Balfour Beatty have a good approach to "Zero Harm" and set their stall out a number of years ago to achieve this by 2012. But the correct me if i am wrong, Balfour Beatty did not achieve this goal, even with all the resources that they allocated to it they could not achieve "zero harm". No doubt along the way they dramatically improved their health & safety performance but in my opinion in an industry such as construction where there is interaction between different trades, time restrictions, cost implications, prices screwed to the floor, zero harm is unachievable. On the other side of the spectrum is the possibility of under reporting (had experience of this in the past).

I disagree. When I was an archer (a hobby that I drifted out of some years ago), I aimed at the very centre of the target every time, even though I know I would not get every arrow in the inner gold. The target should be what you want, not what you pessimistically think you can achieve reliably or easily.

I get where you are coming from and I'm not arguing the merits or otherwise of the Olympics, I agree that some targets (not just zero targets) will cause under reporting, however some (but not all) businesses have a culture where reporting isnt going to be a problem. The ORR report annual H&S is a good example of 'zero' at work. "Our vision is for zero workforce and industry-caused passenger fatalities, with an ever-decreasing overall safety risk." and.... "London Underground, Overground and Docklands Light Railway all achieved a year without any workforce and industry caused passenger fatalities". The target isnt 'zero harm' because ORR possibly recognise this as a concept that is fawed because harm is such a broad and unachievable concept, but slice it into certain groupings, types of incidents or operations and zero as a target can work well.

Only unreachable if not setting a timeline on it - our last campaign was incident free - campaign was 5 days long. Last project we had 2 damage incidents and 1 MTI - it lasted 13 months. We use it as a vision.

Allanwood Again back to the semantics of targets, objectives and visions. Even in this thread people are using these terms with varying definitions. I think I will say again that perhaps we need new management systems that throw out these SMART ideas and look towards a much more fuzzy approach to control than has hitherto been proposed. Some years ago it became possible to control camera shake by the use of Fuzzy Mathematics in the electronic circuitry. We need to set our brains to a management system that corrects by means of fuzzy logic application rather than the achievement of a specific set point(target). Throw out the old and find a new way forward Bob