Why Leading Indicators and Proactive Hazard Recognition Matter
Being proactive in safety requires an aggressive approach to identifying hazards in the workplace before incidents occur and reveal the hazards that exist. The same can be said for behaviors and SIF precursors. There is no management or leadership process in the world that works well without some form of measurements or metrics. Metrics allow us to understand whether we are making progress toward our goals and allow us to course correct if necessary. While lagging metrics tell us whether we are achieving a desired outcome, leading metrics give us guidance along the way.
Leading Indicators can play a vital role in preventing worker fatalities, injuries, and illnesses and strengthening other safety and health outcomes in the workplace. Leading indicators are proactive and preventive measures that can shed light about the effectiveness of safety and health activities and reveal potential problems in a safety and health program.
Lagging Indicators measure the occurrence and frequency of events that occurred in the past, such as the number or rate of injuries, illnesses, and fatalities. While lagging indicators can alert you to a failure in an area of your safety and health program or to the existence of a hazard, leading indicators are important because they can tell you whether your safety and health activities are effective at preventing incidents. A good safety and health program uses leading indicators to drive change and lagging indicators to measure effectiveness.
OSHA Website on Leading Indicators
Quality practices offer us some good guidance and examples. Imagine if we produced products without process controls along the way and we just waited to see if the product was good or bad. We can regard safety in much the same way. Leading metrics can help us understand whether our safety processes are in control and that we are proactively identifying hazards along the way.
The ability to identify hazards in advance of incidents occurring requires a number of things to be successful. These include:
Technical competency helps by knowing what “right” looks like and when something is amiss and may result in an incident occurring.
Being curious about what we observe can cause us to question things that may lead to an important discovery or observation. Even with an absence of technical competency, we all can have a gut feel about what doesn’t look right or out of place.
Last but certainly not least is actually learning how to see more effectively. We are overconfident in our ability to see the reality of the world around us. We need to understand what influences our interpretation of what we see and how we draw meaning from what we see. We need a structured and disciplined way to see.
This is collectively known as being visually literate and practicing lessons taught in art education known as Visual Literacy. By being visually literate, we see more detail and improve the quality and quantity of the inputs to any process we are executing including hazard identification. And from what we have learned, especially hazard identification. We are also able to understand the influences in how we interpret what we see. Our experiences, our expectations and our biases impact how we draw meaning from what we see. By being visually literate, we understand these influences and can be on the watch for how they cause us to misinterpret what we see – or miss it all together.
Measuring What We See: Using Leading Indicators to Evaluate the Impact of Visual Literacy
As we practice Visual Literacy as part of our hazard recognition processes, leading indicators can provide valuable insights on whether we are seeing more hazards or not. Does a leading indicator measurement such as the number of hazards identified show an upward trend as we become more visually literate? Do risk scores improve as we mitigate hazards that we identified? If the trends do not indicate that we are seeing more hazards as a result of being more visually literate, does our training efforts need to be modified or reinforced? In all cases, leveraging leading indicators gives us insights that lagging indicators alone do not.
The combination of enabling a proactive approach to identifying hazards in the workplace by becoming visually literate and measuring our progress with leading indicators gives us the best chance to know if we are making meaningful progress in reducing risk. Visual Literacy helps us improve the quality and quantity of the inputs to our hazard identification process and results in fewer incidents occurring.
Want to take a deeper dive into how leading indicators can strengthen your Serious Injury and Fatality (SIF) prevention efforts? Check out our blog, Keys for Building a Better SIF Prevention Strategy. It explores how proactive metrics—combined with focused strategies—can help you identify precursors, reduce risk, and drive more effective safety outcomes.
