Safer Tomorrow thought leadership series: Jen Maddison

As PSS Health, Safety, and Culture Lead, Jen Maddison is no stranger to thinking about how ports can achieve a safer tomorrow – it begins with the choices we make today — a shared commitment that demands responsibility and action from every one of us.

As an industry we know what needs to happen: we talk about learning lessons from incidents, about behavioural safety and improving culture. However, on the quayside managers and safety professionals are still struggling; they want to make these things happen, but time, resources, and sheer determination are stretched thin. They feel that while senior managers say the right things, their actions don’t always back it up, making it hard to embed the culture we all aspire to.

The challenge for the sector, is to move beyond words and tackle the hard work required to make it happen, which is easy to say – much harder to put into practice. We need to take a more intelligent approach to how we view safety. The days of seeing it solely as the remit of the health and safety team are behind us.

Safety is no longer a problem for one department to solve—it’s a shared endeavour requiring a collective commitment across all levels. When PSS asked senior health and safety managers what is preventing the port sector from becoming a sector of safety excellence, their top asks for CEOs were clear: recognise what has already been achieved and lead by example, embody the culture you want to see while holding others to the same standards, invest in resources, allow time for changes to develop and embed, and champion innovation that delivers safer systems by design.

When CEOs believe this is about addressing safety culture, they are already on the wrong path. It’s about company culture because good safety culture is simply an output of that. A strong company culture isn’t built in isolation; it’s shaped by what happens on the ground every day. To understand and strengthen that culture we need to look closely at how work is actually done and learn from the people doing it.

Too often, safety is reduced to counting incidents and measuring the things that have gone wrong. We carry out investigations and look for the causes of why things went wrong, but we don’t apply the same level of scrutiny to the activities that went well. We often focus on learning from mistakes, yet the real power lies in also learning from our successes — the everyday tasks that go right, quietly and consistently, without a hitch.

We gather large amounts of valuable data from incidents and near misses, but we also need to be able to analyse what ‘good’ looks like and that requires data from ‘normal’ days. By looking at what goes right, not just what goes wrong, we can identify patterns of success, understand the conditions that enable safe and efficient operations, and spot early warning signs before issues escalate. This kind of proactive analysis might include workflow mapping, toolbox talks, post-activity briefings, task analyses, or structured conversations with frontline teams to capture what’s working well and why. Discussing and reviewing these encourages repetition of success, enhancing team engagement and cohesion.

As well as gathering more data, we need to start learning at a deeper level. The richness of detail in descriptions and investigation reports is often underutilised and yet leveraging this qualitative data can reveal underlying patterns and systemic issues. The application of AI solutions offers a powerful way to uncover trends, identify root causes, and understand how and why incidents occur.

Investment in new technology and AI is vital to making ports a sector of safety excellence. This investment is not just about purchase cost, it’s about investing time and knowledge for the research and development of tools, and investment in people and workforce skills. Committing to this investment in AI will be game-changing, but change doesn’t happen overnight. Sustained organisational change takes time, consistency, and clear direction. It’s about setting realistic, measurable goals with milestones that show progress, demonstrate impact, and keep people motivated.

A vision alone isn’t enough — success depends on commitment at every level. Leaders must provide direction, resources, and accountability, while everyone in the organisation takes responsibility for their own actions and for each other. This can’t be surface-level or symbolic; it must become ‘the way we do things here’. Real change means embedding safety and responsibility into every decision, asking tough questions, and confronting uncomfortable truths — including why incidents happen or go unreported. A safer tomorrow won’t come from words alone; it will come from action. We know what needs to happen: embed safety into company culture, learn from success as well as failure, and use data and technology intelligently to drive improvement.

All this means investing in people, empowering middle managers, and committing resources and time to make change stick. Safety excellence is not a destination—it’s a way of working, every day, at every level. The challenge now is simple: stop talking about change and start living it. Let’s make safety the way we do things around here, not just the aspiration.