ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a framework for leaders to progress safety by taking a fundamentally different approach to the role people have in creating safety at the front end of their businesses. Many organisations in industry and government perpetuate safety bureaucracy as 'the way safety is done'. It is easy to make things more difficult; it is easy to add more rules, and it might help assuage people's fears of liability. Bureaucracy is dependent on the adherence of those it governs to be effective. As part of their research work with safety leaders, practitioners assessed the perceived organisational values of several hundred leaders they were working with, all from mega-projects/construction, across four regions: Asia, USA, India and Australia. The belief systems or dogma that have accrued and ossified around safety are persistent and highly resistant to change even in the face of empirical evidence.
