Don't drive through the rear view mirror

You don’t drive your car by looking in the rear-view mirror.

You look ahead and focus on the road in front, with regular gazes behind to ensure there is no upcoming danger from where you have just been or you haven’t clipped the wing mirror of a parked car (or worse).

Measuring safety is similar (in my opinion).

Regulators don’t care about 'where you’ve been'.

Lost Time Injury Frequency Rates (LTIFR), Total Recordable Injury Frequency Rates (TRIFR) or that you’re had zero harm for the last 6 years are irrelevant to regulatory decision making. In all my time as a WHS Regulator, I never once asked for a LTIFR or TRIFR as part of my consideration of organisational legal compliance or to determine if I would prosecute or not.

As Greg Smith perfectly summed up in his recent book, ‘Proving Safety’, (which is a bloody good read by the way), “Regulators don’t care how you do safety, they just want see that it works”. On the money Greg. That’s exactly what I looked for as a Regulator.

A large part of my consulting time is helping HOP & New View focused safety leaders overcome the issue of their executives clinging to LTIFR & TRIFR as a measure of safety success, because that’s all they’ve known, and they have a perverted sense it means they are legally compliant because a frequency rate is low or zero.

Guess what? Wrong!

It doesn’t mean you’re legally compliant. And it won’t stop you being charged.

I have prosecuted organisations and Officers working within mature and comprehensive safety systems who didn’t have an LTI for years. LTIFR’s make no difference to a Regulator’s decision to prosecute.

So, if frequency rates are not a consideration of being safe, legally compliant or prevents you being charged with an offence, why are we still obsessed with reporting them?

Let’s move forward by not looking at the past too much. Spending too much time looking into the past masks the road ahead and does not prevent us from oncoming harm or danger.

Reviewing where we have been is important. I think history can shape our future, but it is not an indicator of future success and will not prevent us from addressing oncoming danger or being prosecuted when things go wrong. And it certainly doesn’t keep the Regulator at bay.

So, please glance back to learn from where you have been but don’t spend too much time looking backwards or else you won’t see the road ahead. And certainly don’t think you’re legally bullet proof because you didn’t crash.

Keep looking forward and nudge. By nudge, I mean make small, incremental changes to your strategy to ensure you see the harm, address your response and learn from the event.

For those of us willing to take the bigger leap, consider ditching numbers and report safety as a narrative rather than metrics. Share your ongoing safety journey through a story of what you have nudged, how and what’s been learned.