In our work we've seen the benefits of expanding out from preventative safety and enabling the space for learning with people how they are being productive safely.
Organisations have spent so much time focused on a small time slice of how work harms people. It's time to learn to see the opportunities in everyday work. To be truely proactive about stopping harm in the workplace there is a need to understand the complexity and dynamic nature of work and in its holistical environment.
It starts with challenging our thinking about seeing workers as people and acknowledging them as experts. What practices are in place for your organisation that enables people?
Why do we only swing into action after people are broken? The hidden pressures that quietly wear down our teams often go unnoticed—not because they’re minor, but because they don’t leave visible marks… until they do.
In our experience, adverse events often have subtle risks of all kinds quietly at play in the background. These same interactions that gradually erode work environments are the ones that show up in the incidents we can’t ignore.
But what if we didn’t wait? What if spotting these interacting scenarios early became a priority—creating environments that enable better work, rather than holding ourselves back?
What if we flipped the approach? Instead of reacting to crises, we could focus on enabling better work by tuning into those subtle signals, expanding our view to consider the day-to-day experience of work as a whole.
Let’s start seeing the bigger picture. Let’s start creating space by noticing what we might otherwise miss – how? Begin with talking to the people at the front line – you might be surprised by what you learn.
"When the performance of the parts of a system, considered separately, are improved, the performance of the whole may not be (and usually is not) improved." — Russell Ackoff