Tibbetts: Focus on SIF Potential to Prevent Tragedy Before It Happens
At ASSP Safety 2025, Highwire's David Tibbetts urges safety leaders to investigate serious injury potential—not just outcomes.
- By Stasia DeMarco
- Jul 18, 2025
Ahead of his upcoming presentation at the ASSP Safety 2025 conference in Orlando, July 22-24, David Tibbetts, Chief Safety Officer at Highwire, is emphasizing a proactive, learning-centered approach to serious injury and fatality (SIF) prevention.
Shifting Focus to Potential – Not Just Outcomes
Tibbetts is scheduled to speak on a critical topic: identifying and analyzing events with the potential to result in serious injury or fatality, even if they didn’t cause harm in the moment.
“I’ve been spending a lot of my time on the topic for the last two years,” Tibbetts said. “It’s critical that organizations don’t just look at what went wrong after someone gets hurt, but also pay close attention to the events that could have resulted in serious injuries or fatalities.”
He noted that companies often miss opportunities to prevent future harm by only responding to outcomes, rather than precursors.
Reframing Near Misses as Learning Tools
Tibbetts hopes his session will help reframe how safety leaders view “near misses” and other non-injury incidents. Instead of seeing them as administrative afterthoughts, he advocates treating them as high-value learning opportunities.
“These events are goldmines for organizational learning,” he explained. “They give you a glimpse into what could happen—and that’s where you can intervene before real harm occurs.”
Culture, Systems, and Behavior Must Align
Tibbetts also plans to explore how organizational culture, systems, and leadership behavior all play a role in reducing risk.
“If we’re serious about preventing SIFs, then we have to build a culture that encourages people to speak up, investigate meaningfully, and act on what they find,” he said.
He emphasized that creating this kind of learning environment means investing not just in tools and training, but also in psychological safety and leadership accountability.
From Compliance to Commitment
In what may be the heart of his message, Tibbetts closed by encouraging a shift in mindset among safety professionals—from regulatory compliance to genuine commitment to preventing harm.
“At the end of the day, our job isn’t to check boxes—it’s to make sure people go home in one piece,” he said. “That starts with being curious about what could go wrong, even when nothing did.”
Tibbetts' presentation, Beyond TRIR: Leveraging SIF-Potential Tracking for Comprehensive Safety Management in Construction, is at 10:00 am on Wednesday, July 23, as part of the broader educational programming with more than 200 breakout sessions, which will focus on emerging safety practices, standards, and technologies.
About the Author
Stasia DeMarco is the Content Editor for OH&S.