With limited time and energy, leaders can’t focus on everything at once.
So, where will your attention have the biggest impact? And if there’s one shift I think every leader needs to make in responding to this, it’s to stop asking, “Are people following the rules?” and start asking, “What’s helping, and what’s hindering, safe work?”
Because in most cases, incidents don’t happen because people forgot what they were supposed to do. They happen because the system made the right thing difficult – because trade-offs, constraints, and pressures shaped decisions in ways no procedure ever predicted.
The leaders who make the biggest difference are the ones who get curious about those realities. They ask: Where are people forced to improvise just to get the job done? What silent compromises are we asking them to make? What could make it easier to work safely?
This is the real work of leadership: understanding the context in which work happens, and then deliberately shaping that context so people can succeed safely.
When leaders focus on understanding the system, the nature of improvement itself changes. Instead of chasing isolated fixes after every incident or audit finding, they begin to see patterns that point to underlying design issues: the way workflows, planning assumptions, or resource constraints quietly shape risk across the organisation. Local corrective actions may patch symptoms, but systemic insights allow leaders to redesign the conditions that create those symptoms in the first place.
That’s how safety improvement matures: from reacting to problems to shaping how work is organised and supported.
Two guiding questions help focus this discovery work:
What makes safe work difficult?
What could make safe work easier?
By focusing on these questions, leaders move beyond surface-level compliance to understanding the system. They see the pressures, trade-offs, and hidden compromises that shape everyday decisions. This insight reveals where friction makes safe work difficult and where enablers help people succeed.
With that understanding, leaders can shape the system itself – not just adjust behaviour or enforce rules but implement long-term changes that make safe work easier and more reliable. This might mean redesigning processes, improving tools, adjusting workflows, or connecting teams so that the system naturally supports good decisions, rather than asking people to constantly compensate for suboptimal, non-human-centred design.
Focusing on system insight rather than policing compliance doesn’t just prevent incidents but makes safety sustainable. It reduces the need for workarounds, strengthens collaboration across teams, and embeds safe practices into the way work happens. People are empowered to contribute, adapt, and innovate, while leaders can shape processes, tools, and workflows that make safe work easier and more reliable. Over time, this approach contributes to a resilient, high-performing organisation where safety isn’t a separate priority to manage, but a natural outcome of how work is done.
Go beyond deficit chasing and short-term fixes. Pay attention to the patterns that help or hinder safe work, use that insight to reduce friction, reinforce enablers, and create conditions where safe work is not only possible, but natural.
