It’s time once again from some author commentary on Chapter 4 with a little bit of what to look forward to in Chapter 5.

Enjoy, and as always, please leave feedback!

-Dr. Law

Please enjoy this audio version of Chapter 3.

As always, you can leave feedback or ask questions right here or in the chat.

Have a great week!

-Dr. Law

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Please enjoy this audio version of Chapter 2.

As always, you can leave feedback or ask questions right here or in the chat.

Have a great week!

-Dr. Law

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Thank you so much for supporting Measuring the Unmeasurable. Please enjoy this exclusive audio version of Chapter 1 as part of your benefits.

Chapters 2-4 have already been recorded and are awaiting production. Stay tuned!

-Dr. Law

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Many of my professional colleagues for whom I hold the deepest respect are continually involved in this concept called “benchmarking”. Perhaps you’ve heard of it, or maybe you’ve even partaken in one of these sessions.

So, what is benchmarking?

According to Fallon (2023):

“Benchmarking in business means measuring your company’s quality, performance and growth by analyzing the processes and procedures of others.”

Basically, I want to figure out if my business is doing well or poorly, and to do so, I need to know what other people are doing and if I’m doing it better or worse than they are. Maybe I can even identify why they are doing better or worse and make adjustments accordingly.

From a production, operations, and sales standpoint, benchmarking can be incredibly useful for painting the picture of the competitive landscape. Sometimes, third-party research firms are hired by an organization to do this benchmarking work without bringing anyone else to the table. Other times, businesses within the same industry may gather as “frenemies” in one room and compare notes.

We do this in occupational health and safety, as safety professionals, as well. I mean, let’s face it; we all know we can do better.

The difference with benchmarking safety, supposedly, is that there is no competition involved. We benchmark in the name of altruism, with the goal to improve workplace safety across organizations and industries. To encourage safety leaders to speak up, we often do these benchmarking sessions under Chatham House rules, where everyone can use the information, but all names and affiliations are kept secret. Then, everyone in the room proceeds to walk through different topics, sharing their struggles, their qualms, and, sometimes, their successes, trying to figure out who has done it best and how we can translate that to other workplace settings.

There’s an inherent reality to these benchmarking sessions, though, that is probably best described by John Goodman’s character, Lawrence Woosley, in the movie Matinee (1993):

“You think grown-ups know what they’re doing? That’s just a hustle, kid. Grown-ups are making it up as they go along, just like you. You remember that, and you’ll do fine.”

That’s why we’re here, isn’t it? We are all just making it up as we go along, and we’re trying to figure out who has made it up in a way that makes it look like they know what they are doing.

But there’s a fatal flaw in benchmarking safety. Remember what Fallon (2023) said?

“Benchmarking…means measuring…”

If we are making it up as we go, we need to also be measuring as we go.

If we are comparing notes, we need to be measuring inputs and outputs.

If we are benchmarking, we need to be measuring the same inputs and outputs.

That brings us to the current crisis within occupational safety and health: We simply are not measuring the same things because we don’t all agree on what those things should be. If that’s not clear, yet, go back and read Chapter 3.

The safety profession has seen much volatility throughout its short existence. Remember, true professional safety efforts really didn’t become prominent until the early 20th century. The OSH Act did not go into effect until April 1971. We’ve had just over a century to try to figure this out, and for only half of that time have we had any kind of federal regulation in the United States. Compared to professions such as medicine, engineering, and law, safety is still in its infancy. Let’s not be surprised, then, that we haven’t yet come to consensus.

But if we want this benchmarking thing to actually produce something useful, we need that consensus, and we need it on two things, specifically:

1. What does “safety” actually mean?

2. Why do safety interventions work?

According to a recent technical report published by the Lloyd’s Register Foundation Global Safety Evidence Centre, we have consensus on neither.

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Dear subscribers,

I had every intention this weekend of putting together this week’s cocktail video and a short preview of Chapter 4.

Unfortunately, Sunday morning, I experienced my first exercise-related debilitating injury, which you can read about in an article I posted in Matt’s Fitness Corner on LinkedIn. I’m recovering, but my limited range of motion as well as my muscle relaxers make a situation unconducive to creating this month’s cocktail video.

But, I haven’t forgotten about you, and I want to give you something.

