Ten Years On: How Foresight Reshaped the Meaning of Safety Excellence
A decade of change in safety practice highlights the growing importance of foresight in managing risk and organizational performance.
- By Shawn M. Galloway
- Jan 05, 2026
When Terry Mathis and I wrote Forecasting Tomorrow: The Future of Safety Excellence in 2015, our aim was simple: help leaders stop reacting to yesterday’s incidents and start deliberately designing tomorrow’s performance.
Ten years later, much of what we called “the future” is now routine in high-performing organizations, and other elements are clearly emerging. The deeper lesson is this - organizations that consciously look ahead spot new risks earlier, adapt faster, and avoid the “surprises” that shock only those who weren’t paying attention.
Excellence Reframed: Beyond the Numbers
We began by challenging the definition of excellence. We predicted that it would be judged less by low incident rates and more by how reliably an organization understands, produces, and improves strong performance. Numbers would confirm excellence, not define it.
Over the past decade, that shift has taken hold. ISO 45001, developed in 2018, positions occupational health and safety as an integrated management system rather than a collection of programs. The focus moved from chasing recordables to embedding risk-based thinking, leadership accountability, and worker participation into how the business runs. Excellence became about the system's strength and adaptability, not just the math on a dashboard.
Serious injury and fatality (SIF) research reinforced this. Many organizations saw total incident rates drop while serious and life-altering events barely moved. That forced leaders to ask, “If our numbers look good but people can still be killed or permanently injured, what do we really mean by ‘excellent’?”
From Programs to Strategy, And Real Ownership
We also predicted a shift away from program-of-the-month thinking toward integrated, multi-year safety strategies tied directly to business goals, and a stronger expectation that operational leaders would own safety. Safety now sits alongside quality, supply chain, and innovation as a core business priority in many organizations. Boards and executives are expected to show how safety is built into strategy and decisions and not just producing low injury rates.
This has pushed line ownership to the forefront. Safety can no longer live solely in the EHS department. If safety is truly a value, it cannot be delegated. Plant managers, supervisors, and front-line leaders are expected to design safe, reliable work and treat safety as part of running the business, not a separate agenda. More companies are investing in leadership coaching, human and organizational performance (HOP), and learning teams. The emphasis is shifting from policing and blame toward curiosity, context, and system learning. In many high-hazard operations, you now hear “safe production” and “operational learning” more often than “go talk to safety.”
The Evolving Safety Professional and the New Consultant
In the book, we described an evolution in the safety role: from “grunt” (buried in paperwork) to “guardian” (focused on enforcement) to “guru” (strategic advisor and partner). Technology has accelerated that journey. Digital incident systems, mobile apps, and analytics now give safety professionals far better visibility into patterns and precursors. The most effective leaders spend less time chasing forms and more time helping the organization see where exposure really lives and what it should do about it.
Their place in the organization has shifted as well. In many companies, senior EHS leaders sit within enterprise risk, ESG, or directly under the COO or CEO, with responsibility for culture, human performance, physical and psychological risk, and supply-chain resilience.
We also anticipated that organizations would demand more from external advisors. Rather than buying plug-and-play programs, many now seek help with long-term strategy, culture and leadership alignment, SIF prevention, and demonstrating safety’s contribution to business performance. Consulting engagements increasingly begin with assessments, move into co-designed roadmaps, and focus on building internal capability.
From Counting to Creating Value, and the Digital Layer
Another prediction was that safety efforts would move away from sheer volume, hours trained, observations completed, toward initiatives and metrics that genuinely change behavior and reduce meaningful risk. We now see more balanced measurement systems that combine lagging, leading, and what I call transformational indicators. Organizations are experimenting with measures that reflect SIF potential, quality of learning, strength of controls, and the degree to which safety is integrated into business and operational decisions.
Learning methods are evolving as well. Scenario-based exercises, virtual and augmented reality, micro-learning, and psychologically informed content are being used to influence risk perception and decision-making, not just awareness. The social and digital tools we once called “emerging” are now part of the safety infrastructure. Internal platforms and mobile apps carry alerts, lessons learned, short modules, and near-miss information across locations and time zones. Networked communication has become part of the safety nervous system.
Why Foresight Belongs in Every Safety Strategy
All of this points to one conclusion: safety performance naturally lags changes in technology, work, and society, unless we deliberately close the gap. Since we wrote the book in 2015, organizations have had to confront a global pandemic, rapid digitalization and automation, new work models, energy transition, the rise of AI infrastructure, and growing climate-related extremes. None of these appeared overnight.
The organizations that navigated these disruptions best were not just compliant. They were already in the habit of scanning the horizon, asking “What if…?”, stress-testing their systems, and building capacity before the crisis arrived. That was the core message of Forecasting Tomorrow - the future is a category of risk and opportunity you can actively manage.
Putting Foresight to Work
You do not need a dedicated foresight team to begin. You can weave future-focused thinking into the routines you already have. Add brief horizon-scanning conversations to your safety and operational meetings. Look at external trends, technology, regulation, workforce, climate, community expectations, and ask what new exposures or opportunities they might create for your organization. Map these trends to your current controls and capabilities. Where are you strong? Where are you relying on luck, especially when it comes to serious, life-altering risks?
Use a few simple scenarios, plausible pictures of what your world could look like in five to ten years, to spark discussion. For each one, ask, “If this is where we’re heading, what will we wish we had started now?” Invite more voices, especially any dissenting ones. Frontline workers, contractors, and technical experts often notice weak signals first. Most importantly, let foresight influence real decisions. Ensure emerging risks and opportunities show up in your safety strategy, improvement plans, and dashboards. If the future never changes what you measure, fund, or reward, it remains an interesting conversation rather than a control.
Looking Back, and Ahead
When we wrote Forecasting Tomorrow, our goal was not to prove we could predict the future. It was to help organizations realize that future-focused thinking is itself a form of protection. Foresight sits upstream of procedures, PPE, and training. It shapes what you prioritize, how you design work, and how resilient you are when things do not go as planned.
Ten years later, the broad direction of our predictions has been confirmed by the evolution of standards, metrics, roles, and technologies. The next decade will almost certainly bring even more disruption. The question for every safety and operations leader is this: Will you treat the future as something that happens to you, or as something you actively prepare for, so your people, your culture, and your systems are ready before the next wave of risk arrives?