Stopping Shouldn't Take Courage

We ask a lot of the bloke on the tools. We give him control of work, a permit, a JHA, a Take 5, a rescue plan, a roles-and-responsibilities matrix and nine Life Saving Rules. Then we tell him he has stop work authority — and quietly leave him to be the one brave enough to use it.

That's the flaw sitting underneath every job front I've walked onto. Stopping requires courage, so it doesn't happen. Not because people don't care. Because calling a stop means being the person who put the whole front on hold, in front of three contractors, with the schedule already tight.

There's a fix for that, and it's borrowed from the engineers.

What's already good

Two things in this space genuinely work, and I'm not interested in replacing either.

The Step 7 Safe Work Process. If you've not seen it: seven steps — Plan, Communicate, Check Equipment, Prepare Area, Control Energy, Final Check, Start Work — with an After Action Review that loops back to the start. Its best line is on the front: "Starting work is NOT step #1." That single sentence does more work than most safety campaigns. Step 2 is Transition to Work — ask open questions, which is exactly the right instinct, sitting right there in a card that's already in the industry.

Life Saving Rules. Derived from 1,484 fatal incidents and 1,173 high-potential events, with IOGP's view that following them could have prevented around 70% of those deaths. That's not a poster. That's a dataset.

So what's missing? Two things. The stops aren't scheduled, and the crew isn't thinking.

Turn the reset into a hold point

Engineering and QA have solved this problem already, and we've never borrowed it. A hold point is a defined point in a process where work stops until someone verifies and releases it. Nobody has to be brave. Nobody's putting themselves out there. It's just the plan — the work was always going to stop here.

Now apply it to safety at the job front. At the Step 1 plan, the crew agrees the hold points out loud, in advance:

• Before confined space entry — always. Different job, different rescue, different rules.
• Before energy isolation is broken or proved — the tag says one thing, the plant might say another.
• When the scope changes — the job in front of you isn't the job on the permit.
• When a new person joins the front — they weren't there for the plan, so they don't have the picture.
• When another crew arrives above, below or beside — SIMOPS is created, not planned.
• When the rescue plan or the standby changes.
• At the transition between steps 4, 5 and 6 — prepare, control energy, final check. The riskiest handovers on the card.

Then the reframe that matters: a hold point isn't stop work authority. It's the opposite. Stop work authority asks an individual to have courage. A hold point removes the need for courage entirely, because stopping was always in the plan. You're not halting the job — you're arriving where the job said you'd pause.

Here's the part worth labouring with your crews: discuss why each hold point is there. A hold point nobody understands becomes a tick. A hold point where everyone knows this is where people have died becomes a control. That conversation takes ninety seconds and it's the difference between the two.

Ask, don't tell

Here's the thing I keep coming back to, because I've watched it work. When someone reads hazards out at a crew, nine people look at their boots. When you ask a question, they think.

That's not a soft observation — it's one of the most replicated findings in cognitive psychology. It's called the testing effect, or retrieval practice: actively pulling information out of memory produces dramatically better retention and engagement than passively receiving it. Every training department in the world knows this. Almost no pre-start uses it.

So stop briefing. Start asking:

• "If he goes down in there, who's coming and how long have we got?"
• "What's the wind limit on this lift, and who's watching it?"
• "Which Life Saving Rule is in play on this job today?"
• "What's different from what we planned yesterday?"
• "Where's the line of fire on this one?"

The Life Saving Rules are perfect for this, and it's what they're actually best at. They were designed to be recalled by a worker in the moment — so use them as the question set, not the poster. "Which one applies here?" beats reciting all nine.

A bit of trivia to get the crew's mind in the game works for the same reason. It's not a gimmick — it's retrieval practice, and it works because a question demands an active brain where a statement permits a passive one.

Tying it together

None of this is a new form. It's three changes to the setup you already run:

1. Agree the hold points at the plan — and say why each one exists.
2. Run the transition to work as questions, not a briefing — one Life Saving Rule question, one rescue question, one "what's different" question.
3. Treat a hold point as a scheduled event, not a brave act — and back the person who calls one, publicly, the first time it happens.

Everything else — the permit, the JHA, the Take 5, the rescue plan — stays. The point isn't to add a seventh document. It's to make the six you have produce one honest conversation, with pauses already built into it.

If stopping requires courage, you've designed a system that depends on the bravest person on the front, on the worst day, under the most pressure. That's not a control. Build the stops in, agree them out loud, explain why they're there — and ask questions instead of reading out hazards.

Starting work isn't step one. Stopping shouldn't take courage.

Further reading

• IOGP Report 459: Life-Saving Rules. 1,484 fatal incidents analysed, around 70% preventable by nine rules, and around 80% of fatalities contractor employees.
• The Step 7 Safe Work Process card. Plan, Communicate, Check Equipment, Prepare Area, Control Energy, Final Check, Start Work, then After Action Review.
• The testing effect (retrieval practice), Frontiers in Psychology. Why recalling beats being told.

First published in The Field Note on LinkedIn.

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