When we hosted the webinar Pursuing Zero Harm: A Powerful Platform for Embedding Lean Capability with Meghan Scanlon, the discussion quickly moved beyond safety metrics or incident rates.
It became a conversation about leadership.
“Zero harm” is often misunderstood as an unrealistic target or a compliance exercise. Meghan addressed that head-on—not by lowering the bar, but by reframing what zero harm actually represents.
As she explained, the point isn’t perfection. The point is learning.
Watch the full webinar or review the slides.
What follows are a few themes from Meghan’s session that continue to stand out—especially for executives.
One of Meghan’s clearest messages was the importance of distinguishing between operational goals and True North goals.
She framed it this way: organizations and systems produce results exactly as they’re currently designed. If you’re not getting perfect safety—or perfect performance more broadly—it’s not because people don’t care. It’s because the system isn’t designed to produce those outcomes.
Setting a goal at zero, she explained, isn’t about believing the current system can achieve it. It’s about acknowledging that the system must change.
“The value of setting those true north goals at zero or at perfect is that it’s meant to set the organization free.”
For executives, this is a crucial distinction. Incremental targets tend to reinforce existing constraints. True North goals invite leaders to question them.
A recurring theme throughout the webinar was that safety cannot be delegated.
When safety lives in a function, a role, or a committee, everyone else subtly learns that it’s someone else’s responsibility. Meghan was clear that this mindset limits learning and improvement.
Zero harm, she argued, only works when safety is embedded into:
how work is designed
how leaders respond to problems
how people are developed
In other words, safety isn’t something organizations do. It’s something leaders demonstrate—every day.
This is where executive behavior matters most. If safety conversations only surface during audits or after incidents, people experience safety as oversight, not as a value.
Another powerful part of the discussion was Meghan’s broader definition of harm.
Physical harm is obvious. Emotional and professional harm are not—but they’re just as influential.
She described emotional harm as what happens when people instinctively blame themselves for system failures:
“That whole idea of ‘My bad. Sorry, guys. My fault.’ That takes away the organization’s opportunity to learn.”
Professional harm, she explained, shows up when people hesitate to speak up:
“How willing are people to call out problems? And what’s the response when they do?”
For executives, this is a critical signal. If people are quiet, it’s rarely because there are no problems. It’s because speaking up feels unsafe.
Zero harm requires leaders to create conditions where transparency is expected—and protected. Leaders must behave in ways that cultivate psychological safety.
Meghan emphasized that safety works as a transformation platform because it’s universal.
“No one should ever go to work and be hurt or harmed. If we can’t get home in the same condition we arrived, that’s a real problem worth focusing on.”
That idea transcends industry. It connects frontline employees, clinicians, engineers, and executives around a shared value. And because it’s deeply human, it cuts through debates that often stall improvement efforts.
This is why safety is such a powerful entry point for Lean capability. It engages people emotionally and intellectually—and gives improvement work meaning beyond efficiency or cost.
Near the end of the discussion, Meghan addressed a common concern: Isn’t zero harm demoralizing if perfection isn’t possible?
Her answer was telling.
“It’s only demoralizing if how you respond isn’t supportive and in the spirit of learning.”
Zero harm fails when leaders treat problems as personal failures. It succeeds when leaders treat problems as information.
She reinforced that problems aren’t bad events—they’re opportunities:
“They’re really opportunities or gifts that we’re given. Opportunities to learn, and improve, and achieve our goals.”
For executives, this is the real work of zero harm:
responding with curiosity instead of blame
reinforcing that transparency is expected
making system design—not individual performance—the focus
What makes this webinar still relevant is that it connects improvement discipline to leadership behavior.
Zero harm isn’t about demanding perfection. It’s about creating organizations that learn faster, surface risks earlier, and design safer systems over time.
That work can’t be delegated. It has to be modeled.
As Meghan made clear, zero harm isn’t a safety program. It’s a leadership commitment—and one that reveals, very quickly, what an organization truly values.
In a Lean leadership context, zero harm is a True North goal, not a short-term performance target. It signals that harm is unacceptable as a normal outcome of work and that systems must be redesigned to make harm increasingly unlikely. The purpose of zero is to drive learning and system improvement—not to demand perfection from people.
Zero harm becomes unrealistic only when it is treated as a promise of flawless execution. When used properly, it is a directional goal that challenges leaders to question existing system constraints, assumptions, and behaviors that allow harm to persist. The goal is not to achieve zero tomorrow, but to stop accepting harm as inevitable.
Safety metrics measure outcomes after harm has already occurred. Zero harm shifts leadership attention upstream—toward system design, leadership behavior, and learning processes that prevent harm and surface risks earlier. Metrics support zero harm, but they do not create it.
Zero harm cannot be delegated to a department or committee. Leaders influence safety through how work is designed, how problems are discussed, and how people are developed. Employees learn what truly matters by watching how leaders respond when something goes wrong.
Beyond physical harm, leaders must recognize emotional and professional harm. Emotional harm occurs when blame replaces learning. Professional harm appears when people hesitate to speak up about risks or problems. Both reduce transparency and increase long-term safety risk.
Zero harm becomes demoralizing when leaders respond to problems with judgment, pressure, or punishment. In those environments, problems feel dangerous to report. Zero harm succeeds when leaders treat problems as information and reinforce that learning—not blame—is the expected response.
Executives can assess zero harm by observing how people react when problems surface. If issues are raised early, discussed openly, and addressed systemically, zero harm is active. If problems are hidden, minimized, or attributed to individuals, zero harm exists only as a slogan.