Embedding insight: How health and safety practice lifts governance

Some health and safety experiences are so odd they almost make you laugh, says Helen Sadgrove, New Zealand Managing Director of HSE Global, as she recounts a visit to an unnamed New Zealand business.

“They had a homemade scaffold with pieces of wood taped together,” says Sadgrove, who was visiting the business as a health and safety consultant. The scaffold had solved one problem – but potentially created more.

For Sadgrove, it highlighted the tension between practical ingenuity and formal safety standards. “You hear people talk about Kiwi ingenuity and the number eight wire mentality. It’s not always a bad thing. That kind of thinking can help us innovate and thrive, but it also shows us why governance and oversight matter, because not every workaround is without risk.

“We want people to be resourceful, but we also want them to be safe. That’s where leadership and governance come in: creating the conditions where both are possible.

In a 20-plus-year career in health and safety, including time as a regulator, manager and consultant, the UK expat has seen both the amusing and the tragic. “Anybody who’s worked in health and safety for a while has been exposed to heartache.”

Sadgrove wants her research to have real-world impact. “I wanted to do the PhD to come up with something practical and evidence-based, so I can say to directors and boards, ‘Hey, this is what matters’. Often, boards don’t know how to do this well.

“Current models for H&S governance tend to be linear, compliance-focused and overly reliant on static indicators. They rarely account for the emerging and relational nature of organisational safety risks.”

She explains that boards often rely on formal structures, charters, reports and scheduled visits to understand work. These mechanisms offer consistency and accountability, but they don’t always tell the whole story. Directors can become preoccupied with finding the perfect dashboard or definitive assurance report.

“That doesn’t really exist,” she says. “Organisations are always changing, people adapt and work shifts, so what mattered last month might not matter today. Equally, risk can be invisible, silently shifting beneath our feet. If we aren’t adapting our practice, we risk being surprised and failing to serve our organisations and our people.”

To be fair to boards, they are often following advice they’ve received. Sadgrove says she used to wonder if the governance advice given by the health and safety profession was up to scratch.

“The problem is we’ve got into this fixed mindset around what health and safety is and how we should approach it. We’ve not evolved. We’re still thinking as we did when we were pumping out widgets from factories.”

Rather than chasing certainty, Sadgrove urges boards to shift from a mindset of control to one of insight. “It’s not about having all the right data. It’s about asking better questions and then making sense of the responses.

“Many directors sit on multiple boards and bring a wealth of experience, but that value isn’t always realised unless boards take time to reflect together, to connect what they’re seeing and hearing, and to surface their different perspectives.

“It’s the quality of their interactions, how they listen, challenge and interpret that makes safety governance adaptive.”

Sadgrove describes adaptive safety governance as a practice shaped by context, dialogue and shared learning. “It’s a shift from oversight to sensemaking, from assurance to inquiry. It’s not a tick-box approach, but one that fosters psychological safety and allows early signals of risk to be surfaced. Effective boards don’t just receive information; they engage with it, challenge it and adjust based on what they learn.”

She says that shift begins in the relational space between directors. Trust and respect influence how meaning is made from information, how decisions are framed, and how effectively boards can support their organisations to be safe, healthy and capable of thriving in complexity.

She draws a parallel with financial decision-making. “Boards would never make a major decision without considering the financial implications. Health and safety deserves the same mindset, especially in complex systems where actions in one area can reverberate unpredictably elsewhere.

“Where I’ve seen the most progress is in boards that stop separating health and safety as a standalone topic and start embedding it within their overall governance practice. When we treat safety as part of the wider system, we gain better insight into how everything fits together.”

Sadgrove also advocates for culturally inclusive governance. “In Aotearoa, we have a unique opportunity to learn from Māori governance traditions, which are inherently relational and holistic. Ambicultural governance brings together Māori and Western worldviews in a way that can make governance more adaptive, values- driven and ultimately more effective.”

She emphasises that effective boards don’t need to be perfect. “There’s a humility in good safety governance, a willingness to admit what we don’t know, to keep learning, and to seek input from others who see the system from different vantage points.”

Ultimately, Sadgrove’s research is about helping boards move from good intentions to better practice. It proposes a framework grounded in systems thinking and relationships, designed not to replace existing structures, but to breathe life into them.

“It’s not about adding more to the agenda. It’s about strengthening what’s already there: the way boards think, talk and decide, because those moments shape whether people go home safe, and whether the organisation can adapt and succeed into the future.”