I’m sure you’ve heard the slogan “safety first”. It is a statement of values for an organization, but let’s think about how to define what it should mean explicitly. Here’s how I propose to define safety first, in the context of a company. I’ll assume the company is in the tech (software) industry, since that’s the one I know best. So, in this context, you can think of “safety” as being about avoiding system outages, rather than about, say, avoiding injuries on a work site.
Here we go:
A tech company is a safety first company if any engineer has the ability to extend a project deadline, provided that the engineer judges in the moment that they need additional time in order to accomplish the work more safely (e.g., by following an onerous procedure for making a change, or doing additional validation work that is particular time-intensive).
This ability to extend the deadline must be:
- automatic
- unquestioned
- consequence-free
Automatic. The engineer does not to explicitly ask someone else for permission before extending the deadline.
Unquestioned. Nobody is permitted to ask the engineer “why did you extend the deadline?” after-the-fact.
Consequence-free. This action cannot be held against the engineer. For example, it cannot be a factor in a performance review.
Now, anyone who has worked in management would say to me, “Lorin, this is ridiculous. If you give people the ability to extend deadlines without consequence, then they’re just going to use this constantly, even if there isn’t any benefit to safety. It’s going to drastically harm the organization’s ability to actually get anything done”.
And, the truth is, they’re absolutely right. We all work under deadlines, and we all know that if there was a magical “extend deadline” button that anyone could press, that button would be pressed a lot, and not always for the purpose of improving safety. Organizations need to execute, and if anybody could introduce delays, this would cripple execution.
But this response is exactly the reason why safety first will always be a lie. Production pressure is an unavoidable reality for all organizations. Because of this, the system will always push back against delays, and that includes delays for the benefit of safety. This means engineers will always face double binds, where they will feel pressure to execute on schedule, but will be punished if they make decisions that facilitate execution but reduce safety.
Safety is never first in organization: it’s always one of a number of factors that trade off against each other. And those sorts of tradeoff decisions happen day-to-day and moment-to-moment.
Remember that the next time someone is criticized for “not being careful enough” after a change brings down production.
