, experiences and areas worth exploring.
Resilience can't redesign work.
Helping people build personal capability can be valuable.
Counting activity isn't measuring performance.
But counting activity tells us that something happened.
Closing the action isn't the same as solving the problem.
An action can be completed while the condition that created the problem remains.
Assurance should follow uncertainty.
The same assurance effort shouldn't be applied everywhere.
Browse a subject.
Critical Risk
Serious injuries and fatalities are rarely prevented by treating every risk, hazard and control as equally important.
Human Performance
Their decisions are shaped by the work, equipment, information, environment, competing goals, organisational conditions and situations they encounter.
Health & Wellbeing
It can also harm it.
Systems & Assurance
Assurance tests whether those intentions survive contact with reality.
Tell us what’s happening.
You don’t need to know which service you need. We’ll start with the problem.