I have been involved with safety in Australia for the past 15 years. In that period I would like to think I have grown and learned or would it be better to say try to understand what drives and motivates people to do certain things.

I hear on several different job sites I have been on we have to do this or that so that we stay compliant with the safety rules, to meet KPI’s or to try and achieve an unrealistic statistic of Zero Harm. Where does this compliance fit this? If I write a Safe Work Method Statement (SWMS) for a high-risk job and the workers sign on and use it and someone gets hurt is it because they did not comply or because I did not understand the task and wrote the SWMS from my desk so I did not comply? Maybe the human side showed us that we are not perfect.

If we are to use a statistical number to measure safety, would we first need to know what the statistical number for human failure is? We are not perfect so there will be failures. If this is unknown then how can we comply with a number that has been made up by someone behind a desk saying we have to do better. Who is this magical person that can change humans to become perfect?

Then we have the golden rule and everyone knew what that was but it just did not make us compliant so now we have life saving rules that consist of 8 or more rules depending on the company. These they say are nonnegotiable. What is meant by that, it would make some people wonder. What will happen if you try to negotiate one? So the other rules can be negotiated why do we have them?

How is one to comply when things are changing constantly or when some things can be negotiated, and some things cannot?

We should strive for progress not for perfection.