Identifying Imbalances in a Portfolio of Safety Metrics : The Q4-Balance Framework for Economy-Safety Tradeoffs

Abstract

Despite the desire to utilize proactive safety metrics, research results indicate imbalances can arise between economic performance metrics and safety metrics. Imbalances can arise, first, because there are fewer proactive metrics available relative to the data an organization can compile to build reactive metrics. Research also has shown a number of factors that lead organizations to discount proactive metrics when they conflict with shorter term, more definitive reactive metrics. This paper introduces the Q4-Balance framework to analyze economy-safety trade-offs. Plotting the sets of metrics used by an organization in the four quadrant visualization can be used to identify misalignments, overlap, false diversity as well as to identify complementary and reinforcing metrics that produce a balanced portfolio for an organization.