First, about Chapter 4…

Chapter 4 drops next week on Tuesday, October 20 at 6am EDT. Free and paid subscribers will have access to the full chapter, and paid subscribers will get the audio version dropping shortly after. That is one thing I should be able to accomplish despite my injury…

I won’t lie, Chapter 4 is short, but it’s a transition chapter that sets us up for the rest of Section II: The Blueprint (Models and Mechanisms). We start this section by discussing the definition crisis, the one where the entirety of the safety profession seems to be unable to come to a consensus on how to define safety, as well as related concepts.

If we can’t even define safety, how could we possibly start to measure it?

We’ll walk through some recent evidence from a massive study that illustrates just how extensive is this lack of consensus. We’ll also introduce the concept of the theory of change, and why it is so so critically important for all of us to use one of those. Of course, we’ll dive deeper into that later in the book, as well.

Chapter 4 is eye-opening. Buckle up.

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It’s that time again for some author commentary on the latest chapter. Enjoy, and please leave feedback!

-Dr. Law

Perhaps such a line makes you laugh. I admit there is a degree of relatability to it. Maybe you’re thinking about a time when you observed someone doing the opposite of what they were told to do, what they were expected to do, or what would be in line with the concept of “common sense.” In this same observational period, you also witnessed the consequences of such an action. If those consequences weren’t catastrophic, your expression became that of a wry smile, a shaken head, and maybe you muttered “I told you so,” or something to that effect. Maybe you also had the same expression if the consequences were catastrophic, in which case I recommend immediate screening for psychopathy.

For me, such a line makes my blood boil.

We really are entering a new age in how we understand maturity within organizations. In 2024, Avetta® announced a partnership with the National Safety Council (NSC) to launch what’s called the Safety Maturity Index™ (SMI) (NSC, 2024). This tool was designed to quantify the maturity of contractors’ safety management systems based on factors such as leadership and structure, how they identify and control hazards, how they ensure workers are competent, how they manage and respond to incidents, and how their continuous improvement processes are built. It is a sound method for scoring something that has traditionally been a guessing game (and an example of what we are trying to do with this book).

As a young safety consultant, though, servicing all types and sizes of organizations across many industries, I didn’t have such great tools for quantifying the safety journey. Sure, I could measure compliance, but if I really wanted to know a client’s definition of safety, their approach, and their receptiveness to new ideas, I really had to rely on the conversation and my own gut intuition. However, there was always one line that came in response to “How can I help you, today?” that explained everything about the state of safety in an organization.

“Can you help me fix stupid?”

Now, I did say this question makes my blood boil, and that’s true. But I also felt quite the sense of relief when I heard it. For me, there was no guessing at that point. I knew everything I needed to know to move forward. “Can you help me fix stupid?” is one of the easiest and most descriptive qualitative indicators of an organization’s current safety maturity level. It tells me everything.

It tells me they have no meaningful metrics.

It tells me they have no proven KPIs.

It tells me they are likely heavily dependent on administrative controls, like training and policies.

It tells me they have many assumptions about what will shape knowledge and behavior.

It tells me they have nothing to measure the validity of those assumptions.

It tells me the only thing they have visibility to is when human error inevitably occurs and something goes wrong.

It tells me they are entirely dependent on that human error not happening, but they have not implemented the controls or performance metrics that allow for human error to occur without causing catastrophe.

Now, here’s the fun part. Organizations and industries do evolve and mature in their approaches to occupational safety and health over time. So too has the safety profession itself, and almost without fail, those evolutions mirror each other almost identically, even if on different timelines. We start with compliance. When we figure out that human behavior seems to interfere with staying compliant, we discover this concept called behavior-based safety (BBS). When BBS devolves (hold that thought, we’re not done with BBS) into blame, and we hypothesize that blame doesn’t work, someone comes along with something called human and organizational performance (HOP), or resilient safety, or safety differently, or something else really fancy that promises to be the next step toward really fixing things. Progress really starts to slow down at this point, maybe even plateau, but we continue playing around with HOP and preaching the good word while never quite figuring out how to fully operationalize it. In the meantime, we discover that people are still being seriously injured, even killed, at work, and we immediately latch onto SIF prevention. Then, if we really consider ourselves progressive, we get involved in benchmarking and thought leadership discussions, still looking for that silver bullet to make these concepts work, but also not wanting to miss the next buzzword as soon as it launches.

