Safe By Accident?

by Judy Agnew, Aubrey Daniels, Lisa Smith (Illustrator)

safebyaccident.com Safe By Accident? Take the Luck out of Safety - Leadership Practices that Build a Sustainable Safety Culture
Despite decades of improvements in occupational safety, avoidable incidents still occur daily across all industries. Recent catastrophic events in the Gulf of Mexico and the mines of West Virginia shine a blinding spotlight on the failures of safety leadership.
Moving beyond finger pointing, behavioral safety leadership experts and authors, Dr. Judy L. Agnew and Dr. Aubrey C. Daniels, deliver leaders a powerful message with clear calls to action in this data-based, practical approach to ensuring organizations are safe by design, not Safe by Accident.
Agnew and Daniels reveal how behavioral science can help safety professionals and leaders foster a company-wide culture of safety. Starting with the seven common safety leadership practices that don t work (and what to do instead) to broader and more strategic recommendations that leaders can incorporate to create a high-performance safety culture, this book is essential for leaders who want to improve safety in their organization.

175 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2010

Reviews

[Osvaldo Gamboa]

Definitivamente es un libro que no muestra lo que no debemos hacer y nos dirige a mejorar el comportamiento positivo que entrega mejores resultados a mediano y largo plazo. Muy bueno el taller realizado con Judy donde tuve la oportunidad de participar. Felicitaciones por el libro que deberías disponerlo en español y creo sería muy útil.
saludos Judy y su equipo.
Osvaldo Gamboa

[Chris Zondlo · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book will teach you a lot about misconceptions in safety.

[Joy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is basically about how companies take the wrong approach to safety. When someone is injured on the job, they are often punished. This leads to people not reporting safety issues, near misses or accidents because they are afraid of being fired. The authors of this book believe that this does nothing to solve actual safety issues and believe that companies need to look at the behaviors that contributed to the mistakes in the first place. Instead of just blaming frontline employees, they place most of the responsibility on upper management who sets the policies that cause employees to cut corners (for instance, emphasis on production over safety). They use their PIC/NIC system to evaluate consequences surrounding a behavior to make improvements.

I could have rated this book higher because it was actually quite interesting. However, their definition of negative reinforcement is not the greatest. It's not terribly surprising because a lot of people get it wrong. Reinforcement increases a behavior. Positive adds something desirable while negative removes something undesirable. It is often confused with punishment because "negative" means "bad" to most people.