If you are a safety professional, you probably know the feeling of staring at a “watermelon dashboard”…

You know the one I’m talking about? That dashboard that is green on the outside, but bleeding red on the inside.

You also probably know the frustration of watching your operations leaders celebrate a drop in the Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR), while you know, deep down, that nothing is actually safer. In fact, when nothing changes, but the TRIR goes up again next year, you’re the one who gets stared down for it.

Maybe you know the exhaustion of fighting over whether a bleeding worker gets stitches or butterfly bandages just to protect an OSHA log.

We talk a massive game in this profession about “systemic safety” and “capacity building”…

Picture yourself leaving the best conference (or webinar) you’ve ever attended. You are on fire because someone finally explained that in order to build a safety culture, you have to build trust.

On Monday morning, you sprint into the operations office, and you declare, “WE NEED TO BUILD TRUST TO BUILD OUR SAFETY CULTURE!”

On Tuesday, you start thinking about your strategy for building trust to build your safety culture.

Wednesday comes and goes. A worker twisted their ankle Thursday afternoon.

On Friday, you find yourself back in the office, reflecting on the week, thinking, How in the actual f*** do I build trust?

When it comes time to actually measure and manage those big sexy conference ideas, we end up defaulting to the same lagging metrics that have failed us for 50+ years. We are trying to measure 21st-century safety management with 1970s tape measures.

It’s time to stop.

I’m Dr. Matt Law. In my work as a researcher, a strategist, and host of the Prove It To Me podcast, my ultimate goal has always been to get real, actionable science out of the academic journals and into the hands of the practitioner. Now, I am writing a book called Measuring the Unmeasurable: A Practical Guide to Ditching Bad Metrics and Building Meaningful Safety KPIs.

But I’ve decided not to do this in a vacuum. I am publishing the first draft right here, chapter by chapter, in real-time, with maybe some extra stuff along the way.

This project is not for the academics in the ivory tower.

This project is for the daily grinder. This is for the practitioner who is positioned to actually save lives.

Over the coming weeks, we are going to look at the real (yet invalid) math behind TRIR, EMR, and other lagging metrics.

We will tear down the toxic “fix stupid” mentality.

And we will build a simple, 9-step methodology that you can use to develop your own predictive KPIs.

You don’t have to go back to school to be a scientist. You just need the tools.

Hit the subscribe button below. The official Introduction drops in a few days, and we are going to start by looking at why the numbers you are currently forced to manage are completely broken.

Stay healthily skeptical, stay cautiously optimistic, and stay safe.