While there probably isn’t a single peer-reviewed study charting this exact progression, this is the undeniable reality of the safety maturity journey. It is the roadmap I have observed across hundreds of organizations. Someone reading this is looking really smug because they started somewhere in the latter half of that journey and have always been ahead of the game. That’s fine, bro, calm down. Yes, this is my story, and a story is not science. We’re getting to that part.

So, in this chapter, we are going to take a critical look at that journey and each step in the process. We’ll discuss some of these abstract concepts you may have heard before. What we won’t do is fully subscribe to nor fully dismiss any one of them. To start, let’s quickly compare the two main concepts of Safety-I and Safety-II.

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It’s time once again for the next Happy Hour edition of Measuring the Unmeasurable. This one is an unbranded version of what we are calling a Fresh Summer Absinthe Drink.

• 1 part absinthe

• 1 part lime juice

• 1 part simple syrup

• 4 parts water

Stir. Pour over ice. Add fresh sliced cucumber.

Enjoy responsibly!

-Dr. Law

It’s a little delayed, I know, but I wanted to make sure I got the author commentary for Chapter 2 posted before things got busy again. I’ve also included some thoughts about what’s coming up for Chapter 3 in less than a couple of weeks.

I received some excellent feedback when Chapter 2 initially released, so I needed to make sure I updated accordingly. Chapter 2 has been updated to reflect some key points that I missed on the first run.

Hey, that’s why this Substack thing is so extremely important for this process, right?

As always, please leave any feedback and feel free to share with your friends and colleagues. We are getting ready to dive deep into the evolution of safety in the next chapter, and, fair warning, it’s some heavy stuff.

Enjoy!

-Dr. Law

One of the benefits of being a paid subscriber is gaining access to audio versions of the chapters as they are available. For all subscribers, this introductory chapter is being provided for free.

If you like this content and want access to the full 9-step methodology for developing original safety KPIs along with toolkits as they are developed, consider becoming a paid subscriber to support my work.

Enjoy!

-Dr. Law

That is mostly true, but it is also a somewhat carefully crafted persona that allows me to build relationships relatively quickly with just about anyone. In reality, there’s a part of me buried inside that is deeply jaded. I can trace it back to many things, but I can trace a significant portion back to one specific day early in my professional safety career.

As an emerging private-sector safety professional, I learned a lot about the recurring frustrations in the safety profession very quickly. I was part of a small safety team working in construction for a contractor who was experiencing explosive growth. At a glance, everything was in place that we needed to be successful, both as a team and as an organization. We had the knowledge, skills, and experience on our team to excel, the means and budget to implement appropriate safe practice, and the support from operations leaders to execute our mission.

However, explosivity brings many challenges. The organization nearly tripled in size within our first year as a safety team. We had new workers, temporary workers, challenges with maintaining robust communications, and many inconsistencies in requirements from site owners and general contractors. Most importantly, workers were experiencing injuries.

It felt like something went wrong nearly every day. In that first year alone, I remember a crushed limb, a lost eye, multiple encounters with federal and state compliance officers, and an abundance of minor strains, sprains, and lacerations. This is the time period when I learned both the fallacies and deep rootedness of traditional approaches to safety (i.e. assignment of blame). This is when I had plenty of experience trying to force deeper root cause investigations. This is also when I became intimately familiar with the process of case management and how, when done properly, it serves the employer better than it serves the worker. As a team, we were exhausted after that first year or so, and there seemed to be no end in sight.

One day, I walked back into the main office to finish my shift. We usually informally met as a safety team near the end of the day to debrief, gripe, and moan. However, the air in the office was different on this day. It was electric, positive, and somewhat celebratory. As I was walking to meet with the safety team, one of the older project managers stopped me. He said, “did you hear? Our EMR went down? Great work!”

Sidebar: if you are unfamiliar, EMR stands for experience modification rate. On their website, FFVA Mutual Insurance Co. describes EMR as a critical metric for both workplace safety performance and workers’ compensation insurance. Basically, it is the dollar amount of a company’s actual incurred losses, based on workers’ compensation claims, divided by the expected losses based on the industry average. The rating directly affects premiums, but FFVA also states that it can affect reputation, competitiveness, and employee morale and retention.

So, I smiled and nodded at the project manager, went into the safety office, and noticed the entire team was sharing my own expression. Were we happy? No. We were exhausted. We were frustrated. We knew something was off. Quantifiably, the EMR was sound and legitimate. There is no doubt about that. We knew, however, that things were not working. We knew that workers were not safe. We had that watermelon dashboard thing going on.

