Paper Cuts or Fatalities?

Imagine opening a safety dashboard and seeing a sea of green. Fewer incidences, lower recordables, metrics turning in

the right direction. And on paper, this signals progress. But what if the quietest indicators, the near misses,

the small operational paper cuts, the signals that slowly disappear from reporting are actually pointing to a

deeper risk accumulating beneath the surface. Today, we’re going to be stepping into that uncomfortable space

between what gets measured and what’s truly happening on the front line. Because sometimes the absence of

incidences doesn’t always reflect safer conditions. Sometimes it simply means that the narrative being told is

incomplete. Welcome back to the Safety Brief, the

podcast where we unpack the conversations shaping the future of safety, risk, and operational performance. In today’s episode, paper

cuts or fatalities, we’re going to be diving into four key themes. the tension between leading and lagging indicators,

the overlooked predictive values of near misses, the risk behind perfectly green dashboards and vanity metrics, and the

overflowing disconnect between ESG expectations and frontline reality. Together, these conversations are

pointing toward a bigger question. What does it actually mean for safety data?

And how does that actually look? And why does transparency, context, and trust ultimately matter more than perfection?

So jumping into leading and lagging indicators, Scott, I know you probably have a lot of personal experience.

You’ve spoken about leading and lagging indicators at so many conferences. So I guess we can start off with why do you

think from your perspective these metrics still dominate leadership conversations even though they don’t

really fill the tell story? Wow. I was just thinking of your

introduction and first Monica, welcome to the new year, right? It’s a

really great time to to do this type of of podcast and I I always uh benefit

from a tremendous amount of of uh research and you never give me that time. So, it’s probably just good to

hearers speak based on his or her past experience and I certainly think this is

an excellent subject. So when I think about, you know, why organizations kind of look around safety and and measure

lagging indicators, I I think really and very honestly that lagging indicators uh

dominate because they’re very easy to measure, right? And they’re very easy to

explain to a set of of executives. And I I think you know throughout my career,

if I go back in my career 36 years ago, uh executives, plant managers,

operations leaders, they really never cared about what we would call leading indicators today. They only cared about

lagging indicators because it was very easy for them to understand those

measures because that’s how they had been leading. And it’s very easy to trickle those up to a senior executive

that reports it to their senior executive. So they just provide I think what we think is a sense of control

right. So during board meetings you know during auditing right being able to compare yourself to uh to maybe a sister

organization or maybe even uh within the industry vertical that you’re working in. Being able to compare that

information that is fairly simple to uh to get is why we kind of pin our hopes

there. I think the risk is that we want to measure failure frequency instead of

operational health. And I think that’s the big problem. Safety performance really should be evaluated by how risk

is is managed before incidents are are even occurring. And I’ll give you an

example of that very early in my career. And when I was in manufacturing,

we went nearly a year without recordable injury. and we were celebrating that

milestone. I had the plant manager asking me what we could give away. Uh we we just spent a lot of money celebrating

the fact that we worked uh almost this 12 months without a recordable injury.

At the same time, I was noticing, you know, some things happening behind the scenes. Housekeeping audits, they were

declining. Uh my machine guarding uh issues were increasing. uh supervisor

was spending less time on on the manufacturing floor. So the injury rate on one hand, it looked great, but I also

noticed that my exposure was rising. And then of course what always happens when

we take our our our eye off the ball. You know, I had a hand injury that reset

the the recordable count totally, right? But these warning signs were were really

visible for months. just no one would listen to me talk about it. So when I

think about lagging indicators, you know, while we do them, it really cause organizations have normalized that that

is the way that you judge success. Um, so, so yeah, when when I think about

this topic and and I would also say, Monica, that I’ve never been fearful of blended metrics and and I I challenge,

you know, my peers, my my colleagues that are safety practitioners, you know,

they want to go one path or they want to remain in in in another. And my push

back on them always is is that why aren’t you blending, you know, leading indicators along with your lagging

