The Most Dangerous Phrase in Safety (“We’ve Always Done It This Way”)
The most dangerous phrase in safety? …
“We’ve always done it this way.”
Every serious incident I’ve investigated had that mindset lurking in the background.
-Not because people were careless.
-Not because they didn’t care.
-But because the system stopped evolving while the risks kept changing.
I’ve seen it firsthand:
-SOPs copied forward year after year, long after the work itself changed.
-Unlabeled containers left on a shelf because “that’s how we’ve always stored it,” until someone grabbed the wrong one.
-Bloodborne pathogens ignored outside healthcare because no one questioned the assumption.
These weren’t “bad employees.”
They were systems frozen in time.
Safety problems are rarely human failures. They’re design failures.
And design failures hide inside routines no one has challenged in a decade.
The safest organizations aren’t the ones with the thickest binders.
They’re the ones with the courage to ask:
-“Does this still make sense?”
That question is the start of stewardship.
The start of leadership.
The start of every meaningful safety improvement I’ve ever seen.
What’s one “we’ve always done it this way” moment you’ve seen that needed rewriting?
Written by Andrew Oestmann Chase
Founder, Simple Safety Institute