If You Can’t Measure It… Maybe You Shouldn’t: Reflections on Measuring Safety, Indicators, and Goals

by Carsten Busch

You drive to your job on a beautiful Monday morning. The speedometer shows a steady just-below-50 km/h. On the radio, the newsreader tells you about the unemployment figures, the number of casualties of an earthquake in South-East Asia, and that the Dow Jones has fallen some points. Upon entering the gate of your company, you pass a sign that proudly announces that today is the 314th day since the last Lost Time Injury. In the hallway, you see the LEAN Kanban board that shows, among other things, production figures and sick leave statistics. At 8:30, you are all expected to gather around the board and discuss what is presented there. In the elevator to your floor, you quickly check what has happened on Linkedin. You are pleased to see the number of ‘likes’ that your latest post has drawn. You walk on to your desk where you see a pile of papers. On the top is a copy of the newest balanced scorecard that your boss’s secretary must have dropped there, Friday afternoon. While sipping your first coffee of the day, you check your calendar and are reminded of the annual performance review at 10 O’clock.So far, you have not done one tiny piece of actual work, but you have been confronted with a mass of figures, measurement and metrics already. They are around us, all the time. But why? Do they help? How to deal with them? This little book intends to help you think about them in different, maybe better, ways and handle them better.Thirty rather compact chapters offer a critical view on measuring, indicators, metrics, goals and statistics within a context of safety. The book also tries to offer some useful and practical suggestions for different (possibly even better) approaches, or at least different ways to think about these subjects.

Genres: Management

Kindle Edition

Published August 24, 2020

Reviews

[Tikhon Jelvis · Rating 5 out of 5]

This reads more like a collection of short blog posts than anything else, but I found this worked well—like the forward suggested, I could read one of two chapters at a time, without needing prolonged reading sessions.

The ideas the book described were all interesting. Most of them seemed obvious—at least in hindsight—but I have seen too many organizations and managers operate contrary to these "obvious" observations to take them for granted! While it's mostly focused on measuring and defining safety, I found the perspective to be just a valuable for other areas of business like understanding software development and reliability.

[Emanuele Gemelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

You will not find answers in this book, but if you are a standard safety practitioner used to do the stuff because it has been always been done like this, then read it; the author discusses some very ingrained standard practices and address them (blast is the better verb) sitting on the shoulders of giants in the field. I have been using similar material in the past three years to bring this new (they are not new, come on!) way of practising safety to my workforce, to my fellow members of the management team, to my peers, to authorities and to my executives, with mixed success. The funny thing is that the concepts outlined in this book are easier to grasp by the workforce than any manager.