indicators? because if you do your leading work quite well, you should have a natural u u e ev evidence of what your

your lagging indicators provide, right? So I think they both go hand in hand. I agree. Actually, one step back for a

sec for the folks who are listening who are not up to speed with all this EHS terminology, can you explain the

difference between leading and lagging indicators? Yeah, lagging indicators are are things

that happen after the fact, right? So, so you’ve had a what we call a

recordable injury or or even, you know, some other type of loss. You’ve passed this threshold, right, where it’s

entered into this definition of how we define loss. So, if I was in safety, right, somebody is is injured, maybe

they’ve laced their hand, uh that’s crossed a threshold where I’ve lost something. Uh for many practitioner,

that’s a recordable injury or some type of medical response type of event. Uh, but that could be, you know, different

things. If I was in process control and and I experienced down time on on a

piece of of of equipment, well, that would pass a threshold, right? So, that would become quote a lagging indicator.

When I think about leading indicators, it’s all of the that programming that supports what you want to prevent, you

know? So, things like attending training would be a leading indicator. So participation in an observations program

would be a leading indicator. So many times we’re trying to to really judge the level of participation within the uh

within the work system to judge if it’s leading or lagging. Right. Okay. I mean I often hear people

say that our numbers are down so we must be saver. But I guess that doesn’t always feel and paint the full the full

picture. Am I correct? Well and I I think that’s correct. Right. And I I would even back up on my

response is that you know I I feel that you know what I told you is the definitive right definition of of both

of these. It waivers depending on on what organization you’re talking talking with because I I’ve noticed some of my

colleagues that claim to be using this as a leading indicator that I would define as a lagging indicator. However,

I don’t have all of that story behind that. I don’t know how they’re actually measuring some of that that information.

So you will find this perplexity of understanding defining what what leading and lagging is but it all goes back to

the organizations that are using those metrics and how they’re how they’re being used. So, uh, you know, I have

friends that have probably 20 leading, uh, metrics and I have some that have

just a few, right? So, it just depends on where that organization is, how they judge, you know, their program and what

are the things they’re actually trying to benefit from their programming. Well, that’s true. I mean, in the spirit

of tracking and trying to paint the full picture, I think near misses is actually

another valuable data point, but it’s also overlooked. So I mean in your experience are organizations actually

using nearmas reporting as an early system or is it still kind of treated like that admin afterthought?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh man this has been a discussion again for the the entire duration of of my career. Uh I I would

say probably near miss reporting is used more now than ever. However, I think

some of the the resident problems that that we’ve always had are are still there, right? So, so near miss reporting

uh what I really, you know, I even redefined this is that I called this concern reporting when I was leading my

organizations because near miss uh how do you define that is that I almost lost

my finger. So, that’s my near miss or it’s a scratch that that didn’t need medical attention but it could have is

that a near miss? So, I even changed the definition for leading my programs to

concern reporting. Uh, but any way you define this is that near miss reporting

or concern reporting, it only works when workers trust the response that they’re

going to get. And and I’ll I’ll tell you what I’ve noticed is that, you know, some of the clients that we even have in

Intellects, when they invite me to look at their system, when they invite me to consult them, I I go over to their

corrective action process, which which really houses a lot of what their near

miss reporting is, and I’ll see, you know, a thousand, I’ll see 1500, I’ll see 2,000 different near misses that

have been put into the system, and then they they just stay there they linger and when I asked that question I said

well why aren’t you removing these why aren’t you fixing these issues the response is is really the same is that

well we don’t have time or that’s expense right so there’s there’s a myriad of uh of of reasons some of them

good uh of why we didn’t do those things right so near misreporting when we ask

and many times as a frontline employee when we ask them to report it only works

works if they get a response from that report. So, they want things fixed. They want them removed from the system. And

if we’re not going to remove them, they owe they’re owed a a conversation of why they didn’t. And and that is really why

