A better conversation | Moving beyond safety metrics to understand risk
What do leaders really talk about in safety meetings? Too often, discussions focus on events, injury statistics, and lagging indicators. But if we want to improve safety performance, should we be talking more about the processes, controls, and organisational factors that shape outcomes?
In this short video, we show how the Tripod incident causation model can help leaders shift the conversation from what happened to why it happened. Using the Hearts and Minds Safety Culture Ladder as a lens, we examine how different organisational cultures focus on blame, events, metrics, barriers, or underlying causes—and what this means for learning and improvement. The video challenges teams to reflect on:
- What topics dominate their safety meetings
- Whether discussions focus on events, barriers, or underlying causes
- What information and metrics are driving those conversations
- How leadership teams can create more meaningful discussions about risk and control effectiveness
There are four discussion questions:
- What are you discussing in your safety meetings?
- What might be driving those discussions?
- What would a better conversation sound like?
- What information is needed to support it?