(57cq) You Can't Manage What You Can't Measure...but Do You Really Manage What You Measure?

The imperious need to measure safety performances through indicators is now a well-established tradition in the process safety community. You don’t improve what you don’t measure has consequently been the mantra that drove important efforts of the community towards not only building reliable lagging representations of safety evolutions but also designing leading indicators providing decision makers with anticipation abilities.

Taking a step back in order to gaining perspective allow us to understand the origin and foundations of this situation. P.Drucker’s “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” seems to be the original starting point that indeed has spread throughout the management community in times where quality management was promising zero default products and conformity to standards believed as the key to successful management. However, management science has moved away towards far more modest precepts thanks to large efforts dedicated to observing real life decision making and organizations appropriation of management tools.

This paper aims at providing the process safety community with new insights gained on the use of indicators by managers and the associated biases and pitfalls they may trigger with the risk of transforming them from leading to misleading Tools.