Today I was reading a LinkedIn post lamenting the state of health and safety management, evidenced by too many “safety stickers” on a piece of machinery.
A commenter noted that the situation was “absolute madness“, which doesn’t keep anyone safe. Much of the conversation from there was focused on whose “fault” it was and we ended up with all of the usual suspects in the firing line – insurers, lawyers, consultants and so on. Probably quite justified too.
To my mind, this issue illustrates the disconnect apparent in health and safety management between “process” and “outcome“. It seems to me that health and safety management is obsessed with process – the way that we “do” safety. This obsession means that every few years somebody reinvents the way we do safety, or the way we do parts of safety. As evidence of this you only need to think of the transition from safety culture, to safety 1, through to safety 2 and now safety differently – with god only knows what in between. On a micro level, just think how many iterations of the JHA you have seen during your working career.
What makes this more interesting is the process doesn’t really matter. How you “do” safety is not really an issue. What is important is whether you can show your process achieves the outcome it was designed for.
The table below lists a series of cases looking at the “outcome” of understanding hazards. The “processes” were all different: documented, undocumented, buddy systems, on-the-job training and so on. But even where the processes were the same this did not determine the decision – the decision was determined on whether the outcome, and understanding of hazards and risks, was achieved.
So, the question is not how fancy, new or shiny your process is. The question is whether it achieves the outcome.
My Safety Thoughts 
Absolutely agree with you in this Greg.
If I said to you that I want to implement a profit management system, profit being an outcome, you would probably think that I was crazy. And yet we talk about safety management systems, and managing safety. Safety is an outcome of a whole raft of inputs and trying to manage the result is madness.You cannot ‘do safety’ any more than you can ‘do profit’. You can make implement systems and processes, and more importantly sound leadership practices, that support intelligent and calculated risk based decision making, that will result in a range of good business outcomes with reduced harm being one of them. Language creates and reflects culture, and our language around safety causes a lot of problems