Raise the Standard | Reader tool | Chapter 12
The Safety Return Calculator
Take one event that already happened in your business. Price it properly, including everything the usual number quietly leaves out. Then work out what the control that would have prevented it is actually worth, in the ledger your board already reads.
How to use it, and what it is for
Chapter 12 priced a tyre at somewhere between five and eleven thousand dollars of machine availability, then told you what that figure left out. Replacement plant. Mobilisation. The production that never happened. The consequences of the failure itself. Those exclusions are this calculator. The narrow number is the one every business already knows how to work out. The honest number is the one that changes the conversation.
Work backwards from something real. An event that has already happened, where you know what broke and roughly what it cost. Guessing a bracket is fine. A defensible range beats a blank space, and every field here can be left at zero.
Read this before you use the output
This is a calculator for events that have already happened, on purpose. It is not a test a person has to pass before you protect them. A leader who needs the return calculated before protecting somebody has already told you what they are. The point of putting a figure on it is narrower than that. Every other function arrives at the table with its contribution quantified and safety keeps arriving with a story. The story is true. In a room where a budget is being allocated it is also structurally weaker than a number.
1. The event
One thing that actually happened
A sentence. What failed, what it did and roughly when.
The obvious answer sits on the surface and it is usually a competence story. Keep pulling. What was the condition that made it likely.
2. The full operational cost
Including everything the usual number leaves out
A. Direct and immediate
B. Asset downtime, the Chapter 12 method
Working days out of service, hours in a working day, and the owning and operating rate for that asset per hour. If you do not know the rate, your plant or finance people will, and it is usually already in a schedule somewhere.
This is the number the book works out in prose and it is the one most businesses stop at. Everything below is what stopping there costs you.
C. What the narrow number leaves out
D. The cost of dealing with it
The hours senior people spent on this instead of on the business. This is real money and it is almost never counted.
E. If somebody was hurt
Leave this at zero if nobody was. It is here because the ledger normally hides it, not because it is the reason to act. The harm is the reason to act. This is what the harm also costs.
The narrow number
$0
Downtime only. What most businesses report and stop at.
The honest number
$0
What this one event actually cost you.
Enter a downtime figure and one other cost to see the gap.
3. The control
The one that would have stopped it
Be specific and name a thing somebody can own. A roster redesign that separates rest from earnings. A pre-start that gets checked rather than filed. Not "more training".
Be honest about the last one. A control that removes seventy per cent of a risk is a good control. One that claims a hundred is a control nobody has tested.
4. The return, in three ledgers
Downtime avoided, rework avoided, and the credential you keep
Chapter 12 names three things worth counting and almost nobody counts the third. Fill in what you can defend and leave the rest at zero.
Ledger one
Downtime that will not happen
How many times a year does an event like this one land on you? Include the near ones that got away with it.
Ledger two
Rework avoided
Work done twice each year because the job was not planned properly the first time, that this control removes. Separate from the event above.
Ledger three
The credential you keep
The one nobody models, and in contracting it is usually the biggest. A prequalification, an accreditation or a place on a panel that a serious event would put at risk. Put in the annual revenue that credential carries, then your honest read on the chance of losing it if this event repeats.
Margin, not revenue. Losing a two million dollar panel does not cost you two million, it costs you the margin on it. Understate this one and it still wins the argument.
Return per year
$0
Control per year
$0
Return on the control
Not yet
The line for the board pack
One page, not fifty. The risks that came up, what they cost and what is being done about them. Edit it into your own words before it goes in.
5. Now do it four more times
Because one event is not the question
The question Chapter 12 ends on is not what one event cost you. It is what your safety data is already telling you about the money you are losing everywhere else. One event cannot answer that. Five can. Go back through the last twelve months, pull the events you already know about and put a defensible number beside each one.
| The event | Honest cost | Same root cause? |
|---|---|---|
| Twelve months, five events you already knew about | $0 |
If the same root cause is sitting in more than one row, you have not found five problems. You have found one, five times.
Where this goes next
Print it and put it beside the operational data in the next board pack, on the same page, read as one story. Then do the thing Chapter 12 actually asks for. When the next incident lands, ask the operational question alongside the human one, and fund the controls that protect people and margin together, ahead of the ones that only tidy the paperwork.
From Raise the Standard: Integrity and Influence in High-Risk Organisations by Matt Jones, Chapter 12. Nothing you type here is sent anywhere. It is held in your own browser until you clear it.
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