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Proactive vs. Reactive Indicators

Fri, 04/07/2017

Data that Tells the Story of Your Culture

Tracking Key Performance Indicators or KPI is a regulatory requirement and an asset in continuously improving your safety performance. But are you tracking the right things to add the most value to the improvement process?

There are proactive and reactive KPI. These are also known as leading and lagging indicators. A great exercise, every couple of months, is to review the data points your organization is tracking, that feed into your overall KPI system (and by doing this, you’re generating yet another proactive indicator – great job!). During your review of the data the organization is tracking, do a simple tally for the total number of leading indicators and lagging indicators being tracked. What is the ratio of leading to lagging indicators? In organizations that have a strong and adaptive Safety Culture, their ratio of tracked leading to tracked lagging indicators usually falls somewhere around 2:1.

Does this mean that leading indicators are more important than lagging indicators? No – they are both equally important, but serve different purposes. Tracking lagging indicators is usually a requirement for incident reporting and record keeping processes. From a Safety Culture perspective, lagging indicators are also important because they allow for lessons learned. While they represent unfortunate circumstances, they do factor into continuous improvement. But, for the most part, lagging indicators serve as proof that an organization monitors their activities and acknowledges their incidents. Proper tracking of lagging indicators exemplifies that an organization has the reasonable ability to react. Leading indicators, on the other hand, are about preventing the need for reaction.

If my hand was forced, and I had to provide one word to serve as the overarching trait in a strong Safety Culture, it would have to be proactivity. There are, of course, many traits inherent in a strong Safety Culture, but being proactive is certainly a driving force. A proactive culture not only ensures they have the necessary assets in place to respond in the case of an unintended circumstance, they also take steps to prevent such an instance from ever occurring in the first place. For the most part, organizations are legislated to ensure they are prepared to react. Prevention, on the other hand, is usually an endeavour by choice – taken on by an organization, irrespective of the governing body. That kind of accountability and proactive mindset breeds a strong and cohesive culture.

Strong Safety Cultures value the data derived from tracking lagging indicators as a baseline and know why they are important. However, they are much more interested in the learnings coming out of their leading indicators and they are constantly identifying new data points to track. The reason they are so keen on leading indicators is because they help organizations identify areas that have the potential for eventually becoming a problem that could result in an incident. Leading indicators allow us to see potential paths to tragedy before they start materializing.

For example, maybe one of your leading indicator data points is Management Site Visits. Let’s say that during one of these site visits, a Manager gets feedback from a work group that a new piece of protective equipment is uncomfortable to wear and its distracting during the execution of their task. By tracking this information and responding to it with preventive action, it’s very easy to imagine how you may have prevented an incident resulting from distraction.

Tracking lagging indicators, while important, does not provide organizations with a reinforcing feeling. After all, they represent the evaluation of an event that cost the organization money, or worse, the wellbeing of one of their employees. Leading indicators represent a collection of data that we can feel positive about. They lend themselves to optimistic imagination – while reviewing their data points, it allows people to ponder how many lives may have been saved within the data collection. This experience reinforces the commitment to continue preventing incidents by constantly improving performance.

Track as many leading indicators as you can identify, and then create other situations where you can track some more. Amplifying the proactive section in your KPI tracking will not only create a foothold for a strong Safety Culture, boost the positive feeling around your KPI system, and inspire continuous improvement, it will also support the belief that everyone wants to go to work, do their job well and get home safe.

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