I I converted my thoughts into saying, “Well, just tell me what you’re concerned about.” And that really eased

the tension across my entire organization because they didn’t have to define what a near miss was, but they

could easily define things that they were concerned about, right? And then if I didn’t agree with them or my teams

didn’t agree with them, we could go have that conversation, right? So when we started seeing these things, one, it

opened up our our eyes to things that we didn’t consider as professionals. So those closest to the work could actually

tell us information that we didn’t know. many of them that were better right at identifying the risk that they were that

they were assuming so we could fix those things and we got you know very aggressive in doing that but even things

that we didn’t right the conversation was magical because we could share risk

understanding we could teach them basic skills right and we could respond much much differently so the first thing is

is is that absolutely near misses or concerns are early warning signals when

we think about how to prevent things from happening, but it’s only as good as

the response of the management team uh at at making sure that those those responses are effective in eliminating

and sustainably uh removing that that issue from from the work process. I

think that that when I think about near miss reporting, if it’s purely near miss reporting, serious incidents, they often

have a lot of these these visible precursors, right, in early reports. And that’s really where near near miss

reporting comes in, you know, as a very effective tool is that we can start looking at all of these near miss type

of reports and looking for trends or looking for segments of of patterns that

would indicate that we’re going to have a future problem, right, with this particular issue. And and I often, you

know, kind of think about this. I I had at one of my facilities operators had been, you know, reporting several near

misses around fork trucks and a pedestrian intersection. So, you know, I I led the paper business for quite a

long time and fork trucks and pedestrians, right? And keeping them separated was a very difficult very

difficult task. So, the the reports were being logged, but we were treating them individually, you know, so we would look

at this particular event and say, “We’ve got that problem. let’s put a barrier up and they would go on to do other work.

Months later, uh a serious incident, you know, occurred in that same area, right?

It was the same area, but the circumstances was just a little bit different. So, we reviewed the data, the

pattern was obvious. We were seeing these same type of uh of what I would say immediate causes and even some root

causes. You know, traffic flow was different, the line of sight change, the production pressure was all of them.

there were all these contributing factors. So that data was in there, you know, but we didn’t treat it as a near

miss or as a signal. So, so that’s really what opened my eyes and I I think

Monica, it’s one of the reasons that I joined intellects is that all of us have things like near miss reporting with all

of these bits of data, right? Thousands and thousands of entry points and we don’t even see right predictable

patterns in the information or the data that we see every single day. So we tend to think think of things individually

when we could be thinking of them right accumulatively. And so that’s one of the

things I I really like about working at Intellects is that we can take that data, we can massage, right? We can

marinate on that data and we can give you right what that answer is or what that prediction shows or what that

pattern may help you understand differently, right? So I think that learning right speed matters a lot more

than just report volume, you know? So I I think that that is one of the clues that that I would leave our audience

with is that learning, right? Learning what’s happening in the work process means more than just driving up this

count of near misses. And I I would also say this, Monica, is that, you know, this is going to be my podcast before

it’s over because I keep thinking things, right, to say is that there’s probably not a safety practitioner

that is that is listening that has at some time in their career been pressured to drive up near misreporting. Right?

It’s a very common, right, initiative for organizations to do. John, you’re required to put in two near misses a

month or, you know, Sally, you’re required to to fix one thing, you know, this this quarter, right? All of that

stuff is noise. And then many times you find employees just putting things in there so you’ll go away, right? So you

wind up with a lot of data that doesn’t mean anything, right? So there’s a a delicate balance of what you need,

right? And then the motivation to to drive the behavior that you’re looking for in the organizations that you lead.

