Elimination of Fatalities: A System, Not Hope, Will Get Us There

The goal of safety is eliminating workplace fatalities. To achieve this, we must prevent and predict risks. Yet, despite extensive efforts, success remains elusive. Although we can identify the risks and understand how they occur – such as high-energy work – we cannot reliably predict when or where they’ll happen. This unpredictability highlights two challenges: Traditional systems for identifying serious injury and fatality risks rely on hindsight, analyzing past incidents or near misses. And static identification tools, such as audits, inspections and risk registers, fail to capture dynamic, evolving risks as they emerge. This session will introduce a new approach – the “randomized readiness for risk” response – that redefines the safety approach. Rooted in a three-year “elimination of fatalities” program within a global corporation, this model demonstrates how operational processes can eliminate latent incident triggers and move safety into a predictive and preventative paradigm.