Last week, as part of what might reasonably be described as a midlife crisis, I undertook motorcycle learner license training.
Much of the course was about handling the machine. Balance, throttle, clutch, shifting gears, braking, cornering, where to put yourself on the road. There was also a part on collision avoidance, using illustrated traffic situations for me and the 18-year-olds to discuss, often with travel paths ending in a small starburst where two vehicles meet. The bushy-white-bearded instructor kept coming back to three moves to solve the situations: look out, slow down, and move away.
The three moves have something in common: they preserve margin, the room I have left before the road asks more of me than I can give. Looking out lets me anticipate. Slowing down buys me time. Moving away creates distance. The margin shrinks and grows as conditions change, and I adjust. Safety is something I keep doing, moment by moment, with what’s available to me.
The course drew the edge for us, starburst and all. Out on the road I can’t see it with any certainty, and I tend to find out where it was too late. What I can feel is the pull toward it. Keep up with the group. Get home before dark. Those pressures don’t register as pressure, and I spend my margin without noticing: following a little closer, riding a little faster, and letting my attention drift to the view. Each is a small withdrawal. Each feels like competence, so I miss how thin the margin has become.
The conditions I ride in shape my margin too. I can’t repave the road, direct the traffic, or change the weather. However, I can pick a bike that suits me. Past that, I ride what’s there.
At work, much of what’s available to me is handed over by someone else. A technician once told me he needed a thermometer to measure the workshop temperature for cable tension. He looked for five days, and in the end he used his phone. He knew the job, and the workshop had spent part of his margin before he began. Schedules, staffing, equipment, access to expertise, the authority to change a plan and the way people respond when someone raises a concern all draw on a person’s margin in the same way.
Work drifts the way riders do. Nobody decides to run with less room. Equipment is short, so someone sources it from elsewhere. The schedule tightens, so a step gets folded into another. Each adjustment is sensible that afternoon, and each takes a little more of the margin until the people doing the job are working at an edge nobody has pointed out. From outside, it looks like someone who cut a corner. From inside it was a string of reasonable decisions.
Nobody can draw that edge for a crew on site the way the course drew it for us. That level of clarity is easier in a classroom or a lab. In reality it gets found by comparing what each person sees. The rider at the back of the group sees what the one at the front can’t. The night shift knows which stand is always missing. The scheduler knows what the client has been promised. Each holds a piece of the picture, and the edge becomes clearer when the pieces are put side by side.
Where the edge sits is half of it. A crew also has to settle which ways of using the margin are acceptable. Some of those calls belong to the people doing the job. Some belong to the people who set the pressures. Neither of those calls is made well alone. Some are fixed, and the people who hold the standard should say so. That’s what safety conversations are for: working out where the edge is and agreeing what to do about it.
We could be as interested in how much room people have to maneuver as in which hazards they’re exposed to. If that’s in focus, there are questions worth asking:
What makes this work difficult? It starts from the job.
Where are you running out of time, tools, plans, or support? This gauges where the margin is getting thin.
What are you having to compensate for? Compensating is the margin being spent, and people usually have a long list.
What would make your work easier? It points to what would give people more space. The requests are often small
It's making me wonder: to what extent is the purpose of safety management to preserve and expand people's room to maneuver? Understanding that room gives leaders a second question to ask of any decision, whether it’s a new rule, a tighter schedule, or a restructure: what does this do to people’s room to respond? Some rules reduce it without anyone noticing. Others expand it by making clear where the edge is so people can act confidently up to it. Design can widen it too: tools that fit the job, slack in the staffing and the schedule, and a way for the problem someone noticed on Tuesday to reach somebody who can fix it by Friday. We put a lot into training people to cope with a setup, and much less into asking whether the setup fits the work. Design done on people’s behalf starts aging the moment the work moves on. Design done with them keeps pace.
On the course, I learned a few ways to preserve my margin. At work, preserving and expanding that margin is something we have to do together.
/Daniel
PS Want to get better at Safety Conversations? I’m running a training workshop in London on 8 December 2026.