Compliance is not necessarily Safety Performance

Stop evaluating your safety processes with compliance alone.

A 2008 academic paper by Mengolini and Debarberis on safety in complex systems suggested we must link Human and Organisational Performance (HOP) directly to our safety outcomes to truly measure effectiveness.

This is exactly why simply checking off a procedure box is a poor measure of safety. In a plant environment, the real safety process is the work-as-done—how your people navigate the daily pressure points, trade-offs, and design flaws to get the job done.

When an incident happens, the temptation is to re-train the individual. But the truth, especially in the Caribbean context with its inherent resource constraints, is that the effectiveness of the system failed to support the person.

If you're a plant leader or C-suite executive, you need to understand that performance is a capability of your organization, not just a trait of an individual.

Your system must be designed to be resilient.

Shift your focus from measuring adherence to procedures (Process Compliance) to measuring the capability of your system to handle complexity and pressure (System Resilience).

This is the key to unlocking better operational performance, not just safety.

What one process audit are you willing to replace with a ‘Learning Team’ conversation next week?

#HOP #Leadership #OrganisationalLearning