Don’t Fool Yourself……if safety performance is bad so is the quality.

The behaviors that lead to safe outcomes are the exact same that lead to a delivering a quality product.  However, don’t be fooled that just because an incident did not occur is an indication of a safety system or a safe organization.  Let’s put this in perspective.

If you and I take a flight together on an airplane and we take of and land without incident, was that a safe flight?  If I told you that the pilot did not use a single required safety checklist and just did his job from memory….would you consider this a safe flight now?  Would you consider the end result was a quality product?  Individuals taking unnecessary risk or leadership and management systems that allow violation of process and risk taking is unsafe and poor quality regardless of the end product.  Poor practices in will eventually lead to a safety or quality incident.  However, we just tend to investigate the negative incident that leads to a loss instead of the successful event.  Our challenge is to change our philosophy and investigate both success and failure and continuously improve our processes.

Investigating success for gaps in our processes more cost effective than waiting till an incident occurs.  It is like changing the tires on your car before you have a blowout and have to pay for a tow truck and new tires.

Please share your thoughts.