Absolutely. I think when we talk about incident reporting and prevention at intellects, a lot of the feedback, and

you’ve touched on it, is that teams want more reporting and they’ll do what they have to do to get it, but they don’t

always know what to do once the volume starts coming in. And I think you did cover that perfectly. Um, so another

topic that I hear frequently is that there’s this idea of green dashboards. And for those listening who are not

familiar with what green dashboards are, it’s just an EHS term used to describe when things are going well. So there’s

no incidents, uh, we’re in the green for budget, whatever it may be. Um, but going back

to the point, everything looks perfect at a glance when you have a green dashboard. But how

do leaders tell the difference between meaningful performance and these vanity metrics? Like for example,

yeah, Steve can climb a ladder and he falls off. He didn’t die, so it’s fine. But he

severely injured himself. I mean, are there certain indicators that tend to look good but don’t actually drive safer

behaviors? What have you been? Well, of course. Yeah. I I you know, you you can think about this participation

metrics, right? Really tell this story and and I would say, you know, your your question is is quite an accurate

depiction of what we like to see, right? Especially senior leaders, what they want to see on a dashboard is that, oh,

I love I love my my dashboard green, right? Because really it it means that I

I don’t have to focus on anything. Uh but what it tells me is that probably my indicators are not challenging enough,

right? If we’re meeting everything, you know, so I always like green, right?

But I learn more from yellow and red. That’s what what uh what what means the most to me is that where do I see these

fractures within the safety process, right? Am I being too easy? But going back to your your original question

about vanity metrics, they are usually participation type of metrics. that

become active in your tracking programs. Right? So, for example, I’ll kind of

give you, you know, an example of this is that, you know, training is is one of

those leading metrics that I think probably every safety professional uses if if they do, you know, attach a

leading metric. But participation and actively learning, right, are two

totally different things. is that if I were to ask an employee to come to a uh

a knowledge sharing session on lockout tagout, they can check the box that they are there, but they could also leave

right without knowing what I was trying to teach them, right? Am I doing skill development? Am I testing them? Am I

developing quizzes to make sure that they know what to do when they leave, you know, that that room? So a vanity

metric would be oh I have this many people that attended this training session. Now what in the back of my mind

you know what I’m asking or telling myself oh I hope they learn what I was actually trying to do in that session.

So to a uh on on a dashboard I’m green right in my office I might be yellow or

red right? So green dashboards they really do had a lot of weak parts of

your system. So you really have to know what metrics you’re actively tracking

that make a difference. So for me, you know, an employee going to training,

right, I would, you know, change that metric to say this many employees or this rate, right, of test scores came

from that activity, right? So I can test, I can make sure that was meaningful. So meaningful, I think,

indicators connect to exposure reduction. If I was teaching things like energy isolation training for example, I

should see that I should see the behavior changed on the floor and I write quite a lot is that and I I was I

was thinking about some of this especially around training is that what makes right training successful? Well,

you should be able to see the behavior change on the manufacturing floor or on the construction site. There should be

some change in what you were were doing, right? What you were relaying. I I also

remember, you know, reviewing a dashboard one time where observation numbers were very very high across every

site that I had. They were very very high. And I looked at that and I said, “Oh, wow. What strong engagement.” When

I look closer, right? Most of the observations that I were seeing were

very low risk, right? And they were completed very quickly to meet these quotas that we had put in front of

everyone. So very few resulted in what I called effective you know corrective

actions. Uh so we achieved the metric right but the risk was not being reduced at all. So they had just picked what I

say cherrypicked things that uh that they could report on. So vanity metrics

I think they’re the ones that we decide that we can meet easily right and we can

make a dashboard show up. uh if you go back you know to how we look at lean manufacturing practices and Kaizen all

those kind of things right uh that that we care about and leaning process forward many of those did come from

Toyota right when we kind of look at them and there was a uh um an idea that

you should never look at a dashboard and see all green right and that really tells you that you’ve not been

challenging enough to the system and your your results are almost predictable if if you didn’t do that.

So, I’ve always tended to to lean there is that if I see all green across a dashboard, I’m going to think to myself

is that the metrics that I’m pursuing were easy to pursue and easy to have

success for. That may work for me, but it’s not taking uh risk away from my

safety work system, right? And I guess someone on your side of the business knows that green or too

green is not good. Someone like me on like say the marketing side or the admin side may look at this and say, “Wow,

this is perfect. Like we’re doing great. I have no complaints.” So for somebody in my shoes, what kind of questions

should they maybe ask um when things are feeling a little too positive?

