Why Incident Counts Arrive Too Late
A low incident count can mean genuine safety performance, or it can mean a facility has simply not yet had its unlucky day. Lagging indicators, by definition, only speak after the fact.
Leading indicators — overdue inspections, backlog of safety-critical maintenance, near-miss reporting rates — give a facility something it can actually act on before an incident occurs.
Choosing Indicators That Actually Predict
The trap most programs fall into is tracking indicators because they're easy to measure rather than because they're predictive, which produces dashboards that look reassuring and mean very little.
Indicators tied directly to barrier health — the condition and testing status of the safeguards a site actually depends on — tend to correlate far better with real risk than generic activity counts.
