Category Archives: safety

I was listening to David Woods this morning on Todd Conklin’s podcast discussing his early work on emergency response in nuclear power stations. The most effective responses occurred as operators changed their perspective based on new data as the situation progressed – i.e. they were adaptive. This included test scenarios that were deliberately designed toContinue reading “Adaptation and complexity in safety”

There has been much talk about capacity in safety over the last couple of years – even using it to define what safety is, such as ‘the capacity to deliver successful work under varying conditions’ or ‘the capacity to fail safely.’ I prefer the former to the latter. We can build capacity into our workContinue reading “What is Capacity, Anyway?”

I found the above picture on-line a few years ago (*see below for attribution). I like it because it takes the Daniel Pink autonomy, mastery, purpose recipe for motivation a bit further and puts a really stark emphasis on the outcome of whether those motivating factors are present or not. There is little that makesContinue reading “Stop making people hate their jobs”

This was a LinkedIn article from a little while ago I’m just pulling into the blog. Commenting on a recent LinkedIn post, I used pruning as a metaphor for reduction of unnecessary documentation and procedures. You cut back to remove the deadwood and encourage new growth to give an overall better crop. You may haveContinue reading “Pruning your safety system”

I get exceptionally frustrated by safety policy documents. They always seem to be an exercise in stating the obvious. A list of things we’ll do for safety (or won’t do), but often without any real reasoning as to why the company chose those particular items. Or things that are so bland, they’re worthless – “we’llContinue reading “Will AI take your safety job? Probably, unless . . .”