Category Archives: safety

Who doesn’t love an audit? Well, most people, actually. There are plenty of reasons to dislike audits – the biggest one being they are often a bit of a waste of time (see the great work by Ben Hutchinson discussed in this Safety of Work episode). I’m not going to go into that here, norContinue reading “Governance Series – Building Effective Assurance Programmes”

Management guru Peter Drucker once wrote that there is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all. A good strategy helps define those things that are worth doing, freeing up time and space that otherwise might be taken up with all those useless activities (you know the ones). StrategyContinue reading “Governance Series – Creating an Effective H&S Strategy”

Influence without authority is often one of the key skills sought in job descriptions for health and safety managers. We sit outside the operational management line and so have to provide advice and then work on getting that advice accepted. This seems to be unnecessarily adversarial. It’s setting the scene to say, “They’re not gonnaContinue reading “Governance Series – Influencing Boards and Executives”

Focus on critical risks, you say. That’s all good but what does it mean? And what does it look like from a governance perspective? And why do it at all? The why There are several reasons why this focus matters. Boards get swamped with information and, due to the breadth of issues they are dealingContinue reading “Governance Series – Focusing on Critical Risks”

Ah, monthly health and safety reports. Everybody’s favourite job and everybody’s favourite read. Or not. In one of my workshops, I use a real example (anonymised, obviously) of a dodgy report to get people to diagnose what is wrong with it. Which is easy because there are lots of problems to choose from. The keyContinue reading “Governance Series – Meaningful Reporting”

Our next two-day Organisational Leadership for H&S Managers will be in Auckland on 20/21 August. This is going to be an awesome session based on the super-smart and friendly people already signed up, so why not come along and join us to learn about all the stuff you need to take your performance up toContinue reading “Auckland Masterclass”

It has often struck me that, no matter how good an organisation is, how well managed their operations are, and how well-regarded their capability is, a decent auditor will always find something to fix. Similarly, an investigation almost never concludes that everything is fine as it is (I have done that in the past forContinue reading “Be a bit worse at things to get better”

Organisations seem to really struggle when they are required to manage something that has a degree of complexity or uncertainty. This is a problem. Because, of course, most of our work is complex and uncertain. As soon as you include people, you get complexity, so it is kind of hard to avoid. Like many others,Continue reading “Explaining Complexity”

Reflections on the Global Safety Innovation Summit It’s a bit soon to have properly digested everything, but I’m sitting in the airport with nothing better to do, so here goes. Let’s get all the obvious stuff out of the way that you will have probably already seen on LinkedIn and elsewhere. Yes, it was aContinue reading “Loud music, suspicious fire alarms and real people.”

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”