Safety Isn’t Luck…. It’s Leadership (and System Design).

Safety Doesn’t Happen. It’s Designed.

Christmas and New Year’s are behind us. And I keep thinking about what those holidays really represent:

People. Families. Coming home.

That’s what safety is for. Not a KPI. Not a binder. Not a slogan. And if 2026 is going to be a better year in safety, we need to say something out loud:

Safety isn’t something that happens to people. It’s something leaders either build… or quietly allow to break.

The myth that keeps workplaces stuck

A lot of organizations treat safety like weather. “Things happen.” “People make mistakes.” “Bad luck.” But most serious incidents don’t come from one bad worker on one bad day.

They come from layers: small gaps that line up at the same time. That’s the logic behind the “Swiss cheese” view of accidents: multiple defenses, each with weaknesses—when the holes align, the hazard gets through. So, if we keep calling incidents “random,” we miss the real lever: The system.

Part 1: Physical safety is (still) system design

Let’s get practical. Physical safety improves fastest when we reduce reliance on flawless human behavior. That’s why safety professionals lean on the Hierarchy of Controls:

• Elimination (remove the hazard)
• Substitution (swap it for something safer)
• Engineering controls (guarding, automation, ventilation, separation)
• Administrative controls (procedures, scheduling, training)
• PPE (last line of defense)

And the key point: the top of the hierarchy is usually more effective because it controls exposures without heavy dependence on moment-to-moment decisions. Translation: If your safety strategy is mostly “pay attention” and “be careful,” you’re betting the farm on willpower. And willpower runs out.

Part 2: Psychological safety is the missing safety control

Now here’s where it gets real. Even the best-designed systems fail if workers don’t feel safe to say:

• “This doesn’t feel right.”
• “I don’t understand.”
• “We’re rushing.”
• “I made a mistake.”
• “That near-miss was close.”

That’s psychological safety.

Amy Edmondson describes it as a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. And this matters because speaking up is a safety behavior, just like wearing PPE or following a lockout procedure.

Google’s team research (Project Aristotle) pushed the same idea into the mainstream: teams perform better when people feel safe to contribute, question, and admit concerns.

In a safety-sensitive workplace, psychological safety isn’t about being “nice.” It’s about making it normal to surface reality before reality hurts someone.

Part 3: “Safety culture” is what people do when nobody’s watching

NIOSH describes safety culture as the product of shared values, attitudes, perceptions, competencies, and patterns of behavior that shape how an organization manages safety. Notice what that means. Safety culture isn’t your policy. It’s your patterns.

• What gets rushed?
• What gets ignored?
• Who gets listened to?
• Who gets punished?
• What happens after a near-miss?

Which leads to a leadership truth. Culture is created by consequences. If reporting problems creates pain… people stop reporting. If reporting problems creates solutions… people keep speaking up.

OSHA’s safety program guidance emphasizes worker participation and protecting workers from retaliation for reporting hazards or injuries. That’s not just compliance. That’s the backbone of trust.

Part 4: The future of safety is integrated

The best safety leaders I’ve met don’t separate “health” from “safety” from “performance.” They treat it as one system: how work affects people, and how people affect work.

NIOSH’s Total Worker Health approach explicitly integrates protection from work hazards with promotion of health and well-being. That’s where the world is heading. Because fatigue, stress, burnout, distraction, and mental health aren’t “personal issues.” They are risk conditions and ignoring them doesn’t make them disappear.

And there’s one more integration point we can’t ignore in 2026: cognition.

For years, we’ve talked about physical hazards and human behavior. More recently, we’ve started taking psychological safety seriously—whether people feel safe to raise a hand and tell the truth. But between those two sits a factor that quietly shapes everything: the state of the brain doing the work.

Fatigue doesn’t announce itself like a broken guardrail. Stress doesn’t wear a label. Burnout doesn’t show up on a checklist. But all of it changes decision-making long before anyone sees a visible “issue.” That’s why I believe the next evolution of safety is cognitive readiness—building systems and cultures that account for the reality that judgment, attention, and reaction time are not constant.

This is also why tools like Neurapulse are showing up in safety conversations. Not as a replacement for good leadership, and not as a shortcut, but as a way to measure and manage the invisible risks that often sit upstream of the visible incident.

What I’m committing to in 2026 (and what you can steal)

If you’re a leader, supervisor, safety professional, HR or in operations - here are four moves that create real change:

1) Make “stop work” real

Not just on paper. Make it easy to pause. Make it safe to pause. Make it respected to pause.

2) Replace blame with better questions

Instead of “Who messed up?” ask:

• “What made this make sense at the time?”
• “What condition set them up to fail?”
• “Which layer of defense was missing?”

3) Engineer out the repeat offenders

If the same hazards keep showing up, training isn’t the answer. Move up the hierarchy: eliminate/substitute/engineer.

4) Reward early warnings

Celebrate near-miss reporting. Praise the hard conversations. Thank the person who says, “We’re not ready.” Because that person is saving you from a much bigger day.

Three questions to end this with

1. If someone on your team saw a serious risk today… would they speak up?
2. If they did… what would happen to them next?
3. Are you building safety on systems… or on hope?

2026 can be a turning point. Not because we work harder. But because we design better, listen faster, and lead like people’s families are waiting at home.