Stop Reacting to Accidents You run a business. You are the one with the authority...and the accountability. You wear your passion for the best possible outcomes to work every day. When you started, maybe you were an engineer or an accountant. Your responsibility for the lives of people was limited. There seem to be no limits now. You would not be in the position you are if you did not care for both the people and the process. When you started, maybe your whole work world was numbers-based. Cool. That was your comfort zone...and it still is. Every day, you make the decisions. And you do it by the numbers. You set targets which reflect your values, measure performance against them, read the data, and make adjustments. You expect all of your team, at some level, to do the same. You have your Key Performance Indicators and can, at any moment, know if people are doing the things it takes to meet agreed upon goals. Except for safety. Somebody told you that measuring safety involved measuring injuries, measuring failures...measuring trailing indicators. Too late to make adjustments. So for you, safety is out of control. As long as you depend on incident rates, safety will always be out of control. As long as you depend on incident rates, those lives you are responsible for will always be at risk. That must feel awful. To care deeply that everybody goes home whole, and at the same time wonder if your best efforts, efforts that otherwise produce great results, are working for the safety and health of the people with their hands in the middle of it every day. The other part of this tale is that you probably run a business just like most businesses. Probably not a big business. You have to be the safety leader. There is no room in the headcount for a full time safety professional. There is small money for consulting fees. The guy your insurance company sent was just out of school. But you do have a couple of bucks to spend with me. (And I will return your calls. I care about your people and your business, too.)