Yeah. I I would say the number one thing is if you were to look at a dashboard, right, one, I I don’t think it’s just

you, right? I think it’s more than you. I I always try to pull two or three people together from different

perspectives. But but let’s think about this. If a safety metric, you know, what

safety metric is the organization celebrating that worries you, right? So

if if you’re somebody that’s in marketing, you see a green dashboard, you see all this green across, you know,

the the top line, it it should beg the question is what are they celebrating?

And as you look at that metric, what worries you about that celebration, right? So I I was telling you that u you

know just a few moments ago is that we’ve celebrated as organizations for

things that you know kind of rested in the back of my mind and it worried me.

For example, right the cost of of uh of incidents. you know, the cost of an

incident is, you know, getting your your your total incident rate down from this number to this number the next year. And

if you put enough pressure on the organization, you can absolutely make that that metric, you know, please the

senior leadership team because you’ll force reporting right under the water level, right? So people won’t report,

right? they’re they’re fearful of doing that and and you start messing around with, you know, psychological safety

where people don’t feel right open enough to share honestly with what

happens, right? And and we do that a lot with metrics. We we’ll set out this number and and we’ll set out this

target. We’ll we’ll make sure that everybody has communicated what that target is in the organization and then

we’ll measure right throughout the year, throughout the, you know, the month to make sure we’re meeting that target. And

we put much pressure. Reporting goes goes well basically

unreported, right? That they they fear missing an artificial target that may

not even be achievable under normal circumstances. So I I would say that I would say somebody, you know, that that

sees green across a dashboard, they should just ask questions. Is that is there something about that that really

worries you? Does that metric right encompass all of the the information or

the data that it needs to encompass and then how do you validate right engagement quality behind all of those

things that you’re seeing on that dashboard which are many times right participation metrics right how are you

validating that information is that a check at the door is that somebody with a checklist that said that so I I I

would say this it’s those questions right how do you validate that information right what are you

celebrating that worries you about that green, you know, dial. And then what are the things that you were not allowed to

measure, you know, that you think are important? Because the other side of this is that unless you’re in in my

business, right, where you’re looking at data in quite encompassing amounts of of information, you know, as you go up the

uh the organizational chain, you’re only allowed to have so certain numbers of

metrics, right? So as you look at that dashboard, is is it big enough? Is it global enough? Does it cover everything

that you need to measure to say that you’re going to be successful? So there’s a lot of that kind of stuff that

that you would want to know. And you don’t have to be a practitioner to even want to know that information, right? Is

that you know what are you celebrating that still worries you, right? How do you validate that that’s real, right?

And then are you covering all the metrics that you believe is going to give you the best success?

No, I think you raised a valid point about how it almost kind of feels like safety has moved beyond operations and

it’s more into reputation and it ties back to that point about pressure on the organization to present a certain

narrative. So, it got me thinking, how do you or what do you recommend for

companies to kind of balance that transparency with the pressure to show that we’re doing better year-over-year

but without actually putting real risk with uh keeping it all green? Yeah, I I get this question quite often,

especially from younger practitioners, right, that are are being uh maybe coached to do things a certain way. I

think as practitioners, we always have to be very adaptive. We always have to be flexible, but there should be that

stopping point where your ethics, right, and what you know about leading safety and health or environmental program

where where there’s a stop, right? And and I think it’s it’s that fine line between all of those things is that I

I’ve seen practitioners defend points right to to the to actually you know

where it it becomes right from from a senior leadership team and and you know

I look at that and I I counsel them as saying there was plenty of flexibility in how you were leading that discussion

on the the uh the answer that you actually wanted versus what you would accept. So there’s there’s plenty of

that that that goes around. But there also has to be this line of where you

will not cross, right? So if you absolutely know that we need to measure

something, right? We need to measure it, right? And and that’s all based on, you know, everything from compliance, right,

to how capable you need the workforce to be to what the behaviors that you’re trying to drive in that organization.

