Why leadership, not software, determines whether your safety systems succeed.
“I can’t sleep at night. I just don’t know if I can trust the data I’m seeing.”
That’s what a senior leader from a large organisation told me recently, they are not the first, and almost certainly will not be the last. And this wasn’t because of a lack of intent or investment. They’d implemented a safety-critical platform, built with expert input and technically excellent. But it hadn’t stuck. The problem? Culture.
Despite the platform’s capability, the strength of the siloed cultures across the business was powerful enough to shut it down. Yes, you read that right. The culture was strong enough to stop the system. In this case, the desire to gatekeep performance and control the flow of information won out over the organisation's intent to build visibility and improve safety. The system was technically sound but politically rejected. Which left a new leader with a mountain to climb to restore visibility, rebuild trust in the data and reconnect the dots between what’s happening and what’s being reported.
The Pattern We Keep Seeing.
This story isn’t unique. It’s the same pattern we saw in our earlier conversations with leaders in Blog #2, leaders who care deeply about safety but are blocked by fragmented systems and disengaged users. And it always comes back to one thing: adoption. “ Even the best solution is useless if the culture won’t support its use.” And we’re not the only ones seeing this.
Harvard Business Review puts it plainly, “Employees’ resistance to new technology often stems from cultural factors.” – HBR, Why Do Your Employees Resist New Tech?
McKinsey reinforces this, identifying “misaligned culture or ways of working” as one of the top reasons digital transformation efforts stall or fail.
And Deloitte also points to the risk of cultural misalignment, “A disconnect between digital goals and employee values creates risk and stalls progress.”
The Adoption Gap.
The reason that point solutions often fail is that they’re designed for ideal use cases. They’re functionally excellent but they are built without your users, their context or your culture taken into consideration, so they don’t stick.
- They’re too rigid to flex with business needs.
- They require perfect data entry from people who weren’t trained or brought on the journey.
- They assume that the problem is purely process not people.
The end result is that leaders remain unsure, visibility fades, trust evaporates, non-compliance creeps in and the risk of incidents increases.
Hope is Not a Strategy.
The reality many leaders are facing is, that the technology that got you here, won’t get you where you need to go. It’s not just about better UX or smoother integrations. It’s about changing the questions you ask when buying or designing a solution.
If the real goal is knowing, then ask:
- How will this help me know?
- How will I make sure everyone, everywhere, can use it?
- How will this adapt as our business changes?
- How will it support leadership at every level?
These are the questions legacy systems and point solutions rarely answer. But as Unifii is demonstrating again and again, you don’t have to settle for functionally excellent systems, that don’t solve the real problem.
Regulators Expect You to Know.
Let’s not forget the regulatory backdrop. Leadership accountability has never been clearer. Work Health and Safety laws, duty of care requirements and growing public scrutiny mean that when something goes wrong, it’s not good enough to say “I didn’t know.” Leaders are expected to know, which requires trusted, real-time data. This means closing the loop, not just collecting data but ensuring it’s complete, consistent, and usable. Trust isn’t just a software feature. It’s an outcome of culture.
Harvard Business Review again hits the mark: “Employees won’t trust AI or any tech if they don’t trust their leaders.”
The Unifii Way: The Sweet Spot Model
At Unifii, we’ve taken a different approach. We start with one clear purpose: Put the right information in the hands of the right people at the right time so they can take the right action. And then we apply the Sweet Spot Solution Model, where lasting change happens at the intersection of:
- Fit-for-purpose technology.
- Real business context.
- Engaged and supported users.
When you design this way, you enable leadership at every level. You create solutions that adapt. You make it easier to do the right thing than work around it. And if someone pushes back on using it, you know the issue isn’t the system.
Final Word
So yes, culture eats technology for breakfast. If your leadership team isn’t visible, if your people aren’t part of the process, if your solution doesn’t flex with reality, you will not get the outcome you’re hoping for.
But the good news is that it doesn’t have to be that way. Ask better questions. Design for real adoption. Enable real leadership. And most importantly, don’t just buy a solution, configure one that works.
Until next time, stay safe, lead well, and ask the question that really matters: “How will I know?”
Cheers
Paul