Did we all just suck, or were we looking at the wrong metric?

We need to talk about SIF

Let’s keep this brief because, chances are, you have heard about this problem already. If not, you might be living under a rock. In fact, we might be neighbors. I only recently learned the magical capabilities of using the slide master view in Microsoft PowerPoint.

Over the last few decades, the safety profession has become quite…proficient…at managing a metric known as total recordable incident rate (TRIR).

Figure 2. Occupational Injury and Fatality Trends in the United States

Note. Adapted from “Injuries, Illnesses, and Fatalities: Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries (CFOI) – Current,” by BLS, December 16, 2021. https://www.bls.gov/iif/oshcfoi1.htm#rates

Chances are that you’ve already seen a chart like this before. Sexy right? Figure 2 is a version of a chart that is commonly used to emphasize that, over the last few decades, we have indeed drastically lowered non-fatal injury rates in the United States. However, in that same time period, we have only slightly reduced fatal injury rates.

There are two things I want to emphasize here:

First, we do have a problem. Based on this data, it is apparent that we, as a profession, have become very good at reducing the risk associated with non-fatal, recordable injuries. However, workers are still dying on the job at nearly the same rate that they were 30 years ago. That is a big issue, and it has sparked a movement within our profession to change metrics and systems to more effectively address serious injuries and fatalities (SIF). It is an absolutely admirable and essential movement because the worst thing that we can do is continue to let workers be exposed to hazards that could potentially threaten, alter, or end their lives.

But if you ask why this chart looks the way it does, the answer can be much more complex. Have we truly reduced the risk associated with recordable injuries? Are we controlling hazards better now than we used to? Are we simply better at managing the number? How does the “science” of case management affect non-fatal injury rates? Are there issues still with reporting, where non-fatal injuries are easier to cover up than fatalities? Are these rates truly reflective of reality?

This brings me to my second point of emphasis: there are significant flaws with the way this data is presented. The first one should be more obvious than it is. If you look closely at the details, non-fatal injury rates and fatal injury rates are calculated differently. Fatal occupational injury rates are calculated by the number of fatalities per 100,000 workers. Non-fatal occupational injury and illness rates are calculated by the number of injuries peer 100 full time workers. This is a great way to normalize or standardize data points and produce a digestible number for both rates, but, in theory, they should not exist on the same Y-axes such as what has been illustrated in the many versions of this chart over the past few years.

But it sure is sexy when presented at a conference to motivate safety professionals to pay more attention to SIF prevention. For that, I cannot fault the intent.

Then, of course, we need to talk about the glaring issues that are inherent to TRIR…

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Modern Tiki Iced Tea

• 1 part white rum

• 1 part bourbon

• 1 part gin

• 1 part aged rum

• 1 part lime juice

• 1 part orgeat syrup

• 1 part grenadine

Shake, pour over ice, top with club soda.

I am putting the finishing touches on Chapter 2 of Measuring the Unmeasurable, and before it officially drops in a couple of weeks, I wanted to give you a quick preview of what we are about to get into.

Let me ask you a question. Have you ever had a moment where your organization’s safety dashboard is glowing perfectly green, your leadership is celebrating, maybe your EMR just dropped, but you and your safety team are sitting in the office, completely exhausted, because you know for a fact that your workers are bleeding on the floor?

I have. I experienced that exact scenario early in my career working for a rapidly growing contractor. Our EMR went down, the project managers were thrilled, and meanwhile, I was dealing with crushed limbs, lost eyes, and an endless stream of strains and sprains. We had a classic watermelon dashboard: green on the outside, bleeding red on the inside.

And it forced me to ask: Did we all just suck at our jobs, or were we looking at the completely wrong metric?

In Chapter 2, we are going to look at the exact math behind why our metrics are failing us.

We are going to talk about the SIF illusion. You’ve all seen the charts: over the last thirty years, we have driven non-fatal, recordable injury rates into the dirt. But fatality rates? They have barely budged.

And the primary reason for that is our industry’s absolute obsession with TRIR.

In this next chapter, we are going to break down some groundbreaking 2021 research from Matthew Hallowell and the Construction Safety Research Alliance. They analyzed 3.26 trillion work hours. Trillion. With a T.

Do you want to know what they found out about TRIR?

It is mathematically random.

