I want to introduce you to a crazy word. Recrudescence. Sounds like something you'd need a prescription for, right? Or maybe a villain in a sci-fi film. Probably best if you don't use it in general conversation. People might think you're a little weird. Despite the fact that no one ever uses this term, it's actually one of the most important concepts in organisational safety. I somehow managed to tie it onto my latest YouTube video. It means the return of something dangerous that you thought was gone. Not a new failure. An old one. Quietly coming back through the cracks while nobody was watching. In 2024, NASA space junk from a battery pallet, discarded from the ISS back in 2021, crashed through a family's roof in Florida. Imagine that. Having a piece of the space station crash into your lounge room. The formal investigation that followed was pretty slack, considering how big NASA is and how scary the consequences could have been. They produced 4 PowerPoint slides for the formal investigation. Four. Compare that to the post-Challenger report. The post-Columbia report. The depth, the rigour, the organisational honesty those investigations demanded. The scary thing about recrudescence isn't the event. It's the slow, invisible erosion that made the event possible. Skills fade. Standards quietly drop. Nobody decides to do less. It just becomes the norm. Until a piece of space hardware falls through someone's living room ceiling. Have you seen recrudescence happen in your own organisation, even if you didn't have a word for it at the time? Here's my example. I just watched a large company stop using a really awesome piece of programming software that had heaps of functionality, and go back to using Excel spreadsheets. The only reason they stopped using it? The contract was up for renewal, and the software company charged too much. They added one too many zeros, so the company has gone back to the 90's to try to manage a really complex system. It's a set-up for failure. Something is going to be missed.

G’day everyone! Yes, it’s been awhile since I’ve posted. It’s great to be back. I’m out in Junee this week doing some WHS training with a team of grateful, down to earth people. It’s a beautiful little town. Some of the safety concepts that we’ve brought up have met some stone walls and I’d love your advice on how to knock some of those walls down. What do you do when an organisation is overlooking some sections of the law and disregarding that people’s health as a result? This question relates to testing the hearing of your team that works in high noise zones. In order to help the team out, how would you attack it from a leadership point of view to give these teams the skills to go to their managers to query why a noise program doesn’t exist?

Hey everyone 👋 I've been off the grid for a little while, and not by choice. Work has been loud. The kind of loud where you look up and realise it's been a fortnight since you did anything that wasn't urgent. I don't dig that at all. But it happens to all of us, doesn't it? The community, the posts and the Wednesday calls have taken a back seat. And if you noticed the silence, I appreciate your patience. Even when I wasn't showing up here, I was collecting things I wanted to bring back. A few moments that made me stop and think. So I'm here now, but before I dive into any of that, I'd love to hear from you first. What's been happening? Fill in the blank: In the last two weeks, I've been busy doing__________.

When it comes to safety, we generally know what needs to be done so that we don’t get hurt or break something. Unfortunately, accidents generally surprise us. We are not aware that we have created the conditions for something serious to happen. So what happened in your world today? That’s a pretty general question so let me make it more specific. Did you have any 4Ds happen? Dumb, Different. Dangerous, Difficult When I ask these questions in the workplace, the answer I get is normally blank stares. So I expand on them. Was there something that didn’t make sense? – dumb? Was there something that was different to the way you normally do it? Was there something that presented a new hazard that you weren’t tracking - dangerous? Was there something that was more difficult than it should’ve been? These questions always generate much better conversation. So what’s your 4D for today?