Encountering reality

Every month, executives around the world receive safety reports. They normally contain charts, frequencies, rates, green and red arrows. Somewhere in those numbers are people.

When Paul O'Neill became CEO of Alcoa, he insisted that every injury report begin with the name of the person who had been injured, together with a short account of what had happened, and that it be distributed within 24 hours.

To some, it may seem like a small change. Why would putting a person's name before a graph matter? And why publish the report within a day, creating even more information for already busy leaders?

It made me wonder whether O'Neill was trying to change not just the information leaders received, but how they encountered reality. A dashboard tells us there were three injuries last month. A name and a story remind us that three people went home differently than they arrived. A categorised event adds to the statistics. A story tells us that Sarah won't be able to lift her child for the next two months. Publishing the report within twenty-four hours means that when leaders read about Sarah, the work that injured her is still happening. The same shift pattern, the same equipment, the same conditions, and the report arrives while there is still something to notice, ask about, and change.

What enables senior leaders to remain in meaningful contact with the reality their decisions shape?

As organisations grow, distance inevitably increases between layers, locations, and roles. Leaders cannot personally experience every job, every customer interaction, or every operational challenge. Reports, dashboards, and summaries help us step back, recognise patterns and make sense of complexity. The challenge emerges when such representations of work become the primary way leaders encounter it.

• Dashboards that reduce work to metrics.

• Risk matrices that replace conversations about uncertainty.

• Escalation processes that filter information as it moves upward.

• Layers of hierarchy that separate decision-makers from everyday work.

• Meetings where decisions are made without the people who do the work.

None of these are inherently problematic, but each compresses reality. As John Law observed in After Method, "parts of the world are distorted into clarity." Texture, ambiguity, and lived experience are progressively filtered as they travel through an organisation.

But distance does more than change what leaders know. It also changes who leaders remain connected to. People become resources. Contractors become costs. Injuries become events. Work becomes something experienced indirectly, through reports rather than through the people living it.

Changing the encounter

Among Ricardo Semler's many experiments at Semco was the decision to leave seats open at board meetings for employees. Anyone could volunteer to attend discussions normally reserved for senior executives. Rather than relying solely on information moving upward through layers of management, Semler created opportunities for leaders to encounter perspectives that would otherwise have been filtered away.

When Greg Foran became CEO of Air New Zealand, he continued a practice he had developed at Walmart: spending time doing frontline work. He stacked shelves, checked in passengers, and worked alongside operational teams. The value wasn't simply that he gained better information. The work revealed itself differently when experienced from within. Equally important, it communicated something to the people doing it: your work is worth understanding, and you are worth spending time with.

At Transpower, meaningful improvement began not with another safety campaign or tighter controls, but with genuine curiosity about contractors' working lives. Leaders discovered that contract insecurity, cumbersome equipment, and practical barriers were shaping behaviour long before anyone reached for another procedure.

A more familiar example is perhaps Undercover Boss. The programme is built on the same premise. Leaders temporarily step into frontline work, encounter the conditions people work within, and often discover opportunities for improvement that were invisible from the executive office. Just as importantly, they meet people whose work they had previously known only through reports, metrics, and organisational charts. And they start to care about them as individuals too.

These examples suggest that leaders need richer encounters with the people and work they are responsible for. Not just more information. 

Proximity isn't enough

The executives from BP and Transocean visited Deepwater Horizon shortly before the explosion. They walked the platform, spoke with workers, and observed operations. Yet something important was missing. The visit appeared to be organised around inspection, reassurance, and confirmation that things were under control. The leaders were physically present, but there is little evidence they genuinely encountered the reality that workers were navigating.

That contrast made me question whether proximity is really the point. What seems to matter is not simply whether leaders are close to the work, but whether they create conditions where reality can affect them. Where they are willing to be surprised, challenged, or changed by what they discover.

Seen this way, many of the practices emerging in contemporary safety begin to look different. Learning Teams. Anecdote Circles. Collective Insights. Appreciative Audits. Discovery Agents. These are often described as learning methods. Increasingly, I wonder whether they are something else, something more fundamental. Perhaps they are better thought of as ways of creating encounters between leaders, workers and the reality of work before it becomes abstracted into dashboards, investigations, and performance reviews.

What leaders do with distance

Organisations inevitably create distance. The question is how leaders respond to it. Some rely almost entirely on representations of reality. Others deliberately create opportunities to encounter work and the people doing it more directly.

Paul O'Neill's reporting change was a way of ensuring that leaders encountered an injured person before they encountered a performance indicator. The report still contained data. But the data no longer arrived before the person. 

Perhaps one of the deepest challenges of leadership is remaining open to encountering the reality we are responsible for shaping. 

Close enough to understand.

Close enough to care.

/Daniel

PS The specific practice of O’Neill may not be replicable everywhere. In many jurisdictions, including Australia, naming injured workers in reports raises legitimate privacy concerns. But the principle transfers: how do we ensure that an injury arrives with enough human texture that it can still be felt?