Proving Safety: wicked problems, legal risk management and the tyranny of metrics

Organisations invest time, money, resources, and personnel into trying to ensure that their workplaces are safe. Very often, the output of all this expenditure is injury rate data, which has, time and again been discredited as a measure of safety. In response, many organisations have adopted so called "lead" indicators to supplement injury rate data. Unfortunately, lead indicators take the question of safety no further. Almost universally, lead indicators are no more than a measure of "acti...