Thought Leadership

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What does it take for a computer to help us do our jobs better and enjoy our lives more? A simplified answer that doesn’t go into nano-detail is that a computer requires both hardware and software to be functional.

A common safety leader’s complaint deals with individuals who fudge the numbers – those who do not report all the injuries and incidents that occur, and those who fudge the severity and do not take incidents as recordable.

There are volumes written on effective goals and how to accomplish them. From a safety perspective, many organizations struggle immensely with setting and achieving effective safety goals that help reduce injuries.

Excessive alcohol consumption is responsible for 88,000 deaths annually and cost the United States $223.5 billion in 2006. It is often assumed that most excessive drinkers are alcohol dependent.

The last few weeks I have been focused on the difficult task of drafting and analyzing comments on the draft ISO 14001 and ISO 45001 standards. This has caused me to focus on the issue of making commitments.
 

Next week I will be conducting the activities surrounding “safety day.” As leader and as a safety practitioner I was the logical selection. The notion of me getting up in front of a group of associates and trumpeting on about safety one day a year may seem laughable to some of my more loyal readers and downright hypocritical to my devoted detractors.

What a wonderful time I had with my wife, my daughter, my awesome son-in-law and our two grandchildren for 11 days in Orlando, Florida. We, of course, did several days at Disney World and one day with my friends at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and the Kennedy Space Center.

As I was growing up, my Papa would sit me down to discuss reality, philosophies and other aspects of life. He would often pose questions that forced me to think through to a conclusion.

In 1980, Dov Zohar addressed various implications of assessing safety climate through a 40-item questionnaire in order to improve safety-related outcomes. Zohar wrote one of the first scholarly works pertaining to safety climate and I was intrigued.

Everything we “know” is retrospective. Humans have unlimited hindsight but limited foresight. This is most apparent in the preoccupation with counting injury statistics. Statistics in themselves don’t tell us the “story” of what they mean; significance is subjectively determined.