It is not associated with fatalities, it has zero precision, and it is not a valid indicator of the impact of your safety interventions. Using TRIR to measure the success of a new safety program is like taking a new vitamin supplement, rolling a pair of dice every morning, noticing you are rolling fewer snake eyes, and claiming your vitamin is controlling the dice.

It’s not science. It’s statistical noise.

But wait, it gets worse. Because it’s not just that the metric is random. The data we are feeding into it is practically made of floppy cheese.

We are going to look at some brilliant work by Dr. Todd Loushine and Mike Wolff that proves OSHA’s ITA data is riddled with massive inconsistencies.

And finally, we are going to look at a massive, multi-year study of a 21st-century safety management system implemented by the Army Corps of Engineers. We’ll talk about the absolute irony of validating a proactive system using something called an SBLI (a Severity-Based Lagging Indicator). You literally cannot make this stuff up.

But here is the thought I want to leave you with today, and the question Chapter 2 is going to force you to answer about your own organization.

In that Army Corps study, the new management system showed a significant drop in contractor incident rates. But government civilian employee rates didn’t drop at all.

Why would a safety management system only protect the contractors?

It wouldn’t.

But you know what affects a contractor differently than a government employee? The fear of losing a 50-million-dollar bid. Government employees don’t lose their contracts if they report a twisted ankle. Contractors do.

So I leave you with this: When you implement a new safety program and your TRIR goes down... did you actually reduce the occurrence of injuries, or did you just increase the suppression of reporting?

When you rely on mathematically broken lagging indicators, you can’t tell the difference.

Chapter 2 drops in just a couple of weeks. Keep an eye on your inbox, get your highlighters ready, and let’s get to work.

So the plan right now is to publish one chapter every month. It’s just right now that’s the current rate at which I can actually write this thing. So expect about one chapter a month.

In the meantime, what I’m gonna do is kind of fill some gaps so that you’re not bored while you’re waiting on the next chapter.

Enjoy this author commentary for Chapter 1.

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You’ve heard that before, right? This is the old adage that is continually referenced in business, consulting, or anywhere else we are trying to make sense of things. If you do a quick Google search for this statement, you’ll find variations of it, such as “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” It’s basically the same sentiment. Notably, it’s difficult to figure out where exactly this sentiment came from, but we usually attribute it to Drucker or Deming or some other brilliant thinker onto whom executive leaders hitch their wagons.

What leadership wants usually trickles down. This is especially true for workplace safety. Management and regulatory agencies want you to manage injuries and fatalities. To manage them, we needed to measure them. So, we started measuring injuries and fatalities. We even standardized the way we measure them and how we calculate them. We incentivized our workers and our supervisors based on these measurements in an attempt to manage the end result.

In the safety profession, we talk a massive game about “systemic safety” and “capacity building” (mostly in response to those big sexy conference ideas), but when it comes time to measure it, we default to the same lagging metrics that have failed us for fifty years. We are trying to measure 21^st-century safety management with 1970s tape measures. Don’t get me wrong, we are managing those standard metrics very well, but there’s a big problem.

Eventually, we [should have] noticed that those numbers were going down, but the same bad stuff was still happening. People were still getting hurt. Property was still getting damaged. Workers were still dying.

Many safety professionals have probably experienced the phenomena known as case management.

This is the process we follow, not to prevent bad things from occurring, but to prevent bad things that have already occurred from becoming worse. A worker gets hurt, we send them, and sometimes follow them, to a designated medical treatment facility, and we manage the paperwork. On the surface, this process seems like a great way to ensure workers are getting the best care possible, right?

Instead, case management amounts to the best possible means to protect the business after a worker gets injured. We not only ensure the worker gets care, but we observe and control that care to the best of our ability to make sure that care results in the least amount of recordability possible. We go back to 29 CFR 1904.7, and we start to micromanage the provider’s methods of care. We try to keep treatment at a level of first aid or below.

Stitches? Why not butterfly bandages?

Prescribed painkillers? Why not ibuprofen over the counter?

Light duty? Well, how much of the worker’s job can we change before it becomes restricted work?

An IV? Can we just give them this electrolyte sports drink?

Then, if we keep running into these questions, we start shopping around for clinics that know what recordability means and how to manage it. We find the medical providers who will help us keep that number down. If we do this process right, we succeed it keeping that recordable injury number down to as low as possible while our workers keep getting hurt.

That’s the thing though, isn’t it? People keep getting hurt. We keep chasing that lower number after the injuries occur.

