The 3 Biggest Mistakes I See People Make in Safety

Fixating on individual blame over systemic context. Blaming the sharp-end worker while ignoring latent issues like inadequate training, production pressure, unclear procedures, or normalisation of deviance.

Weak safety cultures where folks hide errors due to fear of punishment, stunting learning. Fix the context driving the behaviour , and allow a safe and protected speak up culture.

Half-hearted HOP adoption, preaching error is normal but punishing it anyway. Not building psychological safety so people hide mistakes or near-misses → no learning, same traps repeat. Half-assed HOP adoption: saying error is normal but still punishing people, or slapping learning teams on top of an old blame culture without changing how leaders respond to failure.

Did you notice these are all human related threats. Changing culture to beat these threats is challenging. A safety leader has to live and breath systems based approach (SBA) in order to have a win over behavioural based safety (BBS).

This is so true it’s sad

Nah, we’re pretty good at listening to our workers.

We do a bit of both

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The 3 Biggest Mistakes I See People Make in Safety