Leading indicators as indicators that “changes before the actual risk level of the organization has changed”

What is a leading indicator?

There’s lots of definitions – I’ve covered dozens on my site. But this is one I’ve liked from Kjellen for a good while, where:

“a leading safety performance indicator as an indicator that changes before the actual risk level of the organization has changed”

Reiman & Pietikäinen discuss the implications of such a definition. To be leading in this sense, it must be “sensitive to changes in the organizational risk control system” and hence, “cannot focus on ‘‘failings’’, ‘‘holes’’ or even ‘‘near-misses’’ or ‘‘deviations’’.

Instead, such an indicator must “provide information on the organizational activities and the organizational means of controlling risk”.

Further, these leading indicators may not be “measures of precursors to harm but as measures of signs of changing vulnerabilities or improvements … This means that leading indicators should measure things that might 1 day become precursors to harm or cause a precursor to harm as well as things that contribute to safety in positive terms”.

In my non-legal view, after reading heaps of prosecutions and coronial inquiries, this definition seems somewhat aligned to legal interpretations of effective oversight on proper systems.

Ref: Reiman, T., & Pietikäinen, E. (2012). Leading indicators of system safety–monitoring and driving the organizational safety potential. Safety science, 50(10), 1993-2000.