It sometimes feels like we’ve turned safety into a branding exercise. We’ve got codes, ladders, audits, and posters shouting “Work safe or don’t work at all!” but the work isn’t safer because of it. We measure, certify, benchmark, and congratulate ourselves on our “culture score.” Meanwhile, crews are still wrestling with bad planning, missing information, and designs that make the job risky.

We don’t need another sermon about safety culture. That’s just preaching to the inverted, like in the drawing; there’s a chorus of boots in the air while the plan stays upside-down. You see, we’re quick to preach culture messages to people who are suffering from the system’s failures. We sing about values while ignoring the riff we should be playing: designing for safety, leading in complexity, and learning when things bite back (btw read Edward Tenner’s book!). You don’t fix that with a safety culture score, but by getting back to the work, seeing how people actually build, adapt, and protect each other when the plan meets the mud.

So, as Drew Rae and David Provan recently discussed on the Safety of Work podcast, maybe it is time we stop paying for another culture assessment and stop just preaching “safe behaviour”. Instead, we could fix conditions and start listening to the people holding the tools?To do this, we need leaders who can look a risky design in the eye, help kill the single-point failures, sequence the work so people don’t have to fight the plan, and treat supervision as support. - (Rant over)