Where Is the Organization Looking in Order to Be Proactive about Safety? A Framework for Revealing whether It Is Mostly Looking Back, Also Looking Forward or Simply Looking Away

Abstract

Despite the desire to utilize proactive safety metrics, research results indicate imbalances can arise between economic performance metrics and safety metrics. Imbalances can arise, first, because there are fewer proactive metrics available relative to the data an organization can compile to build reactive metrics. Second, there are a number of factors that lead organizations to discount proactive metrics when they conflict with shorter‐term and more definitive reactive metrics. This paper introduces the Q4‐Balance Framework to analyse economy‐safety trade‐offs. Plotting the sets of metrics used by an organization in the four‐quadrant visualization can be used to identify misalignments, overlap and false diversity. It results in a visualization of the set of metrics an organization uses and where these conflict or reinforce each other. The framework also provides a way to assess an organization's safety energy as a kind of analysis of an organization's capability to be proactive about safety.