We managed the number because we were measuring the number, but why did it feel like we were getting it wrong?

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My wife, who admittedly can be quite snobbish when it comes to movies and TV shows, has been one to repeatedly roll her eyes at yet another entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), which must spend the first act or more creating a dramatic origin for our beloved protagonist before getting to the real action. If you are familiar with these movies, you are likely familiar with this concept. Usually, the protagonist suffers a traumatic experience in which they are likely powerless to prevent; a family member dies or vanishes, they suffer a life-altering or even life-ending injury, they are juxtaposed into a vastly foreign environment, or they become so figuratively absorbed in their exotic science experiment they eventually become…physically absorbed. Maybe keep your fingers crossed in an attempt to prevent that last example from happening to you by the time you reach the end of this book.

So, if not everyone loves an origin story, why do we have so many?

I am so glad you asked. Well, at least I am glad that I wrote the question, you read it, and therefore I forced you to ask. I never promised voluntariness in inquiry.

In a 2011 study, Gazley and colleagues found among a group of 225 New Zealanders that genre had a significant effect on a potential moviegoer’s decision process, specifically for comedies, dramas, and horrors. They also found that respondents view movies depicting true stories more favorably compared to movies derived from fiction or folk stories. Now, while this does seem counterintuitive to our discussion on the action-based, science-fiction movies of the MCU, they also note that it is likely the relatability factor that creates this favorability.

So, perhaps the creation of origin stories for our Marvel superheroes is an attempt to foster that relatability. Spider-man (2002) featured a lanky, nerdy Peter Parker, played by Tobey Maguire, who was bullied, in unrequited love, and struggled with wanting to be better than he was. That seems relatable enough, right? According to a 2002 article in the Hattiesburg American, that movie grossed $114 million in the opening weekend at the box office, the first time any movie had grossed over $100 million in only three days. Is it because people loved the origin story? Or is it just because, well, it’s Spider-man?

Okay, technically, it took nearly two decades for Tobey Maguire’s Spider-man to somewhat become part of the MCU. Let’s look, instead, at Iron Man (2008). Gray (2010) reported that this first entry into the MCU grossed $98.6 million in opening weekend, and McMahon (2025) reported that the film grossed over $585 million worldwide against a production budget of $140 million. In comparison, Gray (2010) also reported that Iron Man 2 (2010) grossed $121.8 million during opening weekend. Hmm…

Let’s go back to the character of Spider-Man, since, within a few short decades, we have seen a few iterations of the character with different origin stories, and this is just in the films.

Figure 1. Ranking of Highest-Grossing Spider-Man Movies Worldwide as of November 2024, by Box Office Revenue (in million U.S. dollars)

Note. Adapted from “Ranking of highest-grossing Spider-Man movies worldwide as of November 2024, by box office revenue (in million U.S. dollars)”, by Statista Research Department, Statista, 2025. Copyright 2026 by Statista.

In Figure 1, we can see all the Spider-Man movies from 2002 to 2024 ranked by box office revenue. The origin stories are highlighted a different color, just to help with this discussion.

The question remains, does everyone really love an origin story?

With the exception of Tobey Maguire’s and Andrew Garfield’s second movies, we know that the sequels, for the most part, performed better than the origin stories in overall box office revenue. So, does that mean moviegoers prefer sequels to origin stories? Are these numbers simply indicative of the years of inflation between origin stories and sequels? Would the sequel have even performed so well in the absence of an origin story?

I know what you are thinking. What does all this mean?

Absolutely nothing.

I just provided a bunch of data. Box office revenue is one of the most important lagging metrics to determine a given movie’s performance. Movie-making is a business, after all, and with all this data, we should be able to determine the popularity of origin stories.

But we can’t.

We have data, and it’s data that everyone uses as a primary metric, but we do not have the right data to answer the primary question. In fact, we have more questions. To answer those questions, we can make assumptions. We could say that people love origin stories, but perhaps they love sequels more. Is that true? If this is all the knowledge you had to assess the likelihood of popularity for a movie you were about to create, would you go with the origin story, or dive right into a new story based on the assumption that everyone is already familiar with your main character from the comic books? If millions of dollars are on the line, do you take the gamble?

Does everyone really love an origin story?

Honestly, I don’t know, and I couldn’t care less. Here’s mine.

