Safety itself is not the absence of injuries or incidents, but the attitudes, actions, behaviours, and processes that exist that assures that injuries and incidents don’t occur. Safety Starts With Me (SSWM) is a discussion of all things safety to help assure that nobody gets hurt.
SSWM - Thinking Clearly, Caring Deeply: The Two Muscles of Prevention
Safety failures are rarely caused by ignorance. In almost every serious incident, someone knew. Someone sensed risk corralling quietly near the edge of normal work. Someone had enough information to pause, question, or intervene. And yet the work proceeded. The task continued. The outcome arrived as if uninvited, though it had been scheduled all along.
The enduring question is not why people break rules, but why intelligent, experienced people continue in the presence of known risk. The honest answer is uncomfortable: prevention requires more than knowledge. It requires two disciplined capacities that must be trained, exercised, and owned—logic and empathy. One without the other is not incomplete; it is dangerous. Safety collapses not when people stop thinking, but when their thinking becomes detached from care, and when their caring loses contact with reality.
13 Jan 2026
SSWM - The Cult of the Firefighter
Organizations love firefighters. They celebrate the individual who storms into chaos, takes decisive action under pressure, and rescues the operation from imminent failure. These figures are praised in town halls, rewarded in bonuses, and elevated into informal legends. Their stories are retold as proof of grit, leadership, and resolve. Meanwhile, the quiet professional—who spent years designing systems that made catastrophe unlikely in the first place—stands off to the side, largely unnoticed. This imbalance is not harmless. It is corrosive. And it sits at the very heart of why so many organizations remain trapped in cycles of preventable failure.
6 Jan 2026
SSWM - Justice Deferred Is Safety Denied
There is a seductive appeal in the modern fashion of creative sentencing. It arrives clothed in empathy, wrapped in good intentions, and marketed as enlightened justice. Community service instead of incarceration. Training programs instead of fines. Public apologies instead of prison time. In cases involving safety-related failures—where negligence, recklessness, or willful disregard leads to serious harm or death—creative or alternative sentencing is increasingly advanced as humane, forward-thinking, and constructive. It is anything but. When used as a substitute rather than a supplement to punishment, creative sentencing is morally and ethically irresponsible. It fails the victim, undermines justice, corrodes deterrence, and ultimately erodes the moral architecture upon which safety itself depends.
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