If nobody was hurt, does it matter?

Posted on June 26, 2026

By Steve Wallace
There is a tendency in this profession to judge success very simply. If we get through the day without hurting anyone and we have made money, then it has been a good day.

On the face of it, that sounds reasonable. In practice, it can hide something more uncomfortable.

Many of the things that eventually lead to harm have already happened. They just did not result in injury at the time.

A ladder slips but no one falls. A load shifts but misses everyone. A tile falls from a roof and lands harmlessly on the ground. Nothing is reported, because nothing happened. Or at least, that is how it is seen.

The warning signs we ignore

Serious incidents are relatively rare. You cannot rely on injury alone to tell you where the problems are because there simply are not enough of them to learn from.

That is where near misses come in. Or, more accurately, ‘learning events’.

A near miss is not an absence of failure. It is evidence of it. It offers a chance to understand what is going wrong without the cost of harm, disruption or enforcement. Yet time and again, they are dismissed. If no one was hurt, it does not matter.

From a health and safety point of view, that misses the point entirely.

There is a difference to the public between a tile falling and killing a child in a pram and the same tile landing harmlessly on the floor. To a health and safety professional, there should be no difference at all. The event that mattered was the tile falling. The outcome was chance.

From accidents to systems

Near misses come from the same place as accidents. Poor planning, poor supervision, weak control and often organisational issues that sit behind individual actions.

The difference is what happens afterwards.

When someone is injured, the focus can turn to blame. With a near miss, there is far more opportunity to be honest. And when organisations are honest, they usually find the same thing – the problem was already there. In many cases it has happened before. Once, twice, sometimes many times. At that point it is no longer unforeseeable. It is a risk that has been allowed to persist.

Learning before the outcome

No one expects businesses to predict the future. But when something happens repeatedly, even without harm, it should be recognised and acted upon.

That is the principle behind plan, do, check, act. Not just doing the work but asking whether it could have been done better.

There was one company I worked with that appeared to have too many incidents. The concern was how it looked. We changed the approach. Near misses were not just safety events, they were anything that had not gone to plan, damaged materials, failed inspections, poor quality work.

Once that was visible, patterns emerged and the work improved. Over time, incidents reduced. So did defects. The system worked because we were finally seeing where it was failing.

For many businesses, the issue is not systems or procedures. It is attitude. Near misses are often seen as a burden rather than what they are, an opportunity to learn without loss. That requires a shift. Away from blame and towards understanding. Away from asking who was at fault and towards asking what could have been done differently.

Preventative failure

Not reporting a near miss is often a reflection of culture. If something is not discussed, recorded or learned from, the organisation is simply waiting for the outcome to catch up with it.

The opportunity was there. It just was not taken. So the question is a simple one. If nobody was hurt, does it matter? From a practical point of view, it matters a great deal, because by the time someone is hurt, the lesson was already there.