Operational excellence has become one of those terms that means everything and nothing, and yet it has a big impact on how safety outcomes are delivered.
Depending on who you ask, operational excellence is about continuous improvement, eliminating waste, building culture or focusing on customers. The reality is simpler: Operational excellence is a framework that is about process and system design across the whole of the organization, with improvement over time. Safety, then, is an emergent property from these same processes and systems — not a separate program bolted on top.
Safety, being an outcome of the same work that ensures quality products and services, is an important realization. When safety isn’t included in the desired outcomes, improvement efforts are likely focused on the wrong things. And if safety is an outcome, then so are quality, delivery and cost — all of which are symptoms of how well your operational systems actually work.
So, what do we do with that information? What does it mean for operational excellence?
It changes where you invest resources. Organizations can better invest when they stop throwing money at outcome metrics. You can’t "fix" your safety record directly; you fix the systems and processes that produce it. This means investing in process design, problem-solving capability and understanding how people do the work versus how it’s envisioned — not just more training or awareness campaigns.
It also reveals why traditional approaches to safety fail to deliver without addressing the operating systems. Traditional safety programs treat safety as a separate function, something to be managed by the safety department with meetings, training, compliance metrics and safety campaigns. The problem is that safety isn’t a separate thing you add on top of operations when the HSE team dips in for an activity. You are asking people to manage competing priorities when they are the same thing.
The HSE team is better focused on problem solving with a diverse team to re-work the processes and systems of work, rather than instituting a new policy to try to address the behavior, like instituting a glove policy to address hand lacerations that can be solved by more creative problem solving.
It also provides a diagnostic tool. If you have high injury rates, poor quality and cost overruns, you don’t have three separate problems. You have one problem: weak operational systems. Fix the root system issues and all three improve together. This is why organizations with world-class safety also tend to have excellent quality and productivity. This can be translated into developing a process like LEAD (Listen, Engage, Ask, Develop) — listen to the workers, engage by showing genuine curiosity, ask questions that unravel how work is really done, develop a hypothesis about how change can be made and a plan to test it. This helps move away from grading or judging workers against how we think things should be, and gains insight into their operational reality.
Lastly, it positions risk and safety as the entry point. This means we lead with operational risk as a whole: personal safety risk, health risk, environmental risk, risk to cost and risk to delivery. The work we do with all five of the risk areas is treated by improving systems, building discipline and identifying the areas where the work is causing an issue. This naturally improves all performance – fewer injuries, better quality, higher reliability and lower costs. We are using these risks as inputs, diagnostic signals that tell us which systems and processes need improvement. Fix the systems, and the outcomes will follow.
The question isn’t whether you want operational excellence. Everyone wants good outcomes. The real question is whether you’re willing to do the hard work of building the systems that produce those outcomes. That means moving from reactive management to proactive design. From individual behavior to process capability. From outcome tracking to system building and problem solving.
For more information, email Justin Abshire at justin@novapathrisk.com.
