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Safety Curves and Pyramids

For many years DuPont have perpetuated the myth that they are the “Worlds Safest Company” and a “world-class safety leader”. In the 1940s the company developed the safety philosophy that “all accidents are preventable”. Encouraged by their perception of success, DuPont eventually turned safety consulting, making chemicals and materials on the side. In the 1990s, …

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Safety as Avoidance

Safety as Avoidance The language of ‘error’ is unhelpful when it comes to understanding human judgment and decision making. One can assemble pyramids of ‘unsafe acts’ and ‘unsafe conditions’, fault trees of ‘active and latent failures’, maps of ‘violations’, ‘slips’ and ‘missed barriers’, sets of hazard conditions and, classify ‘omissions’, ‘organisational factors’ and ‘system failures’ …

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Subjecting and Objecting About Risk

Subjecting and Objecting About Risk Rob’s new Book: “Following-Leading in Risk” is a MUST READ if you think you already know about Leadership. CHECK IT OUT I read with amusement the constant projection of safety activities as objective. This is one of the great myths of behaviourism (and BBS), that the observer and safety expert is …

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Nonsense Curves and Pyramids

Nonsense Curves and Pyramids Safety likes nothing more than curves and pyramids, nothing so exciting as parading out the Bradley Curve or Heinrich’s Pyramid to get the troops excited about failure and loss. The Bradley Curve was created by DuPont in 1995 to try and benchmark notions of culture and performance in relationship to safety. …

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