It’s entirely natural for any organisation to feel uneasy when data challenges long-held beliefs and operating practices. Yet in the arena of life-safety, such defensiveness carries serious moral, legal, and reputational risks, not to mention the potential harm to residents living in affected buildings across the UK.
Life safety specialists share a simple motivation: to make people safer. Our role is to understand and calculate the risk profile of buildings and their occupants, and to use that knowledge to guide informed, evidence-based decisions. We don’t exist to criticise or compete; we’re here to identify, quantify and prioritise interventions that improve the safety of residents. We provide a ‘single source of truth’ to support leaders in making the best possible safety decisions.
Learning from high-risk sectors
In high-hazard industries, such as aviation and oil and gas, near misses are treated as vital learning opportunities. These industries have built ‘no-blame’ cultures, where mistakes and close calls are examined, not hidden. The goal is to ensure the same errors never happen twice. They understand that risk should not be feared, it should be understood, studied, and managed collectively.
If the social housing sector embraced this cultural mindset, it could prove transformational. By replacing defensiveness with collaboration, this would empower knowledge sharing and foster a shared sense of accountability for safety. The age of passive compliance is over as society demands better and a powerful regulator flexes its muscles, and organisations must now show proactive, risk-based assurance. The real threat is not what an external consultant might uncover, but how an organisation chooses to respond.
Building a no-blame, collaborative culture
Cultural and structural barriers still exist. Life-safety is a specialist field, and internal teams often face unrealistic expectations without sufficient resources or expertise. But by removing stigma and fostering collaborative partnerships, organisations can get back on the front foot with enhanced asset data and prioritised interventions to future-proof safety strategies.
Ultimately, life-safety cannot sit within a single team or leadership silo. When responsibility is shared, and openness replaces defensiveness, organisations reduce the risk and impact of the most serious high consequence, low frequency events that are seared into public consciousness.
Creating a no-blame culture, one that embraces transparency, collective responsibility, and continuous learning, is not just good practice, it’s essential for ensuring that the people we act for always remain safe and secure.
Cultural transformation lies at the heart of Harmony Fire’s recently launched Life Guard framework, an open-source toolkit for housing leaders to objectively score their organisational life safety assurance response. To learn more about the framework and to download the full report click here.
