‘Safety is in a crisis’ is a provocative statement from John Green, Laing O’Rourke’s HSEQ director, who is on a mission to redirect safety from its current ‘broken’ state to a new paradigm – ‘safety differently’.
On 3 December Acre Frameworks hosted the second ‘safety differently’ forum, a platform for John Green, along with partner in ‘safety differently’ Sidney Dekker to further spread the word of the movement.
Safety has become inextricably linked to accidents so much so that good safety is seen purely as the absence of accidents – zero. We need to change this. We need to move from an approach that sees people as a problem to control, sees safety as the absence of negatives and we need to reduce the bureaucratic monster that has been created in safety’s name.
We need to recognise that true excellence is built upon creating conditions for success and that our people get it right most of the time and that resilient, adaptive organisations are truly safe not the ones that count things that can be counted. We need to do ‘safety differently’.
Attended by 25 senior leaders, Sidney Dekker video conferenced in and gave his overview of what ‘safety differently’ is, does and wants to become. John Green then followed further defining the compelling case for change. This was followed by Q&A and round table discussion. Global leaders from across the safety space added to the robust discussion.
‘Safety needs to return to an ethical responsibility’ was a key theme running through much of the discussions. Although the safety space has moved away from this focus, which led John Green and many others to enter the discipline in the 1970s there is no question the ‘safety differently’ approach is a key to unlocking the moral imperative once again and driving the sector forward.
One of the key challenges John Green explained when rolling out ‘safety differently’ at Laing O’Rourke in Australia was changing the mindset of the safety team. He discussed his need to recruit from alternative backgrounds, including psychology and philosophy in addition to the ‘traditional’ safety professionals and agreed that it’s the non-technical skills that are imperative to drive this forward.
Anna Keen, founder of Acre Frameworks and organiser of the ‘safety differently’ event, recently spent three years in Sydney engaging with ‘safety differently’ and recognised a need to refocus safety professional on the skill set that makes an individual effective.
“We are focused on the assessment and development of the behavioural competencies critical for success in the safety profession recognising the need to work with individuals and teams to understand how their behaviours impact performance. Qualifications might make an individual competent but in order to effective you must be able to demonstrate these behaviours.”
Hopefully, with new approaches to measuring safety professionals’ key competencies, the industry can make sure the right people are in the right roles to drive this change. This can only help to accelerate change following Sidney Dekker and John Green’s mantra that “people are the solution not the problem”.
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