How Storytelling and AI Can Strengthen Safety Culture
Stories about near misses, lessons learned, and everyday work can bridge the gap between written safety rules and real-world behavior—when used thoughtfully and supported by leadership and technology.
- By Thomas Cassidy
- Jan 13, 2026
Safety professionals invest significant time in developing policies, procedures and training programs. Yet even in organizations with thoroughly documented systems, incidents and near‑misses continue to occur. In many cases, the issue is not a lack of rules, but the gap between what is written and what is lived on site.
That gap is largely cultural. Culture is formed and reinforced by what people talk about: how they describe risk, how they speak about prior events, and how they react when things go wrong. Stories about close calls, injuries, lessons learned, and quiet successes play a central role in developing that culture.
This article discusses how storytelling can support a stronger safety culture, how leaders and supervisors can use it in day-to-day practice, how artificial intelligence (AI) can assist, and what pitfalls organizations should avoid.
Why Stories Stick When Rules Don’t
Most safety practitioners have seen how quickly a good story travels through a workforce. A powerful near-miss account or a vivid description of a line‑of‑fire incident is often remembered long after a formal briefing has been forgotten.
There is a reason for this. Research in psychology and neuroscience suggests that narratives activate more brain areas than lists of facts, making it easier to remember and recall. A worker is therefore more likely to remember a colleague’s detailed account of nearly falling from a ladder than a generic instruction to “maintain three points of contact.”
Stories communicate values. Openly discussing incidents to emphasize learning and change shows that honesty and improvement are important. In contrast, stories about blame or “getting away with it” reinforce a negative culture.
Before exploring how to craft effective stories, it’s important to consider what makes specific stories resonate in the safety context.
Not every story will help improve safety outcomes. Effective safety stories tend to share a few common features:
Specificity. They clearly describe the task, conditions, people involved, and sequence of events, rather than speaking only in general terms.
A turning point. There is a recognizable moment when a decision, distraction, or condition led to increased risk.
A clear lesson. Listeners understand what should be done differently next time.
A practical change. The story connects to a concrete action: a new control, a change in behaviour, or a different way of communicating.
For example, “Someone nearly slipped in the warehouse last week, so be careful,” is easy to forget. A more detailed account describing the time of day, the unreported spill, the near‑fall, and the subsequent agreement to report all spills immediately gives workers something to picture and a specific behaviour to adopt.
Done well, these stories become reference points that teams draw on when they face similar situations.
Embedding storytelling into Everyday Safety Practice
Storytelling does not require a new program or a large budget. It can be integrated into existing safety activities with a few deliberate changes.
Use existing forums. Toolbox talks, shift handovers, and safety meetings already bring people together. Reserving a few minutes in each session to a recent incident, near‑miss or positive example, told by someone directly involved, can make these forums more compelling and relevant.
Encourage participation, not performance. The objective is not a polished presentation but an honest reflection. Supervisors can invite workers to describe what surprised them, what did not go as planned, and what they might change next time. Simple open questions often work best.
Create a simple story library. Short written summaries, audio clips, or brief videos of incidents and lessons learned can be stored and tagged by topic (e.g., lifting operations, vehicle movements, confined spaces). Over time, this becomes a practical resource for training sessions, refreshers and inductions.
Integrate stories into training. Real incidents can be turned into short case studies or scenarios. Asking trainees, “What would you do here?” before revealing the actual outcome encourages discussion and helps connect procedures to genuine operational settings.
The Role of Leadership
Leadership behaviour strongly influences whether workers feel safe to speak up. When leaders at all levels share their own experiences, including mistakes, near hits, and times they changed courses after feedback, they demonstrate that learning takes priority over blame.
This clear communication sets expectations for how the organization will respond to concerns and incidents. If workers consistently see managers listening carefully, asking questions, and focusing on improvement, they are more likely to report hazards and contribute proactively in discussions.
Leaders can also amplify frontline stories by retelling them in larger forums, such as town halls or internal communications, while crediting the teams involved and emphasizing key lessons. This reinforces the idea that local experiences matter and that those insights from one project or site can benefit the wider organization.
