- Excellent blog article, and right on the mark!
Like you, I came into safety management through quality management, and also through the 'Zero Defects' movement. Your reframing of the aim of 'Zero Harm' is exactly what safety practitioners need to take on board. Much of what we struggle with in safety management has its root cause in reluctance to take personal responsibility - at ALL levels.
I am going to step out even a little further on this precarious limb to suggest that safety, like quality, is actually only an outcome, rather than the aim of the business. As you suggest in your article, both quality and safety - as well as other key business aims such as productivity and profitability - are desired outcomes that require businesses, managers and safety practitioners to connect the dots, follow Plan, Do, Check, Act (PDCA) processes, take responsibility for the part each of us plays in delivering successful work outcomes, communicate, coordinate, collaborate, engage and involve, and all those other familiar safety themes throughout the business, to facilitate business processes that make sense and work effectively.
Safety is quite simply a significant outcome of efficient business processes, effective managers and good leaders who model the very behaviours they want from their workers, and when things go wrong they start by looking at themselves, their leadership habits, and the organisation's culture and processes.
Unfortunately, the current legislation quite undermines these efforts by wagging a critical finger even more menacingly in front of senior managers, with scolding threats of fines and jail sentences aimed to scare them into complying. Using fear as a weapon is not modelling good leadership for NZ businesses, and seems in many cases to further undermine the principles of effective organisations and workplace safety by placing greater focus on legal compliance than on genuinely caring for workers and accepting responsibility for their workplace experience of safety, quality, productivity, reliability, etc - they become overly focused on avoiding fines and jail sentences and how they might throw someone else under the bus if it goes wrong.