And then finally, how accountable you want manage management to be in making

sure that you can deliver right success as as was outlined in in your your

agreements, right, to to do your job. So there’s all these stopping points, but I I think for us as as practitioners,

there are ethics, compliance, those kind of things ring ring true of saying we will stop here and we have to have, you

know, that piece of information to go forward. No, I love that. Um, so I guess more

just to conclude everything, I love that the main message here is that consistency, it honestly matters way

more than just having that green dashboard and the perfect numbers. Um, but if incidents alone isn’t the goal,

do you have an example of what good safety data actually looks like in a more mature organization?

Yeah, I I think three things, right? One I’ve already mentioned is is mature safety data. It shows participation,

right? It shows how we’ve learned. It shows how we are controlling effectiveness, right? So those are three

things. It it it shows that behavior is changing. Right? And then finally, it

shows that my management team is being accountable for the things that I care about. Right? So, so when I think about

the data that I want, when I think about, you know, I’m controlling incidents, right? And and that’s my

objective. I don’t think that that’s true. I think when I think about it in the lens of what does the safety process

look like, not just incidents, what’s the safety process look like? There’s a lot of things that that identify that. I

I’ve always used the same four things to drive my safety process. It’s how

compliant we were and now we call those table stakes, right? We everybody has to be compliant. uh the next level of of

implementation for me is how capable my workforce is and am I giving them the

capacity to give their knowledge away. Right? So if I could do that that that

requires me to do things differently but it requires the workforce to mature in a

different way. And then if I can get people to give themselves away right then I can attach another element called

behavior right and behavior means is what do I want to see in the workforce? How do I want them to act? Right? What

what are the words that I want them to say when they’re they’re faced with a decision that compromises safety? Right?

So that’s another indicator uh of of safety maturity, not certainly not all of it. And then finally I uh that the

fourth element which really became one of the harder ones for me is working with senior leaders, right? Is can I

hold this group of senior leaders accountable for the things that for the things that I think are important in

making sure everyone goes home, you know, safe at the end of of their shift. So to me that’s what you know a mature

safety culture looks like and now I can can backward or reverse engineer this

and say well what are some of those measures right that really show that right so I can certainly do several

things right mature safety data shows participation right it shows learning it

shows control it shows a leadership team that’s doing safety walks right weekly or they’re out on the floor every single

day so there’s a myriad of of data of of data points that you can measure, but I

think you really have to understand what your management system is, what these system elements are that you care about.

I I shared four of mine and then building out a metric that measures

that, right? And then trust uh I think it shows up, right? So when I look at

all of this and think about your question, a mature safety data, it really shows that trust is showing up

because the work is happening quite consistently, right? If you’re going to measure me on behavior, right, then how

how is that graph going? Is plateauing okay for a while? Do I have fits and starts? Right? And that may be okay,

right? But what it really shows and it kind of goes all the way back to green dashboards is that strong cultures,

right, surface problems very quickly, right? So, so measuring that, right,

means that I’m going to measure a lot of things, right? and I’m going to be looking at at reflections or trends,

right, or patterns in my information to understand it as quick as I as I possibly can. Now, I I think about that,

right? And in one of my organizations, we were tracking uh very quickly, you know, hazards and and getting things

done and and they were being reported. I’d turn them around in a week. At first, all of this data uncomfortable

because the more we did, the more data we consumed, right? So employees were seeing that we were doing things so they

would give us more right and then you know it became uncomfortable because the reg the the resolution times they became

longer right so so on one hand man I’m glad these people are really reporting

things right but once they learned that I would fix the things that they reported they reported more right so

over time you know teams began competing right uh they were going after these

these hazards faster they were verifying these controls. So what I did, right, because I just couldn’t assume them all,

I started asking them. I said, can you can you get the can you help me get those things done,

right? So one success led led to an uncomfortable period led to success.

