SIF Precursor
A condition with the potential to cause a serious injury or fatality, whether or not anything actually happened. The insight behind the concept is that serious injuries have different causes from minor ones — so counting cuts and bruises tells you nothing about the fatality risk.
This is the correction to a generation of safety thinking. A site can drive its minor-injury rate down impressively while its exposure to a fatality is entirely unchanged, because the things that cut fingers are not the things that kill people.
So the metric that matters is not the injury count. It is the count of precursors: unguarded edges, unsecured loads, live energy not isolated. Those are the conditions that produce fatalities, and they are visible before anybody is hurt.
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