This book is not about safety. It is about people and leadership. It explores the few things in Safety that sit beneath all of the complexity and complicatedness of the workplace and that we simply must get right. It explores what the underlying elements are that look through each of the lenses of the Individual, Leaders and leadership, the Systems we use and the workplace Cultures.

It does this by exploring each of 12 underlying elements (Chapter 1), what leaders’ practices and routines might look like (Chapter 2), barriers to implementation and their remedies (Chapter 3), how to use the Essentials of Safety to learn after incidents (Chapter 4), and how to measure the effectiveness in the workplace of each of the essential elements (Chapter 5). It is designed to promote thinking, not to be a set of instructions. It is aimed at students, safety practitioners, leaders in the industry at all levels and anyone interested in understanding what good might look like in the safety and leadership space.