Most safety programs operate in a single direction: pushing safety culture out through toolbox talks, compliance lectures, and policy manuals. What organizations rarely get is the pull-in: an honest read on how workers actually describe hazards and risks in their own words before an incident forces the question. The Safety Lexicon is made for the pull-in.
In 1916, four miles out and roughly two hundred feet under Lake Erie, crews hand-digging a water tunnel triggered a natural gas explosion that killed eleven men instantly. Two rescue parties went in after them without the right protection, and ten of those eighteen rescuers died too, before the effort was called off. Two years earlier, inventor Garrett Morgan had patented a working safety hood built for exactly this kind of environment. City officials liked it over the phone, but dismissed him in person. That night, Morgan and his brother went in with the hoods and pulled survivors out alive.
It was the sixth fatal disaster in that water system in eighteen years. The hazard was known. The fix existed. The breakdown was that leadership and the frontline never shared the same understanding of the risk. That's the same gap this exercise is built to expose, before it costs anyone anything.
No. It's built to feed an existing program, not replace it. One reading shows where to focus first: which sites, crews, or topics need attention. Run again later, it shows whether the work already underway is actually changing how people talk about risk. The programs, trainings, and reporting systems you already run stay exactly as they are; this just gives you a clearer read on where to point them.
It's the same film, delivered differently. Someone watches The Inventor (about 15 minutes), then answers one open-ended question in their own words (about 5 minutes), no multiple choice, no forced categories. That response is read against the same 8 attributes used in the in-person session, and mapped to whichever ones it actually names. There's no score. It's a private readout, not a public ranking, and it's built to point at where to focus a safety program next, not to replace one.
Something different at each level. Frontline workers get a way to describe what they see without feeling put on the spot. Managers get visibility into the terms their own crews already use to talk about risk, in plain language, not a score. Leadership gets a clear read on how their own language compares to what's actually happening on the ground, one honest reading at a time. Run once, it shows where to look first. Run again later, it shows whether the work already underway is actually changing how people talk about risk.
Narrative Transportation Theory (Green & Brock, 2000) found that people absorbed in a story engage in significantly less counterarguing than they do with direct instruction. Separately, safety surveys are well documented to suffer from ceiling effects: a 2022 study on patient-reported experience measures found 81% of respondents gave the maximum possible score before adjusting for social-desirability bias, dropping to 2.5% once adjusted (Ring et al., 2022). NIOSH's own research on open-ended near-miss reporting found qualitative narrative data surfaced risks that standard numerical safety audits missed entirely (Haas et al., 2020).
NRC Inspection Manual Chapter 0310, built from NUREG-2165's broader safety culture common language. It's the same coding scheme NRC inspectors use on real plant findings, not something invented for this product.
Hundreds of individual findings pulled from public CSB, NRC, and NTSB investigation and inspection reports. We are deliberately independent, not affiliated with, reviewed by, or endorsed by any of them, so there's no vendor relationship shaping what the framework says.
Pricing is per digital seat and scales with your organization's needs. Cohorts start at $2,000 for up to 50 digital licenses, with custom readouts available for organizations that want a deeper, tailored analysis afterward.
The Safety Lexicon runs as a 60-minute workshop in three parts: a short look at the 1916 disaster and the operational pressures crews faced (10 min), a screening of the short film The Inventor (15 min), and a facilitated exercise where participants map how their own crews naturally describe risk on the job (35 min). There are no lectures and no canned answers. The historical distance gives people room to reflect on their own site's safety culture without feeling defensive or put on the spot.
Your leadership team gets an immediate, authentic snapshot of your site's working hazard vocabulary, gathered directly from your workforce rather than inferred through a traditional survey or a retroactive incident log. It surfaces where shared language already exists on your team, and where the critical gaps are.
Philip Musey, a filmmaker and organizational culture strategist. He wrote and directed The Inventor and has facilitated sessions on Garrett Morgan's story across construction, energy, finance, media, education, and technology companies. He spent over a decade before this crafting stories that turn a brand's stated values into something its own employees believe and its customers buy, and has given a TEDx talk on Morgan's story.
In-person workshops start at $6,000 per session and scale upward from there depending on group size, location, and format.