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In the domain of EHS&S at a company with more than 100 business entities and 126,000 employees, there are so many sparkly things you may as well call it glitter. Could be a near miss at one business regarding poor execution of a safety permit. Could be an unapproved flashlight in a potentially explosive atmosphere. Could be three fork lift near misses in two months. My list could be endless and every piece of this “glitter” makes us question what reaction (or size of reaction) is warranted. How many other sites are using this kind of flashlight? Why don’t we know that? How come we’re not collecting that data? Business A has a mobile device for tracking flashlights with GPS chips; why don’t we have that for everyone? Was the workspace labeled to restrict non-explosion proof equipment? Do we need to do flashlight training? Maybe we need a flashlight technical standard…. I’m being a little silly, but you get my point. We’re well down the road chasing a shiny object with our precious resources. And we’ve just voided our carefully crafted strategy.
It takes real discipline and leadership to stick to a strategy and not be distracted by sparkly things. There will be occasional shiny things that demand a scramble and realignment, but it shouldn’t be the daily way of operating.