Safety Drivers: The First Level of Leading Indicators
The way we measure safety has contributed to our tendency to manage safety reactively.
All of our early safety metrics were reactive, i.e. chronologically after accidents or incidents occurred. Since our metrics essentially were failure metrics, we fell into a pattern of managing safety to produce fewer failures.
The serious problem with this approach is that it reaches the limits of its effectiveness before it tells us how to prevent all accidents. As we fail less, our failure data diminishes, losing its statistical significance before our performance reaches zero accidents.
