Tag: Safety
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Slow Down, Save Lives
This quote was a favorite safety message of an old mentor of mine. We used to have to publish a weekly safety message to all the drivers, and we often used that space to remind everyone to slow down. Somewhere along the way, he coined this phrase, and it stuck.
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The Original
I honestly don’t recall where I cribbed this quote from. The “Absence of Accidents” part appears in a few different books and sources. Each author tends to define the “presence” part a few different ways. This was one of the first quotes I put on the board, appearing early in 2020. Since that time, I…
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What are you looking for?
When investigating accidents and failures, professionals seek to find cause. This is a different concept than finding fault. Causes are factual, faults are personal. Exercising the separation between these two items is critical to creating progress. Good leaders avoid playing the blame game, and even when individuals have a direct action in a root cause,…
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Cloudy with a chance of wrong.
Humans are emotional creatures. When something doesn’t work, it’s normal to react. We can be disappointed, angry, shameful, prideful. We put effort into things, and we want to succeed. There’s like four-thousand different inspirational quotes about dealing with failures. All sorts of successful people will gladly tell you about all the times they weren’t. But…
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It is the start, not the end.
This quote comes from the book The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error by Sidney Dekker. In it, Dekker explores the “bad apple theory”, whereby our operations and SOP’s are inherently safe except for those few unreliable people working within it. Dekker questions the idea that concluding “human error” is the end of a safety…