For decades, safety reporting has been dominated by a simple yet seductive narrative: if the injury rate is low, we must be safe. This narrative can be likened to a nighttime lullaby. Comforting. Reassuring. Something that helps everyone sleep a little easier. Yet scratch beneath the surface of these metrics and the lack of reassurance may instead result in a few sleepless nights.
The most commonly used lagging metrics, TRIFR and LTIFR, tell us what has already happened. The raw data tells us how many recordable injuries occurred and the frequency rate converts this to a precise number often with a couple of decimal points. But these measures tell us only a very small part of the story.
And that’s the part that should concern any Board or executive team.
They tell us little about whether the organisation understands its critical risks. Whether workers have the resources they need. Whether critical controls actually work in practice. Whether leaders understand how work is really performed. Or whether the organisation has sufficient capacity to keep things going safely when conditions inevitably change.
In Australia and New Zealand, these questions sit much closer to what officers are actually expected to know, understand, resource, monitor and verify as part of their WHS due diligence obligations.
Research by Dekker and Tooma (2022) identify significant problems with these incident-based measures; including inconsistent definitions, weak construct validity, low statistical power and little predictive power. A low TRIFR also provides no assurance of legal compliance.
The proposed alternative is fundamentally different: think about safety not simply as the absence of bad outcomes, but as the presence of capacities that enable things to go well. A business can go a long time without seriously hurting anyone and still be drifting towards failure. Hazards do not disappear because the dashboard is green. Goal conflicts remain. Plant degrades. Workarounds accumulate. Resources tighten. Procedures become disconnected from practice. Small adaptations that keep work moving become increasingly invisible to those furthest from the frontline. Hence, the suggestion is to provide metrics that seek to identify this.
The danger is not simply that we are measuring the wrong thing. It is that what we measure directs our attention. A singular focus on injury metrics can become a decoy, drawing organisational attention away from the conditions in which risk is accumulating. Link bonuses, reputation or contracts to those numbers and we can introduce another problem: an incentive not to disturb the reassuring story. A Board that spends most of its safety conversation looking backwards can become very good at understanding yesterday while remaining surprisingly ignorant about tomorrow.
The limitations of lagging metrics is not necessarily new information for our industry. Of course it begs the question: if we remove these metrics, what would we put in their place?
What if we measured capacity instead?
The Due Diligence Index – Safety (DDI-S) was developed as an alternative for industry. Instead of treating injury frequency as a proxy for safety, it examines the six elements aligned with due diligence: Know, Understand, Resource, Monitor, Comply and Verify. The shift is from counting outcomes to examining capacity.
- Know asks whether leaders are genuinely acquiring safety knowledge, particularly from those doing the work.
- Understand asks whether they comprehend how operations actually happen and where critical risks arise.
- Resource asks whether people have the tools, time, capability and support they need.
- Monitor moves beyond simply counting failure towards learning from incidents, normal work and successful work.
- Comply retains the importance of legal compliance without confusing compliance activity with safety itself.
- And Verify asks whether leaders are personally and proactively assuring themselves that what is supposed to be happening is actually happening.
The philosophy underneath it is just as important. It sees people as part of the solution rather than the problem; safety as the presence of positive capacities rather than simply the absence of negative outcomes; and safety as an ethical responsibility rather than a bureaucratic exercise.
What this looks like in practice
Hansen Yuncken was one of the organisations involved in piloting the DDI-S. Their experience provides an important lesson: adopting a different approach was not about declaring the existing safety system broken or simply replacing one dashboard with another.
The organisation wanted to take the next step without simply adding more rules and procedures. Leaders started asking more open and curious questions about how work was really being done, what their risk profile looked like and where critical controls mattered most. Implementation was gradual rather than “plug-and-play”, and Board conversations began to include forward-looking qualitative insight alongside traditional lag indicators.
While that that sounds relatively simple in theory, in practice, it can be more challenging as it requires leaders to surrender one of the great comforts of modern safety management: the illusion that a number can substitute for understanding.
At Hansen Yuncken (HY), they acknowledged that the injury data did not have to disappear. It simply needed to be put in its proper place with the lights dimmed, and the spotlight increasingly shifted towards high-risk work, critical controls, operational reality and the capacity to proactively plan for successful outcomes. Over a number of years, HY were successful in making this shift.
This shift is where due diligence becomes less about receiving information and more about generating insight. There will always be a gap between work as imagined and work as actually done. Real work contains variation, trade-offs, constraints and surprises. The people closest to it therefore possess knowledge that aggregate Board reports routinely wash out. Worker insights, learning teams, critical-control conversations and learning from successful work can help close that gap.
But of course, the seasoned safety professional knows there is a trap here too.
DDI-S should not become another reporting bureaucracy. As one of the developers I acknowledge that it is easier to measure the administrative “work of safety” than the actual “safety of work”, and that capacity measures can to become susceptible to the same numbers games as traditional metrics.
So to put this into practice in your organisation: keep the injury data. But let the Board know it’s not an accurate indicator as to whether you stop asking it to tell you whether you are safe. It is to change what leaders pay attention to and the conversation that follows the board pack.
Ask instead:
- What are our critical risks?
- What makes successful work possible?
- Where are people compensating for weak systems?
- What resources are missing?
- What are workers telling us that has not reached the Board?
And which critical controls are assumed to be present but have actually been verified in the field? The answers might be harder to fit neatly onto a dashboard. But they are much closer to due diligence and understanding the real state of safety in our organisations.
If you are interested in learning more about the DDI-S and implementing it in your organisation, check out the free DDI-S Standard at Due Diligence Index – Council.
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By Kym Bancroft, Director, New View Safety
Kym Bancroft is Managing Director of New View Safety and anorganisational psychologist with more than 20 years’ experience in health and safety leadership. She works with boards, executives and frontline leaders to strengthen safety governance, leadership capability, critical risk management and organisational learning.
Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/kymbancroft
