Breaking Free from Safety Stagnation

Familiar safety strategies can lose their effectiveness over time. By recognizing outdated thinking and embracing new approaches, leaders can overcome organizational inertia and build stronger, more sustainable safety performance.

• By Robert Pater
• Sep 14, 2026

Unsticking Safety Doldrums 

Have you also seen some leaders overly repeat minor variations on themes that haven’t really gotten results? Seemingly stuck in an approach to Safety issues that just isn’t paying off? Sadly, many companies have ingrained once-effective implementations that have ceased to return real improvements - or those that have been grandfathered in and never really moved the needle. Leading to disappointments, loss of leadership credibility and, most important. potentially avoidable injuries.

It’s akin to knowing some who sadly remain in a dysfunctional relationship, whether due to fears of jumping from the frying pan into a fire or from a reluctance to leave the (dis)comfort of the known. Or just plain inertia. Even when things just aren’t working. 

Will Rogers addressed this: “The secret of success if simple. If you’re in a hole, quit digging.” But clearly not “simple” enough for many to recognize or to pull themselves away from the lure of “staying the course”, “keep on keeping on”, “just try harder” (to do the same things.)

I’ve seen this within many organizations. Including a conversation, I had with a VP of Safety at a large utility who expressed frustration that many of their outdoor workers continuing to suffer soft-tissue injuries year after year. I then asked what they had tried to counter this. He replied to their main approach for the previous half-decade was hiring outside medical professionals to shadow their linemen and truckmen to provide some kind of technical coaching. The VP then ruefully told me how much they’d cumulatively spent on these interventions – and after all that nothing had changed, the same level of injuries persisted. I asked, “So why do you still do this?” He blurted out, “That’s a good question!” and then in short order ended our conversation. Last I heard they kept repeating the same approach with similar results.

This isn’t by far the first time I’ve seen resources expended on effectively beating a clearly hobbled horse. And wondered “why?”:  Why do otherwise smart, strategic, dedicated/committed leaders seemingly stick with approaches that have consistently gotten only diminishing returns at best? Why do some reflexively eschew “different” methods that might possibly make a difference?

Why do some people persist in doing the same old things yet somehow expect different and far better results? 

Why do workers, all people in general, seem resistant to changing what appears to be dysfunctional habits? 

And, on another level, whether being mind-stuck on the same old “solutions” is one of the largely unrecognized contributors to tenacious injuries, such as soft-tissue injuries/strains/sprains and slips/trips/falls?

Why don’t people consider doing something different? What’s behind some of this resistance to change? (This event affects highly trained, intelligent doctors. See my article, “Expanding Leadership:  The Courage to Go Beyond Unsubstantiated Beliefs”)

Most important, how might we get beyond staying mired in effectively ineffective modes in Safety (and elsewhere?) – I suggest if this rings, you might bring up these questions.

Understanding this has spurred research in neuroscience. Frederike Petzschner, assistant professor of cognitive and psychological sciences at Brown University and the Carney Institute for Brain Science, described “Belief Stickiness” as “a common phenomenon, a cognitive glitch where an individual struggles to detect that their environment has transitioned from one stage to another.” Like what Professor Ezenwa E. Olumba, with the Royal Holloway University of London, terms “cognitive immobility.”

Petzschner’s research found that increasing serotonin levels (through select “SSRI”/Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors) could reduce “the tendency to get stuck on an old idea despite new contradicting evidence.” 

Unsticking What’s Safety Stuck

It certainly would be a problematic challenge to medically screen and treat all needing company members with SSRI’s – and these can also bring other side effects. But we know from long real-world practice there are other, non-pharmaceutical ways that may effectively boost serotonin and that help change beliefs – but rarely through “traditional persuasion” alone. 

• Stuck:  Talk alone or mainly is indeed cheap. And limited. 
Unsticking: We know that experience can provide a level of interactive perspective that pierces old patterns. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a sensory experience can be worth millions. As in generating a belief changing “Aha!” that sets the stage for coming unstuck in previously self-limiting strategies, towards doing things differently. Our training emphasizes this.

• Stuck:  Leaders who default (blindly? Insistently?) to strategies that have either not worked or have diminishing returns.
Unsticking:  Piloting different approaches (which some companies do with different sites trying out new methods to address a common Safety concern then report back to all.)

• Stuck:  Only focusing on equipment and environmental changes in attempting to quell soft-tissue injuries or slips/trips/falls. Controlling tooling, setup and procedures is always a great first step but clearly can’t be the sole one – or else these injuries wouldn’t continue to prevail. 
Unsticking: It’s also critical to help people learn methods they value and can readily implement for taking control of their own safety

• Stuck:  Predominantly attempting to improve safety buy-in and behavior by lecturing, disciplining, “reinforcing”, “rah-rahing”/cheerleading, threatening or badgering. 
Unsticking:  Rather, neuroscience – and our three plus decades experiences with companies worldwide – consistently show that helping people self-convince rules way over these limited motivational approaches.

• Stuck:  Or when seeking executive approval putting all (or most) request eggs in the one basket of “making a business case for Safety” (i.e. trailing indicative financial improvements.)
Unsticking: Also including a myriad of other draws (personal, PR, attraction and retention, performance, etc.)

There are, of course, numerous other ways to change beliefs. But, as in all things’ leadership, change must begin with the leader. Safety leaders must first be willing and then self-enabled to courageously and calmly examine any of own stuck biases and strategies for what no longer really works in an unquo statis. Then to try something that goes beyond their previous modus operandi. That’s the foundation on which they can then build to help others – executives through workers – towards Safety actions and patterns that elevate and sustain performance.

This article originally appeared in the September 2026 issue of Occupational Health & Safety.