Before you dive into this, I need to set the stage... My next post — the one about how we turned Safety into a department instead of a core value — the one I intended to drop today — needs context. That post is the heart of the whole damn problem. That’s where the wheels first came off. But before we get to that mess, we need to talk about: How we drifted so far off the path in the first place. We didn’t just bureaucratize Safety… We didn’t just hand it to the wrong people… We rebranded loss prevention and risk management as “Safety,” and expected the boots to salute it like gospel. This is the prequel… the throat punch… the opening salvo... Because you can’t understand how Safety lost its soul until you understand how the suits rewrote the definition to fit their optics instead of our reality. Let’s quit pretending we don’t know what happened here... Somewhere between the bean counters, the lawyers, PR, and whatever “strategic initiative” committee was meeting in a room with catered muffins and designer coffee, somebody decided to pull off the biggest word-swap in the history of this trade: They slapped a “SAFETY” sticker on loss prevention and risk management… and expected us not to notice. They didn’t change the work. They didn’t change the culture. They just changed the label — and acted like that was leadership. And now everyone’s standing around, shocked that the field doesn’t trust a damn thing with the word Safety on it. WHAT SAFETY USED TO BE (BACK WHEN IT STILL MEANT SOMETHING) Safety used to be the old hands teaching you how not to die. Not how not to ding a truck, not how to avoid cracking a tail lamp, and sure as hell not how to protect someone’s preventable-incident KPI. IT MEANT HOW NOT TO DIE. It was blood-and-bone knowledge: • How to hear danger before you saw it. • How to shut shit down when something felt wrong. • How to pick up the guy next to you… when his knees shook. • How to walk away from a near miss with a lesson… not paperwork and punishment.

Very few times are we in the same book, same page, or wavelength. However, The more I read the more I know that wavelength I'm on and not alone. If this community is on the same book with where we need to be in this industry the more encouraged I'll become. Looking forward to more of this. Extremely similar to my Courage over Comfort series I've been writing and teaching to apprentices at the Apprenticeship. Felling Jazzed LFG!