This year’s event focused on major accident prevention and safety management. International business and safety leaders from a range of industries shared their, often harrowing, perspectives on the causes, consequences and safety learnings from tragic events including fatalities in F1 racing, the Challenger disaster, Deepwater Horizon, Costa Concordia and the Grenfell Tower fire.

Throughout the day, roundtable discussions between speakers and conference participants brought out some of the common denominators across the various talks. Here are a few of our takeaways from those discussions:

• The oil and gas industry is further ahead in its thinking about major accident prevention than many other sectors. These high standards should be shared with, and applied to other high-hazard industries
• The purpose of safety is to ensure things go well, yet we often associate it with things that go wrong. We need to reverse this thinking and focus on understanding and learning from the things that go well to open up new opportunities for improvement
• Safety strategies are, of course, designed to stop accidents happening at all, but when they do happen, we need levels of resilience to prevent injury and fatalities
• In a rapidly changing world, the assumptions, models and methods we have about safety may no longer be fit for purpose; we need to create an environment where legacy behaviors can be challenged
• A high level of safety behavior is the product of a supportive culture where people have the freedom and courage to challenge existing behaviors
• To create this kind of culture, you need responsibility/accountability to be balanced with care and dialog
• Leaders need to be mindful not to pressure people to act in an unsafe way. Instead, create a culture where results can be achieved safely
• Make it normal for people to challenge leadership and raise different views
• As ESG gains focus, it will be increasingly difficult for organizations to hide a poor safety record from their investors
• Leadership doing the right thing empowers others to do the right thing

Many of these points support JMJ’s long held belief that establishing a safety culture in organizations is about authentic leadership, and how you guide and inspire your people to think and act safely.

To learn more about the Task Force Safety Conference, and watch some truly inspirational presentations, we highly recommend watching the full event on OGD’s YouTube channel.,

If you would like to discuss how JMJ can support your organization’s commitment to creating an Incident and Injury™ (IIF™) safety culture, please contact us