
See Something. Say Something?
In this month’s Flash Paul takes a look at choice as it relates to saying something, or not, when someone is taking too much risk.
In this month’s Flash Paul takes a look at choice as it relates to saying something, or not, when someone is taking too much risk.
If you know Paul, you know he has a Wall Street Journal habit and often finds in his reading lessons that transcend finances into Managing Safety Performance. This month Paul extracts important lessons from the recent banking crisis. He provides useful insights into risk, complacency, accountability and safety. The same challenges in banking are challenges managing safety performance.
This month Paul does a deep dive into understanding hazards — what can hurt us – and hazard recognition. Actually, that is not exactly correct, he does a deep dive into understanding the failure to recognize hazards and getting to the truth about what really happened. As long as I have known him, Paul has had a fascination of trying to understand what really happened when things go wrong. He puts the “axe of truth” to the reported findings. He has done Root Cause of Root Cause investigations analyzing the findings of reports in his organization and those in the public domains. Whatever your role in your organization, understanding what he shares this month can make a difference sending people home alive and well at the end of the day.
In this month’s edition of the Flash, Paul lends some advice on where to look for hazards and some perspective about the environment around us.
This month Paul examines what happens when the right things aren’t done to make sure the hazards do no harm. He examines the case of Jacob Dean and how the decisions, not just of Jacob, led to a tragedy. There are many lessons to be learned from this case regardless of where you work or what you do that can make the difference between going home alive and well at the end of the day or not going home at all. The Case for Safety depends on doing the right thing.
This month Paul disects three similar events to examine the issue of trust. You might be surprised how he ties it all together. He provides us some very important thoughts that we all need to understand.
This month Paul brings clarity to some of the different word choices in play to explain events where something bad happened and events where nothing bad happened but could have happened. But that is not the big story. Paul takes us below the surface of the debate of terms to examine some critical things that need to be understood to prevent recurrence of an unplanned and unwanted event beginning with you need to know something happened.
This month Paul explores how we ought to determine which “old things” are important and that we ought to prepare for. He discusses the most common misunderstanding that leads us to get it wrong more often than not. There is a lot to learn from a good hard freeze that can help you back on the job.
This month Paul’s lede story is about a recent accident while working on a similar water tower. Paul dives in on the “job” hazard analysis process. There are several lessons from this accident and the JHA process that need to be understood to make sure no events occur doing the work you and your crew do.
This month Paul shares his experience around hazard recognition and lists. He explores the nature of hazard recognition challenges and leaves us with some Darn Good Advice and a suggestion for a better way.
In this months Flash, Paul shares some observations about recognizing hazards by simply sharing a photo he took. Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words.
This month Paul discusses what happened in his old company every time it looked like safety performance was declining and introduces the term “political water.” He then dives into the toughest challenges as reported by one industry and compares and contrasts that to what we have heard over the last twenty-two years across a wide range of industries around the world. It leads to a discussion of the root of all challenges and management’s first duties. He shares some very important lessons.
In this month’s Flash Paul takes a look at choice as it relates to saying something, or not, when someone is taking too much risk.
This month Paul talks about the importance of training, more importantly of knowledge, in sending people home alive and well at the end of the day. He discusses how good leaders doing Managing by Walk Around can make a difference when they show up at a class. There are some very important points he makes that make this probably the most important News he has written.
In this month’s Flash we take a look at what doing work well really means, and why understanding the definition is so important to sending everyone home Alive and Well.
This month Paul starts by examining Deming’s Plan/Do/Check/Adjust cycle and supplements the discussion with lessons from Drucker and Fayol. Paul uses the lessons as a starting point for a deep dive into the Check step as it relates to sending people home alive and well at the end of the day.
In this month’s Flash, we take a moment to appreciate the difficulty of the work done “on the farm”, and the importance of ensuring that every job ends in a way where no one could have gotten hurt.
This month’s News is authored by one of our senior consultants and teachers: Dr. Edward Aronson. Eddie, as we know him around here, is a former manufacturing executive, whose focus as a management consultant is on what I’d describe as leading from within. Or, as Eddie puts it, “Standing up for what you believe in.”
This month Gary Rivenes shares a personal story about the perception of choice, and the importance of making the right choices when it comes to safety.
This month Paul discusses two tools of leadership – Leading by Example and organization power. He makes the point that by the time anyone is promoted into a position of leadership they know about the important leadership practice of Leading by Example and while it may seem simple “there’s more to it than first meets the eye” and not always easy to do. Leading by Example is easier to understand than organization power and this month Paul does a deep dive into organization power and how not understanding it can lead to huge problems and catastrophic outcomes. He examines a case where the misunderstanding was deadly.