This will be a series of short articles designed to provide a different perspective—a paradigm shift -- in terms of how most of you think about industrial safety. And how most of you think about accidental injury causation in general. Questions you will be asked in these articles have been asked to more than three million people in 66 countries. I have personally asked the questions to more than 125,000 people at training sessions and conferences. During the past five years we’ve also collected data with audience response systems. Despite the improvement in data collection, the answers and the percentages really haven’t changed since we first started asking these questions 20 years ago.
Some of the paradigm shifts I’ll discuss are controversial or cause arguments, especially with those who accept a lot of the traditional “doctrine” about industrial safety management at face value. But if you can keep an open mind as you go through the series, you’ll have a much broader perspective on accidental injury causation, and be much better equipped to answer questions like: