Essentials of Safety Maintaining the Balance

This book is not about safety. It is about people and leadership. It explores the few things in Safety that sit beneath all of the complexity and complicatedness of the workplace and that we simply must get right. It explores what the underlying elements are that look through each of the lenses of the Individual, Leaders and leadership, the Systems we use and the workplace Cultures. It does this by exploring each of 12 underlying elements (Chapter 1), what leaders’ practices and routines might look like (Chapter 2), barriers to implementation and their remedies (Chapter 3), how to use the Essentials of Safety to learn after incidents (Chapter 4), and how to measure the effectiveness in the workplace of each of the essential elements (Chapter 5). It is designed to promote thinking, not to be a set of instructions. It is aimed at students, safety practitioners, leaders in the industry at all levels and anyone interested in understanding what good might look like in the safety and leadership space.

1. The Essentials of Safety Elements. 2. Leaders’ perspectives – practices and routines. 3. Barriers and their remedies. 4. The Essentials of Safety as a driver of learning. 5. Assessing and Measuring success. 6. Conclusion. 7. Bibliography. 8. Acknowledgements.

Ian Long has a degree in Science and post grad studies in Occupational Hygiene. After some 18 years working in various industries and roles, he has worked predominantly in the minerals extraction and processing industry. During this last 25 years, he has worked in Oil and Gas, Chemical industries and semi-Government industries. He held roles ranging from Safety Advisor though to Vice President of Health, Safety and Environment within BHP. He now runs his own company, Raeda Consulting, providing mentoring, coaching and training in leadership and in incident investigations around the world. He has also facilitated many serious workplace incident investigations. His purpose in life, his ‘Why’, is to share ideas, concepts and practicalities in safety and leadership with as many people as will listen, so that people start to think differently and positively about the why, what and how of the things they do in both leadership and safety. Essentials of Safety is his second published book. The first being Simplicity in Safety Investigations. This was published by Routledge in 2017.