The Future of Safety Isn't More Safety

Today's episode is all about the future of safety isn't more safety.

Scandalous, I know.

So the future, it's not about more procedures.

It isn't more forms.

It isn't another campaign.

And I think the sooner that we understand that and lean into the future of safety is understanding organisations and how they work and how they actually operate.

I definitely see safety becoming integrated into business.

I reflect on the Hunter Safety Awards and the submissions that were in there, and I think the award submissions really, not only increasingly, but really loudly, were showing safety is linked to operations, safety is linked to productivity, it's linked to culture, and it's linked to leadership.

The best organizations are no longer running safety as a separate program.

They talk the language of business, not the language of safety.

The other emerging theme that I see in this space, not only in the women in safety community, but as I said, from all of the submissions across the Hunter Safety Awards, is the emerging themes and the future of safety really reflecting on systems.

And I think the emerging themes that I've spotted is definitely critical controls, understanding them, applying them, monitoring them and putting that assurance in place that the things that we're saying are critical controls are indeed critical.

And I know in the women in safety space, we've had a lot of conversations about that over the last couple of months.

And it definitely seems to be a trend when we, you know, have hopped between different topics.

I feel like critical control still comes up.

Learning from incidents, I think, will forever be an interesting topic and one that we could definitely talk about for a long time.

But I think the ability to actually learn from an incident and how we do that, not how we use a framework, is absolutely going to be critical as we move forward.

Operational learning.

So how do we actually reflect on how an organization works? How do we learn what improvements? What's the change case? How do we implement change? And then the other theme is very much around human and organizational performance.

And I find that one really interesting because as an ex-HR junkie, you know, human performance and organizational performance and how they're intertwined and how and why people show up to their Monday to Friday, 9 to 5, that for me has always been such an interesting topic.

And I think the way that we...

Reflect on that and move beyond the who made the mistakes, why did that happen to that thing, and more reflecting on the systems piece of what conditions allowed a particular process to happen, good or bad, right? How do we learn from it? And I think we get so hell bent on learning from what went wrong.

And I always say in the Hunter Safety Awards space, when I went to university, we learned so much about, you know, things like Piper Alpha, Apollo and, you know, learning from what went wrong.

i think there's such an opportunity to reflect on what went right so how many oil rigs have successfully you know operated without such a catastrophic event and what were the conditions that allowed that success to thrive similarly in in any organization We do deep dives on these investigations, but do we deep dive on a process that went or a project that went really well and go, let's share that learning? You know, we've got a safety alert for when it went bad, but what's the safety alert for when it went well? And for me, you know, this concept of critical controls, learning from incidents, operational learning, human and organisational performance is really tied into the future of what conditions allowed that to thrive, to succeed, to, you know, if there was an incident, what conditions allowed it to be inevitable, I guess.

I also think when we think about the next generation of leaders in this space, the people that are succeeding, and again, I reflect on a few different insight reports, the Hunter Awards and the conversations happening in the women in safety space, the people succeeding and thriving are those that operate collaboratively.