The focus of safety on performance has been about for 45 years. Tarrants’ book The Measurement of Safety Performance was published in 1980. The book was published by The American Society of Safety Engineers that changed its name in 2018 to The American Society of Safety Professionals. The name may have changed but the ideology is the same, it’s very much all about safety engineering. Indeed, if you do a search for ‘ASSP Safety’ the word ‘engineer’ remains in the title.

So, Safety has been focused on performance for 45 years. But apparently its now new with Human and Organisational Performance (HOP).

Unfortunately, when your focus is on safety performance then there’s nothing new. Its just traditional safety dressed in new clothes.

Tarrants’ book goes to the foundations of safety from the start, measurement. The language of ‘performance’ is the language of measurement. Unless your language of performance infers the Semiotics of Drama and Theatre (https://archive.org/details/semioticsoftheat0000elam ) then there’s nothing different about a focus on performance.

The Semiotics of Performance understands the word poetically, as unmeasurable. This is not how HOP understands the word. In SPoR, this is how the notion of performance is understood – semiotically and poetically.

If you undertake a language audit of HOP publications it could easily be blended with Tarrants’ book from 1980. There is nothing different other than a small change in discourse.

If you are rather interested in a different understanding of performance, then you can read about The Semiotics of Performance here: https://www.humandymensions.com/product/spor-and-semiotics/