Tim Davies argues that chasing zero incidents backfires: it silences workers and kills reporting. A high number of reported near-misses actually signals a healthy safety culture where people admit mistakes before they become disasters.
And it's interesting because sometimes metrics drive the wrong behaviour. So you might look at a site and go, actually, we want zero incidents, zero near misses. I actually think high near misses is good because then you're improving to actually reduce the chance of one of those serious events ever happening. But the culture around numbers is that zero for safety is a good number, and I'm just not convinced it is.
And what it does is it drives people to silence. And if, um, if somebody, you know, why, why would you want to put anything into your business from a health and safety perspective that's shutting people up? I don't get it. I don't understand it. And in actual fact, you know, we should be, we should be applauding it when, when people, when people, even if somebody, right, if somebody does something wrong, okay, but then puts their hand up and says, I've got it wrong, they should be, they should be not taken, not necessarily taken out of the pub, but they should be, you know, it should be well done, this is fantastic.
EP 60: Why Founders Become the Bottleneck — And How AI Changes Everything | Thea Brook
