What If the Information That Prevents Your Next Fatality Is Already in the Building?

Serious Injury and Fatality (SIF) rates remain stubborn because critical warnings get filtered out long before reaching executive decision-makers.

• By Shawn M. Galloway
• Aug 10, 2026

I have said this in rooms across the globe, and I will say it again here, because I believe it more now than when I started saying it. If our profession actually adopted and enabled the deliberate pursuit of dissent, structurally, not as a slogan, it would be the single greatest differentiator available to us in preventing fatalities and life-changing injuries. It would finally move a number that has barely moved since the term SIF (Serious Injuries and Fatalities) entered our vocabulary in the mid to late 2000s. Sit with that for a moment.

We have refined our lagging indicators. We have built leading indicators. We have layered on observation programs, life-saving rules, critical-risk protocols, and human and organizational performance principles. Much of it has helped, and yet the serious injury and fatality rate has stayed stubborn in a way the recordable rate never was.

We learned, importantly, that the two are decoupled. Doing well on minor injuries tells you almost nothing about whether someone is going to die. That discovery matters, but leaves us with a harder question most of us have quietly avoided: What is the mechanism that actually prevents the catastrophic event? Here is my answer. It is not new; it is just rarely operationalized.

The catastrophic event is almost always preceded by someone who knew. Someone closer to the work saw the warning earliest. The information existed. The problem was never that the signal was absent. The problem was that the signal did not survive the trip up or through the organization.

The Trip of Voiced Concerns

A concern is raised. The concern is filtered. The decision proceeds on a confident version of an incomplete picture. The consequence arrives, and the investigation finds the warning that was there the whole time. Notice where the failure actually lives. It is not with the decisions being made.

Most leaders, given good information, make good decisions. The breakpoint is one step earlier, at the filter, where information is being censored, intentionally or unintentionally. That is the place in your system where a concern gets softened, delayed, reframed, or quietly attached to the wrong person and dismissed for who raised it rather than what they said. The filter is where your leverage sits. It is also the part of the system that most organizations have never once examined.

That is the gap I keep pointing at. For decades, we have audited whether concerns exist. We have spent almost no energy auditing the journey those concerns take. Where do they slow down? Where do they die? Who decided not to escalate? What happened to the last person who tried? That audit is uncomfortable, which is exactly why it is the most valuable thing a safety leadership team can do this year, and it exposes how little protection our usual answers provide.

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