Next week, I'm stepping into a meeting that has the potential to affect the way we measure safety in the Air Force. If it works, it may bring significant cultural change. Instead of chasing how many accidents we've had 💥lagging indicators💥 (how most organisations have measured safety since forever), it's time to be way more proactive with tools like Learning Teams and the 4Ds as reportable 💪leading indicators💪 Can't do it alone. If you guys had the opportunity to talk to people about a generational change like this, what innovative approach would you use to get after it?

If you made a decision to start changing your safety culture tomorrow, what is the first thing you would do to make a start?

Shout out to @Mark Heaton who asked for some detail about what Safety Differently is about. In fact, this is good for anyone in a safety position. @Aaron Bulbert, @Andrew Munro @Tarryn Ryan @David Ferris, @Peter Grieves @Carla Prinsloo These OPerational Learning concepts are sweeping the safety world right now. Here's a quick video I made up tonight. An extended explainer is available on my YouTube channel.

- 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).

The one move that instantly puts you ahead of 90% of safety pros is this: stop waiting for perfect data and start running a quick what almost happened huddle with your crew at the end of every single shift. Five minutes, no blame, just listen to what sucked today that could've bitten us? Most safety people chase lagging indicators and pretty spreadsheets. You chase the near-miss stories while they're still fresh, and you'll prevent the accidents everyone else is still reacting to. That's the cheat code.