Our Purpose and Ethics


Purpose

We created Safetymatters to present nuclear safety culture news and insights, and expanded it over time to include other high hazard activities, overall organizational culture, and organizational dynamics. We search for the most important items to share with you and provide our perspective on them.

We believe:
  • Safety culture is a competitive asset of high hazard organizations.
  • An organization's safety culture will invariably decay over time absent effective reinforcement.
  • Complacency and normalization of deviance are omnipresent threats to safety culture.
  • Self-revealing problems can be the ultimate signs of ineffective or weak safety culture. 
  • Important safety culture artifacts include:
    • Management decisions (handling of goal conflicts, esp. safety vs production vs cost, priority-setting, and resource allocation), 
    • Corrective action program responsiveness and effectiveness,
    • Executive compensation, and
    • Backlogs of safety-related work.
  • Systems thinking and system dynamics are powerful constructs for framing, analyzing, and understanding organizational behavior.

Our Ethics

We strive to get the facts right, perform analysis that is complete and robust, present commentary that is fair (even if it is sometimes critical), and accurately recognize and characterize the intellectual contributions of others whose work we cite or discuss.  Although we may disagree with the ideas of others, we do not engage in ad hominem attacks.

We have worked as management consultants in the nuclear power industry but we are not currently beholden to any industry entity.

If you have any questions or suggestions, please email us.