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Safety That Lasts
A Playbook for Leaders Who Are Done with Compliance Theatre
Foreword by Dr Jennet Arshimova, founder of NEW HSE, Poland's first accredited NEBOSH Learning Centre
If a frontline worker on your site stopped a high-value operation today because they judged it unsafe — what would happen to them by the end of the shift?
Praise, or reprimand? Your honest answer is the measure of your safety culture.
Orders open soon: the print edition through NEW HSE, the publisher, and the e-book on Amazon. Follow me on LinkedIn to hear when.
Serious injuries and fatalities have hit a plateau. Decades of compliance investment fixed the easy part: minor incidents fell and dashboards turned green. The events that still kill people barely moved.
Here is why the dashboard lies: only about one in five minor incidents involves a hazard capable of killing (National Safety Council, 2018). A falling trend line of slips and paper cuts says nothing about the next fatality, and chasing it consumes the attention that should be protecting against catastrophe.
The accidents that remain are not caused by careless workers. They are produced by systems: bonus structures that reward silence, procedures that describe imagined work, controls that exist only on paper. This is compliance theatre: performing safety rather than creating it. One serious event can erase years of margin. Ask the boards of Vale, PG&E, or Boeing. This book is the intervention.
It is written for the people who own production targets and the risks that come with them: board members, operations directors, site and plant managers, shift leaders.
- ▪ Why your risk register lies, and the two field questions that build a Top 5 fatal-hazard list from work as it is actually done
- ▪ How Transocean paid safety bonuses for its “best year in safety performance” (2010, the year Deepwater Horizon exploded), and the parallel scorecard that stops your bonus scheme doing the same
- ▪ Stop Work Authority that survives contact with a delay-penalty clause, including the escalation route for jobs where stopping itself creates the hazard
- ▪ A three-question test that strips away safety clutter without increasing legal exposure
- ▪ Why fruit on Thursdays and a meditation app change nothing, and how to treat chronic stress as a work-design hazard with the same hierarchy of controls as any other
- ▪ A survival plan for the leader whose board has heard the case and declined to act
- ▪ A 12-month transformation playbook with phase-by-phase success criteria
Rethink risk management. Target the risks that kill, not the ones that are easy to count. Build layered controls that assume failure. Verify them on the shop floor, not in the audit file.
Rebuild management systems. Strip away safety clutter. Write procedures with the people who do the work, matched to work as it actually happens.
Grow safety culture. Treat safety as a value that holds under pressure. Investigate systems, not culprits. Develop the practical judgement people need when the procedure runs out.
One book instead of a shelf. Most safety books pick a lane: culture, systems, or risk. This one runs end to end, bringing strategy, risk management, management systems and safety culture into a single framework.
Built for Monday morning. The “new view” literature is rich in aspiration and thin on instruction: it describes the destination and skips the route. Here every idea becomes something you can implement: a parallel scorecard, a contract clause, a budget line, and a 12-month plan with success criteria the book itself can be held to.
Two traditions, one architecture. It joins the old school's rules written in blood with the new school's work-as-done, two camps that rarely meet in the same room, and it is written by someone who has carried a permit book in the rain.
“A lockout procedure that exists in a manual but is routinely bypassed is not a control. It is a liability.”
— from the book
Book launch
Safety That Lasts was launched on 23 October 2026 in Warsaw at Safety as a Business Value, the international conference organised by NEW HSE.
Włodzimierz Kaczmarzyk is a Chartered Safety and Health Practitioner (CMIOSH) with eighteen years in health and safety across water and wastewater, construction, renewable energy, waste management and facility services. He has worked in Poland and the United Kingdom and is now Global HSE Manager in an international facility services group of more than 300,000 people. He holds an engineering master's degree from Poland and an MSc from the UK, and tutors the NEBOSH International Diploma at NEW HSE.
Early in his career he was the enforcer: policing rules, chasing compliance, believing tighter control meant safer sites. It did not. He has since directed safety operations and led cultural transformation programmes in complex, multi-site organisations. The book draws on that work and on close readings of Brumadinho, the Camp Fire, the 737 MAX and Deepwater Horizon. He wrote it to give leaders what the binder never will: organisations where people go home safe by design.
Orders open soon: print through NEW HSE, e-book on Amazon.
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