Working Across Languages and Cultures
Many organizations operate with multilingual, multicultural teams. In these environments, technical language and regulatory terminology can be difficult to understand. Stories, told in clear everyday language, can help overcome these gaps.
Several effective approaches are useful:
Use plain language and translate where appropriate. Steer clear of technical terms, acronyms, and highly technical phrasing. Where possible, make key stories and messages available in the main languages spoken on site.
Add visual elements. Photos, diagrams, or simple sketches can make a story easier to follow and remember, especially where literacy levels or language skills vary.
Use multimedia thoughtfully. Some organizations have found that short, animated videos of real incidents, narrated in multiple languages, can convey critical lessons more effectively than lengthy written reports.
The aim is not to replace procedures, but to make the reasoning behind them easier for everyone to grasp and apply.
How AI Can Support Better Safety Storytelling
Artificial intelligence is increasingly used in health and safety to analyze data, such as incident reports, and support decision-making. When applied carefully, AI can also help organizations extract insights from the stories they already collect, such as employee safety observations or practical examples.
Finding patterns in incident narratives. Many incidents and near-miss reports include free-text descriptions. AI-based text analysis can help safety teams recognize recurring themes such as mentions of a particular task, location, or type of misunderstanding that might not be obvious from looking at events one by one. These patterns can guide which stories should be prioritized for discussion or training.
Emphasizing stories with high learning value. By scanning large numbers of reports, AI tools can flag those that illustrate important lessons, such as close calls involving similar decision-making errors or repeated issues in a particular stage of work. Safety professionals can then review these and decide which ones to develop, such as case studies or toolbox talks.
Supporting multilingual communication. AI-enabled translation can help convert short incident summaries and key learning points into multiple languages more quickly. Human review remains necessary, but it can speed up the sharing of stories across global teams.
Enriching training materials. AI can assist in generating scenario variations and discussion questions based on real incident trends, helping trainers to keep content in line with current risks and operations.
However, there are important safeguards. Any use of AI must respect privacy, confidentiality, and legal requirements. Workers should understand how their reports are being used. AI output should always be reviewed by competent professionals before it is used to create training materials or safety communications. AI can help surface patterns and candidates for stories; it cannot replace professional judgment, context, or empathy.
Common Pitfalls to Avoid
Storytelling, with or without AI, is not a solution and can even be counterproductive if misused. Common pitfalls include:
Repetition without renewal. Telling the same stories too often can lead to a loss of interest. Rotating storytellers and updating examples helps keep interest.
Blame‑focused narratives. If stories focus on individual faults rather than system conditions, they can create fear and reduce reporting. Facilitators should guide conversations towards understanding context and improving controls.
Excessive dependence on tools. AI and online systems can help find and share stories, but they cannot replace face-to-face conversations, local knowledge, or professional judgment.
Lack of follow-through. If workers share experiences although they see no changes in procedures, equipment, or supervision, they may become sceptical. Linking stories to visible improvements is essential.
Handled thoughtfully, storytelling ought to strengthen, not compete with, the organization’s wider safety management system.
Fitting Stories into Formal Safety Systems
Storytelling is most effective when it is aligned with existing safety processes. Hazard identification, risk assessment, engineering controls, and formal training remain the pillars of any program. Stories help people understand why those components matter and how they play out in real work.
Real experiences can:
Motivate stronger participation in observations, audits, and training.
Improve workers’ ability to recognize early warning signs by connecting them to familiar examples.
Support long-term culture change by developing a collective “memory” of what has gone wrong in the past and what has been done to prevent recurrence.
Over time, a well-rounded approach that integrates solid systems with honest, well-used stories can help move safety from a set of requirements to a shared value.
Conclusion
A strong safety culture is built not only on regulations and procedures, but also on everyday conversations. The way workers and leaders talk about risk, incidents, and lessons learned has a direct impact on how safely work is carried out.
By deliberately using storytelling coupled with carefully applying AI to identify and share high-value lessons, organizations can better leverage the knowledge they already possess. When people see their experiences listened to and acted upon, safety becomes less related to compliance and more about joint commitment.