Developing a Pragmatic Solution

Developing a pragmatic solution to any problem takes time, and it requires actually knowing the difference between a problem and a symptom. No one with business sense would have advised trying to make a living off what has amounted to years of hard core research and development, battling against an entrenched misunderstanding about what the problem is. Yet for more than fourteen years, Pragmatic Solutions Ltd. has been travelling resolutely toward a solution-set for a problem-set that has never been identified or addressed, in a domain where reactively treating symptoms has been the accepted norm. What other field, other than “safety,” has spent decades recycling variations of the same approach with expectations of different outcomes?


It would be exciting to write we generated a superior lasting solution at a discrete moment, hollering “Eureka!” and leaping around joyfully, but the reality was we crawled our way through the status quo minefield that is “safety,” weighed down by stagnation and indifference. We were stymied by semantic resistance, because terminology apparently matters more than value; a dearth of progressive ideas in the “safety industry,” where status quo is paramount since it is profitable; entrenched dishonesty, where even the regulatory framework is designed to obscure reality; and a serious psychological resistance to trading nonsense ideals for practical processes, preferring peppy slogans to provable results.

What we ultimately discovered was that the key problems in “safety management” lay in a bizarre misunderstanding of the differences between problems and symptoms, processes and outcomes, and causes and effects. “Safety managers” have been focused on activity counts for so long they created a purely reflexive model, where they substitute counts for actual metrics, and since this isn’t management they remain in a constant state of crisis. And because that approach was never effective, regardless of the weekly flavour deployed, broader management came to view safety as a drain on productivity, and a necessary evil, a view that safety managers reinforced by recycling the same failed models under new banners, as if a different shade of lipstick would turn the proverbial pig into a princess.

If we were pressed to point to a core lesson our years of research taught us, it would be that too many people, no matter their intelligence, mistakenly believe that “safety management” is possible. They basically believe they can manage an outcome rather than the processes that generate the outcome. This ignorance about what actually constitutes safety is astounding in an industry that has existed in various forms for more than a hundred years. It means that for all that time the shared wisdom has somehow implied that an outcome is a process. We confirmed that misunderstanding when we began to identify the repetitive disasters this view engenders, and we balked at it. We realised that until the view was corrected, the solutions would never address the underlying realities. We realised that safety is the outcome of imparting a culture of operational risk-management, and we realised we needed to create a framework of tools and processes to do that, rather than just say it.

When this core idea was accepted, we came to believe being a lone voice preaching this simple shift of focus was a more honourable route than taking the easy path and further entrenching the failed schemes of the past. The central theme we developed was that safety would exist as a by-product for any organisation where operational risk-management was executed, cyclic improvement was embraced, and the commitment existed to use expert tools properly and consistently to ensure a return on the investment of those resources. And with those objectives in mind, we developed the tools necessary to address the real problems with real solutions.

Yet on the cusp of leaving our research and development phase behind, we have run into the final brick wall, because research and development never generates the necessary resources to commercialise a provable product-set, and a paradigm shift frightens investors who want fast, high returns with no risks. And that leaves us here, today, standing on the fringe of a massive untapped market, with a provable solution-set, clear revenue potential, and a fuel tank running on fumes.