Alive and Well at the End of the Day, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER 6FOLLOWING ALL THE RULES … ALL THE TIME

What part of the word stop do you not understand?

—Charlie Hale

Time is the biggest challenge leaders face in managing safety performance: there’s a fixed amount of time available to take on what seems like an unlimited supply of things that needs to be done to see to it that every follower goes home alive and well at the end of every day. Finding time is the leader’s problem. Noncompliance is a problem leaders have with their followers. Fully understood, noncompliance might well be second on the list of toughest safety challenges leaders face.

As to the significance of the compliance challenge, consider the level of safety performance that would be achieved were everyone to follow all the rules all the time. Not to just tick the box, but to fully and faithfully execute each and every safety requirement—policy, procedure, program, standard. If that were to happen, an operation might not be injury free—not every injury is caused by someone’s failure to comply—but the goal of zero harm would likely be within reach.

More importantly, the odds of a major event occurring that would cause significant harm—serious or fatal injury to one or more—would likely be very low. That’s because in the twenty‐first century most serious hazards—“life critical” as they are sometimes referred to—are well recognized and managed by procedures such as confined space entry, equipment isolation, and elevated work. If there’s a serious incident, the ...