Challenging the Safety Quo

Safety is broken. The people who are responsible for helping you stay safe should be at the top of your Christmas card list, but all too often they are despised, ridiculed and ignored.

But safety management is beginning to be challenged. Businesses have begun to realise that what they have been doing is no longer providing any additional value.

The same issues are repeatedly raised by corporate leadership:

• How do we get our workforce engaged in safety?
• How do we improve safety systems to gain commitment from all employees?
• How do we improve safety understanding to make the case for change?
• How do we embed safety as an integral part of culture in an environment of ongoing change and cost pressure?

Challenging the Safety Quo makes the case for change based on stagnating performance, identifies areas where there are problems and proposes alternative ways to progress. Provocative but practical, it outlines the business benefits to be gained from putting in place the right approaches to managing safety, although not in the way traditionally presented by most safety managers.

This book translates theory into practice; putting an accessible, practical and usable spin on cutting-edge thinking in safety.

Part 1 Introduction

1 The Problem

2 The Cast List

3 The Maturity Relevance

4 The Paradigm Shift

Part 1 Summary

Part 2 Truths, Half-truths and Downright Myths

5 The Triangular Fallacy

6 The Priority Confusion

7 The Benefit Façade

8 The Number Crunch

9 The Measurement Folly

10 The Communication Gap

11 The Zero Paradox

12 The Worker Implication

13 The Safety Separation

14 The Systemectomy

15 The Miscellany

Part 2 Summary

Part 3 Your Context

16 The Bespoke Approach

17 The Leadership Bus

18 The Leadership Attribution

19 The Culture Cascade

20 The System Alignment

21 The People Postulation

22 The Future Evolution

23 The Highlights

24 The Resistance

Appendices

Index

Craig Marriott is a senior safety professional with over 25 years’ experience managing safety in high-hazard industries. From nuclear submarines and highly radioactive waste, to high-pressure gas pipelines and oil rigs, he has written safety cases and managed safety for some of the world’s most hazardous operations.Craig specializes in providing safety leadership advice to organisations across the world and has worked with companies in the US, Canada, Europe, Middle East and Asia Pacific.