How a bright-eyed, young safety professional became a seasoned yet cynical researcher with a podcast who, for some reason, still gets asked if this is his first job out of college…

I have always been one to challenge the status quo. Sometimes, like when I was a young, hot-headed, egotistical undergraduate student, that notion tended to result in bridges burned and diminished grade point averages. It took arguably far too many of those hard lessons learned to eventually turn my boldness, and sometimes my undue pride, into a strategic advantage. Eventually, some things worked out.

Almost every emerging safety professional gets the privilege of experiencing a root cause investigation fairly early in their careers. If you happen to be unfamiliar with this process, this serves as one of the first shocks to a safety professional’s system, when they realize that real-world applications of safety practice do not always end with butterflies and rainbows. Something goes wrong, people get hurt, equipment gets damaged, and yes, the safety professional must figure out what exactly went wrong and how it can be prevented in the future.

In my case, I directly reported to who I consider to be the classical type of operations leaders, those who did not have the time nor the skillset to look much further past the human behavior that they believed caused the incident to occur. They would blame the incident on the worker, or sometimes the supervisor, and call for more training. Check that box, and move on.

However, as a foundationally public health professional with experience and academic training in human behavior models, I was the one who wanted to dig deeper. What was the experience of the worker that influenced that behavior? What was the historical context? What were the traditions of work that have been passed from generation to generation, becoming the things that we knew so well, took for granted, and never had a clue they could lead to adverse outcomes?

One of my proudest moments was when I was able to put this into action. A construction worker under my purview had unfortunately dislocated his ring and pinky fingers while changing a bit, specifically a hole saw, in a portable power drill. How did this happen? By doing what had always been done. He grabbed the chuck of the drill with his gloved hand and squeezed the trigger with his other hand to use the power of the drill to loosen the chuck, the glove became caught on the teeth of the hole saw, and the pulling force caused the dislocation.

Now, the operator’s manual for that power drill says to remove the battery before changing bits. So, why was that practice not performed?

Because that’s not how it’s done. That’s not how this worker was taught to do it, and that’s not how any of the hundreds of his peers on that same site do it. Using the power of the drill to loosen and tighten the chuck is a tradition that has existed for decades.

So, mister operations leader, go ahead and check your behavior box and blame this guy for doing something stupid, but prove to me that doing so actually fixes a deeply rooted human habit that has become a normative practice for generations of workers performing the same task.

I loved playing devil’s advocate because I wanted people to prove to me that their belief was correct. I needed data. I needed operations leaders to follow proven models rather than haphazardly tossing blame around. I needed conference presenters to give me evidence for their big ideas rather than just empty inspiration.

This probably explains my attraction to research which really came to fruition during my doctoral studies. I discovered that the scientific method used to dig deeper into problems and solutions was not really that complicated. In fact, just because I now have a degree that proves I can do it does not mean that I could not have done it all along.

I just needed methodology.

Honestly, that methodology is what everyone needs, all the way down to the practitioner. The daily grinder. The folks who are actually positioned to save lives.

The problem is, when that methodology is practically implemented, especially in work like mine, it is often presented either overly complicated in academic literature or overly simplified in news headlines. Neither one is practical for the practitioner. That practitioner may fall into the common trap of the big sexy ideas presented at conferences, those big ideas that most often come in 45-minute conference presentations with little practicability. There are no action items. There are no applicable metrics. It’s just fun noise.

So, I thought, now that I understand research, but not every practitioner is going to go through the torture of completing a doctorate, how could I help get real science into the hands of the practitioner? How could I help the practitioner learn simple scientific methodology to determine if a study, or a big idea, is good or bad?

I really needed a source for catharsis. I have always wanted a creative outlet. I suck at drawing. I’m okay at music, but I never had the drive to make that a thing outside of my college worship band and a handful of weddings and bar gigs. How could I be creative, but maybe also turn that into something that gives back to my profession in occupational safety and health?

And so, with a desire to get science into the hands of the practitioner, and a passion for creativity, along with a tiny bit of entrepreneurial spirit, I decided to make a podcast, called Prove It To Me, which, to date, generates absolutely no revenue but hopefully creates value for the listeners. The goal has always been to evaluate researched solutions, good or bad, and get that evaluation, along with actionable takeaways, into a digestible format for practitioners.