Right? So I was able to extend my safety process purely through metrics. Now I I

would say this because we both work for a technology company. Now working with EHS technology, I can see the same

patterns, but I don’t have this uncomfortable period anymore. Right now I can can focus on I can focus on

corrective action closure. I can focus on frontline reporting consistency and I

can get all that information very very quickly. And it’s one of the reasons I joined Intellects is because I had data

line everywhere, you know, and I literally had business analysts, right, as parts of my team to understand all of

these things that I just described, but I was very late in the decisions that I needed to make. And and so today, as I

kind of think about all these things that we’ve talked about, right? You can construct dashboards that reflect really

what you’re you’re wanting to do, you can put together leading and lagging metrics based on all of these

applications, right, that that you may purchase and start to use, right? So there’s a lot of things that really

helps you uh today that was not even existent, right, readily 10 years ago.

So you can do a lot of things that you’ve always wanted to do and now technology has allowed you to do them in

a very efficient way and safety performance right benefits from that.

No, I agree. Um I think the two main themes that I’m I’m hearing and you can correct me if I’m wrong. I’m speaking

more from the admin side of the business is one you need to be able to track that

data and obviously technology helps with that. But I think the main other theme

is that you need to have somebody actually responsible for that data and

putting that data into practice. So if you had to pick one, which one would you say would be more beneficial? Having

that top down leadership actually take it seriously and do something about it or having that data in the first place?

Oh my goodness, that that’s a loaded question. I I want them both. I I would tell you this and and I get really

excited when I think about mobile technology, right? We we basically have put the safety management system or the

EHS and quality management system on a mobile platform, right? So, we’ve literally put that in the hands of the

person that is willing to use it, right? And to me, the closer that I can get to

the front line and ask them to participate and partner with me through a data exchange is as far as a reach

that I really want to make today, right? So I I think about it much differently

than I did in in in further back in my career, right? Where I tried to get to

the main floor, where I tried to get to the front line, where I had paper systems and ask people to contribute to

it, right? there was a lot of of barriers to to success you know when I

was doing that. So technology for me it’s getting as much data as I can so I

can start right using technology to do those things like noticing trends or or

um you know start accumulating that that um that that data much differently that

for me right as a practitioner now to answer your other question right me

having that information allows me to produce metrics that matter the most to

a senior you know leadership team I I’m okay right with them wanting to understand lagging indicators but what I

want to do is introduce leading indicators in such a way that they value right so that’s what I want to do as a

practitioner I would also say this is that I don’t have to be exactly right in what we’re talking about today I think

professionals are all on a different journey right so they know when to pull some of these things right into their

their programs and when not right so I think the most important thing that they can do today is to start understanding

where they are in their safety journey and then what that next step is. It may

be backing up and saying we’re going to really do do well with one metric and then just assume that we’re going to add

an additional metric to that as time goes on. So all of us that are are different journey I led you know in in

industry verticals that may be different than some of our our listeners are are listening to and some of them may be

more advanced than I am right so but I I would say that using data very very effectively it may be different for me I

want to go very deep in my organization right I even think senior leaders want to to understand that information they

just want it maybe in a more concise fashion I I honestly can’t think of a way better

way to wrap up that episode. I mean, we explored how safety performance is often interpreted. Um, we talked about the

dominance of lagging indicators, the missed signals. Um, and if there’s one takeaway, it’s this, that meaningful

safety performance isn’t about presenting those flawless numbers. It’s about creating visibility into the risks

that exist before they become out outcomes. Um, and thank you, Scott, for

helping unpack a lot of this and sharing your insights. Um, if this conversation

challenged the way that you think about safety data, make sure that you’re following the safety brief for more

discussions. Um, and remember, progress doesn’t come from perfect reporting. It comes from building cultures grounded in

transparency, learning, and trust. We will see you guys next time.

Thank you.