Deploying a Pragmatic Solution

Developing a pragmatic solution to any problem takes time, and deploying one is challenging. The business challenges to being on the forefront of a market are often overwhelming, but for more than fourteen years, Pragmatic Solutions Ltd. has been travelling a path to a destination. That destination has changed over time, and the path has changed in course of time, because just as our research into risk-management showed us the requirement of functional dexterity in that domain, we long ago realised the same flexibility is a necessity to be the harbingers of a new paradigm.

Traditional Safety has spent decades wallowing in variants of the same approach to new problems, always achieving mediocre results through luck and generating spectacular failures by way of inevitability. You cannot treat symptoms to cure an illness, unless you consider death a cure. Traditional safety will never create safer workplaces, because it has never grasped the problems, and spends more time playing with paper than solving real problems.

While it took us ages to create what we have as a solution-set for generating safer outcomes, we are heartened that it often takes an intelligent observer only a short exposure to the fruits of our efforts to have their “Eureka!” moment. It is frequently painful to see the realisation that there is a better way, a dynamic process that is not indifferent to the well-being of people, and to see it combined with the realisation that to make the change requires a degree of commitment and capability that seems impossible. The number of times smart people have told us, outright, that their organisation doesn’t appear to have the chops to play the tune we wrote is shocking.

What we have to deploy is not another safety pig with a different shade of lipstick, and there is no magical transition from pig to princess promised. What we developed was a systematic approach to changing how operational risk-management is done, and to show how it should be done to integrate the scope of operations entirely, and to ensure that the outcomes sought are measured by something that can be quantified. We rejected the same-old-same-old because we knew that industry, business at large, needed to find a way to produce an outcome that wasn’t luck-based. Repeatable success, cyclically improved, with and ever-increasing productive knowledge base was the goal – the tools, and the methods, prove it possible.

We realised that safety is the outcome of imparting a culture of operational risk-management; and that rather than being something you can pay lip service to, it is an idea that must be lived. There is something honourable in forging ahead on new ground, even with the incredible challenges presented by the inertia in the domain of safety.

And here on the cusp of leaving our research and development phase behind, following the governing principles of risk-management, we recognise that there also comes a time when the core of a thing – our company – needs to reach out and surrender the lead to someone who can commercialise the opportunity. Who that is remains to be seen, but the search is on, because at the end of it all we still know the product-set is right, the problems we solve are real, and the value-proposition is undeniable.