Then I thought, maybe practitioners don’t just need examples of research. Maybe they need the ability to do research themselves. With the variety of industries, organizations, workers, processes, policies, and situations that exist, there are so many possible solutions to key occupational safety and health issues that have never been studied and may never gain the opportunity to be studied through traditional means. What if practitioners could be empowered to scientifically evaluate these things themselves?

Well, they could go to back to school to be scientists. Or…

…they could acknowledge that they are already scientists. In that case, they just need the tools.

Thus, here we are. I wrote a book. You’re reading the book. Here are your tools.

You’re welcome.

Did everyone love this origin story?

This is what this book is about. We have traditional ways of measuring safety performance. For the most part, those traditional ways are not working. Each organization, each safety practitioner, must be able to measure the things that matter. They must be able to measure the things that they have traditionally considered unmeasurable because no one gave them the tools to be able to do so. They must be able to navigate through those big sexy conference ideas and prove to leadership whether they work or don’t work. They must be able to implement the scientific method.

So, let’s get to it, shall we?

References

Gannett News Service. (2002). ‘Spider-Man’ spins magical web on weekend moviegoers. Hattiesburg American. https://www.newspapers.com/article/hattiesburg-american-spider-man-spins/102160352/

Gazley, A., Clark, G., & Sinha, A. (2011). Understanding preferences for motion pictures. Journal of Business Research, 64(8), 854–861. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2010.09.012

Gray, B. (2010). Weekend report: ‘Iron Man 2’ builds on ‘Iron Man’ launch. Box Office Mojo. https://www.boxofficemojo.com/article/ed695862276/

McMahon, K. (2025). Iron Man (2008) - The ultimate guide to the birth of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Pop Culture Weekly. https://podcast.popcultureweekly.com/blog/iron-man-2008-the-ultimate-guide/

Statista Research Department. (2025). Ranking of highest-grossing Spider-Man movies worldwide as of November 2024, by box office revenue (in million U.S. dollars). Statista. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1388739/highest-grossing-spider-man-movie-worldwide-box-office/

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If you are a safety professional, you probably know the feeling of staring at a “watermelon dashboard”…

You know the one I’m talking about? That dashboard that is green on the outside, but bleeding red on the inside.

You also probably know the frustration of watching your operations leaders celebrate a drop in the Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR), while you know, deep down, that nothing is actually safer. In fact, when nothing changes, but the TRIR goes up again next year, you’re the one who gets stared down for it.

Maybe you know the exhaustion of fighting over whether a bleeding worker gets stitches or butterfly bandages just to protect an OSHA log.

We talk a massive game in this profession about “systemic safety” and “capacity building”…

Picture yourself leaving the best conference (or webinar) you’ve ever attended. You are on fire because someone finally explained that in order to build a safety culture, you have to build trust.

On Monday morning, you sprint into the operations office, and you declare, “WE NEED TO BUILD TRUST TO BUILD OUR SAFETY CULTURE!”

On Tuesday, you start thinking about your strategy for building trust to build your safety culture.

Wednesday comes and goes. A worker twisted their ankle Thursday afternoon.

On Friday, you find yourself back in the office, reflecting on the week, thinking, How in the actual f*** do I build trust?

When it comes time to actually measure and manage those big sexy conference ideas, we end up defaulting to the same lagging metrics that have failed us for 50+ years. We are trying to measure 21st-century safety management with 1970s tape measures.

It’s time to stop.

I’m Dr. Matt Law. In my work as a researcher, a strategist, and host of the Prove It To Me podcast, my ultimate goal has always been to get real, actionable science out of the academic journals and into the hands of the practitioner. Now, I am writing a book called Measuring the Unmeasurable: A Practical Guide to Ditching Bad Metrics and Building Meaningful Safety KPIs.

But I’ve decided not to do this in a vacuum. I am publishing the first draft right here, chapter by chapter, in real-time, with maybe some extra stuff along the way.

This project is not for the academics in the ivory tower.

This project is for the daily grinder. This is for the practitioner who is positioned to actually save lives.

Over the coming weeks, we are going to look at the real (yet invalid) math behind TRIR, EMR, and other lagging metrics.

We will tear down the toxic “fix stupid” mentality.

And we will build a simple, 9-step methodology that you can use to develop your own predictive KPIs.

You don’t have to go back to school to be a scientist. You just need the tools.

Hit the subscribe button below. The official Introduction drops in a few days, and we are going to start by looking at why the numbers you are currently forced to manage are completely broken.

Stay healthily skeptical, stay cautiously optimistic, and stay safe.