Making Safe Decisions
The Making Safe Decisions® Solution

Advancing high levels of precision in critical work, powered by the neuroscience of decision making

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The Making Safe Decisions® Solution

Why does a worker with years of experience doing the same task suddenly make an error that results in a serious injury or disruption in operations?

  • Why do people sometimes miss important information right in front of them?
  • Why does a driver swear the light was green when the drive-cam video shows differently?
  • Why do people say they speak up to make it safe, but behaviorally don’t intervene?
Because we’re human! And human action can provoke mistakes.
Our brain functions are astounding organs. But even so, neuroscience research has found that the way our brains are designed to operate makes us vulnerable to error. In many cases, these inherent characteristics—Brain-Centered Hazards™—help our brains work efficiently. But in some cases, brain-oriented vulnerabilities can increase our exposure to injury and error. If not addressed, brain-oriented vulnerabilities are typically implicated in more than 80% of safety, quality, and efficiency issues.
The Making Safe Decisions solution teaches senior leaders, supervisors, and employees how to control Brain Centered Hazards to maximize Human and Organizational Performance (HOP).
By understanding the recent neuroscience research behind safe decision-making and recognize brain-centered hazards, leaders can take steps to enable high levels of precision, so teams are supercharged to notice drift from safe work and avoid unplanned events:
  • Hone error detection skills with behavioral strategies to prevent injury and protect assets and brand reputation. Move from ‘looking’ to ‘truly seeing’ issues before they strike
  • Add horsepower to your Serious Injury & Fatality prevention process
  • Gain human performance tools and techniques to advance safe decision-making across levels and roles, and strengthen precision within critical tasks to avoid costly errors.

Does it work?

Consider these sample results after one year of implementing the Making Safe Decisions solution:
Construction: Over $1 million in savings in Worker's Compensation. 20% reduction in recordable rate in 6 months. All-time high engagement in safety
Manufacturing: 27% reduction in injury rate. Over $1 million in savings in Worker's Compensation. 46% drop in the number of recordable incidents. 0 environmental incidents. 17% drop in the SIFp rate.
  • Transportation: 35% reduction in preventable collisions. $2.5 million in claim savings
  • Construction: Over $1 million in savings in Worker's Compensation. 20% reduction in recordable rate in 6 months. All-time high engagement in safety
  • Manufacturing: 27% reduction in injury rate. Over $1 million in savings in Worker's Compensation. 46% drop in the number of recordable incidents. 0 environmental incidents. 17% drop in the SIFp rate.

Implemented For Sustained Success

The five-step implementation processes play an important role in success, maximize learning within your staff, and enable ongoing progress and sustained results. Each implementation is scalable and customizable based on your organization’s needs and goals.
  1. Planning—Evaluating your organization’s exposure profile, understanding the safety activities leaders and teams perform, and laying out the implementation’s key steps and milestones
  2. Managing/Supporting—Communicating organizationally about the effort and removing obstacles to implementation
  3. Building Capability—Creating a team of HOP SMEs to unleash the power within front-line decision making focused on five elements of the Making Safe Decisions approach: Seeing, Thinking, Doing, Moving, and Teaming. (Learn more about the approach.) We have a variety of modalities to deliver custom fit development that gets traction in your business
  4. Tracking Progress—Measuring changes in several leading indicators (e.g., hazard identification, work pauses as exposures are noticed, communication/coordination between workers, waste reduction, customer complaint reductions, engagement score improvements, and more)
  5. Sustaining Success—Embedding updated POV on safety and precise work techniques within the work system to reinforce and sustain progress

Part of a holistic approach to HOP improvement

Your organizational culture, leadership, systems, and processes, all play a significant role in controlling exposures and reliability to avoid unplanned risks. The Making Safe Decisions approach both complements and reinforces these critical factors that are essential to every human—and in turn, is reinforced by them. Working together, they form a holistic, highly effective approach to drive HOP improvement and keep people, property, and communities safe.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) About Human Performance and Safe Decision-Making
Human and Organizational Performance (HOP) is an approach that helps organizations understand how people, systems, processes, and workplace conditions influence performance. Rather than focusing on blame, HOP seeks to identify and manage the factors that contribute to human error and operational risk.
The Making Safe Decisions® Solution helps leaders, supervisors, and employees understand how brain-centered hazards can influence decision-making and increase exposure to injury, quality issues, and operational disruptions. The program provides practical tools to improve precision, error detection, and workplace performance. These tools support safe decision making during critical work.
Brain-centered hazards are natural characteristics of how the human brain processes information, attention, memory, and decision-making. While these characteristics help people work efficiently, they can also contribute to errors, missed signals, and unsafe decisions if they are not properly understood and managed. Understanding these hazards supports human error reduction across critical tasks.
Organizations can reduce human error by improving situational awareness, strengthening communication, designing more resilient work systems, developing human performance skills, and helping employees recognize factors that may affect decision-making during critical tasks. Human performance consulting can help organizations apply these practices consistently.
Many serious incidents involve human and organizational factors that influence decision-making and risk recognition. Human performance improvement helps organizations strengthen critical thinking, hazard recognition, communication, and precision in work execution to reduce exposure to serious injury and fatality risks. This supports serious injury and fatality prevention by helping teams recognize and control exposure.
Human performance improvement programs are designed for executives, supervisors, frontline employees, and safety professionals. Organizations often implement these programs across multiple levels to create a shared understanding of how decisions influence safety, quality, and operational performance. Human performance training helps each group apply this understanding in its daily responsibilities.
Improved decision-making helps employees identify potential exposures earlier, recognize deviations from safe work practices, improve communication, and avoid errors that can impact safety, quality, productivity, and operational performance. This contributes to workforce safety improvement by helping employees act before risks become incidents.
Organizations often track leading indicators such as hazard identification, work pauses, employee engagement, communication effectiveness, operational reliability, and reductions in incidents, injuries, quality issues, and unplanned events.
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