What We’re Thinking
We’ve added a few things - Social posts up top, articles below - from the Magpie team. Read through them on your own, or give us a call, and we’ll tell you all about it.
Just Culture and Accountability
The image of justice—at least as it is personified in many cultures—is of a woman, positioned high above, prominently blindfolded and holding a sword and set of scales. The scales are symbolic, of course, but suggest that searching for justice in a complex world requires a careful balance between individual and societal needs, or, perhaps, between the more elusive concepts of blame and accountability. There are a lot of organizational forces that lead us toward blame. Managers, customers, boards of directors and even interested attorneys may demand an explanation into what went wrong and what is being done to fix the problem.
Design Thinking for Safety
The safety industry sees its fair share of fad ideas come and go, and even today, there are scores of branded products that offer to solve your safety problems. Despite a lot of catchy names, a lot of so-called solutions to safety and risk management available today still focus on old ideas about the way we work, and the role an organization plays in the ecosystems we work within. In practice, this often looks like an overemphasis on human error, on finding “root cause”, and on reacting to negative outcomes. Design thinking avoids this focus on backward-looking data and instead shifts to human behavior as a centerpiece for product and system development.
RETURN ON SAFETY
Return on investment, or ROI, is increasingly a part of the discussion of safety, and rightfully so. While making safety decisions solely on the prospect of whether they help the bottom line isn’t helpful, neither is knee-jerk implementation of a safety strategy without some means of validating effectiveness – including a careful look at investment. There’s a tired old axiom that safety isn’t a cost, it’s an investment. The problem isn’t the altruistic sentiment – it’s that the conversation often stops there, well short of any meaningful support for just how safety helps the organization.