Todd Conklin argues that safety is not a product, an outcome or a program owned by leadership or by workers alone. It is a common good, a capacity co-created by leaders and workers together to provide stable, secure production. That framing changes how you think about accountability, ownership and engagement: everyone owns the safety outcomes, good and bad.
Key takeaways
- You cannot enforce your way to compliance or punish your way to safety.
- Safety is a co-created capacity between leadership and workers, not a product that gets produced.
- Ownership of safety exists in the common: leaders must own it, and workers must own it too.
- The problem does not exist with the workers; it exists with the organization, so the organization must create the solution.
- Thinking of safety as a collective good reframes accountability, engagement and involvement.
You cannot enforce your way into compliance. You're never going to punish your way into safety.
Safety is a co-created capacity that you and your organization create together in order to provide stable, secure production.
We all own the safety outcomes. We own them when we're bad. We also own them when we're good.
The SafetyTalker take
If your safety program leans on discipline and enforcement, this is a four minute reset. The practical shift for a foreman: stop positioning safety as rules you police and start positioning it as something the crew builds and owns together, because shared ownership is what actually changes behavior.
Full transcript
Read the full transcript
Believe it or not, you can’t enforce your way to compliance. Hi everybody, I’m Todd Conklin, and this is the PreAccident Investigation safety moment. Here is your operational excellence moment for this week. You already heard me say it: you cannot enforce your way into compliance. You’re never going to punish your way into safety.
In fact, as a safety leadership moment today, I really want to challenge us to start thinking about safety as the creation of common good. It’s a co-created activity between, really, leadership and workers to create ultimately a common good. What does he mean, the creation of a common good? That sounds a little bit modern. So let’s talk a little bit about what common good means.
Safety is a co-created capacity that you and your organization create together in order to provide stable, secure production. I mean, everybody knows that. What’s interesting is that the ownership for that safety exists in the common. Everybody owns the safety program. It’s not owned by leadership. That doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense, although leaders have to own it. It can’t be owned by workers, because they don’t have much power, except that workers have to own it. It’s really the notion that we’re creating a common good. We’re creating a common activity that actually provides safety for us. And when you look at it that way, safety becomes much, much different.
So when you say common good, are you really talking about common ownership, common responsibility, common accountability? And the answer is yes. It’s really a program that everybody owns, everybody is vested in, everybody has a part in. And in fact, one of the challenges we have is really getting leadership to believe that a problem doesn’t exist with them, the workers. A problem exists with us, the organization. And so because the organization has the problem, the organization has to, by definition, create the solution for that problem. And that’s where we get to the idea of creating a common capacity. We create safety together.
You will not enforce your way into better behavior. It just doesn’t work, and you’ve known that for years. You cannot punish your way into better safety. That doesn’t work well either. What you do is create a common understanding, a common wisdom, a common goal, a common good, a common accountability for safety throughout your organization. Now that challenge is exactly where we want to be.
So what’s all this mean? What do we do with this piece of information? The quick answer is: you know it by knowing this. By thinking, by conceiving of safety as a product of the collective good, it creates collective capacity. Then that really forces us to think about things like accountability and ownership, engagement and involvement, much differently. We’re all in this game together: leaders, workers, all of us. We all own the safety outcomes. We own them when we’re bad. We also own them when we’re good. And it’s important to understand that’s a common product.
That is your safety moment for the day. I hope you enjoyed it. It’s one that makes you think, and that’s always the goal. I’ll take it from here. Until then, learn something new every single day. I bet you did today. Have as much fun as you possibly can, and for goodness sakes, be safe.
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