How to improve safety culture with workshops - the DELTA Manual

Are you struggling to turn safety data into meaningful safety improvement? 

We can help.

Introducing the DELTA Manual: Transform your safety data into Safety - a handbook that shows you how to use workshops to convert safety data into action.

The DELTA Manual shows you how to transform safety data into Safety.

How to identify Safety improvement projects

As a safety manager, a leader responsible for safety culture, or anyone trying to improve the safety culture of your organization, it can be difficult to figure out how to identify projects that improve safety. 

We created the DELTA System to show you how to convert safety data into improvement projects that any person, team, or organization can do that will have a direct, positive impact on your safety culture. 

The DELTA Manual explains how to identify safety improvement projects via in-person safety workshops, with a collection of helpful resources like worksheets, templates, and a detailed workshop agenda, in addition to the DELTA System itself. 

If this sounds like a resource your safety team could use, I would love to send you a free copy of the book – with no strings attached. 

Just leave a comment below or fill in our contact form, and I will be in touch.

Author’s Note:

For more context, here is my author’s note from the beginning of the DELTA Manual:

The world of safety management isn’t short on ideas. Open LinkedIn and you’re flooded with new safety books, trending #safetybuzzwords, pledges to reach zero accidents, and invitations to another round of industry safety conferences. I’ve tried to keep up with the nonstop output of the “safety industry” — but honestly, it could be a full-time job. As safety managers, we’re faced with the monumental task of finding the right ideas, those few that will work for our organization, in an ocean of safety content.

There’s a ton of “safety work” going on, and what do we have to show for it?  Accidents haven’t meaningfully declined in years. It’s an uncomfortable truth about the state of the safety industry that these efforts have largely been insufficient for improving organizational safety. Instead, they consume organizational resources to give the perception of improvement without real results. If the thought of wasted safety resources makes you mad, good. It makes me mad, too.

I’m Brent. I’ve spent my life in aviation — first in the right seat of my dad’s airplane, later as a mechanic, a pilot, and eventually in leadership roles at companies like Rolls-Royce and GE. Over the past two decades, I’ve worked on organizational improvement across the U.S., Europe, and Asia. I’ve seen good teams suffer catastrophic incidents — not because they were careless, but because they lacked a concrete method for monitoring and improvement. That’s why I co-founded Sociometri with Savannah, a social scientist and researcher who’s spent nearly twenty years designing survey tools to measure abstract concepts. Together, we bring you a reliable method for monitoring and improving organizational safety.

Sociometri is predicated on a simple but often overlooked insight: safety is a property of the organizational ecosystem. Rather than attempting a top-down enforcement of “safety culture,” we recognize that safety culture emerges from the interplay between environment, people, practices, and conditions. Organizations are constantly changing. These changes aren’t inherently good or bad, but when they go unrecognized or unmanaged, they can create hazardous conditions. Think of it like flying a plane. A pilot must be aware of changing factors like weather, fuel, attitude, and altitude. They must monitor their instruments and be prepared to respond appropriately to changes if they wish to fly safely.

Sociometri applies that same logic to organizations. We treat them as dynamic systems that must be monitored over time. We don’t take a one-time snapshot. We collect data over weeks, months, and years. This lets us observe patterns as they emerge, detect subtle shifts in the system, and identify conditions that could quietly lead to failure.

Our method is grounded in the principles of scientific inquiry and continuous improvement. It’s not theoretical — it’s actionable. And it works because it’s tailored. You can’t import a solution wholesale from one ecosystem and expect it to work in another. Different ecosystems mean different risks — and different paths to improvement. That’s why we don’t hand out prescriptions. We provide diagnostics. We help you see what’s actually happening in your system, so you can respond with clarity and purpose.

Thanks for picking up this manual. I hope it provides a way to understand your organization as a dynamic system, address risk before it turns into harm, and ensure concrete, reliable improvement over time.

Let’s get started!

Warm regards,

Brent Vlasman

Back Cover

And if that wasn’t enough, here is the blurb from the back cover:

This book provides a framework for addressing risk before it turns into harm and ensuring concrete, reliable improvement over time.  The DELTA Manual offers a methodical, hands-on approach to turning survey results and safety data into tailored, effective improvement projects.  Designed to be read and shared with members of your safety team, it’s packed with practical insights, detailed walkthroughs, checklists, worksheets, and a facilitation guide to running a DELTA improvement workshop.

DELTA Manual back cover blurb - it’s for anyone trying to improve safety at their organization.

While we hope you find the book to be packed with helpful information and tools, most of all we hope it helps you with the most important part of improving safety – taking action. 

If you know someone that would also benefit from the book, feel free to send me their info as well – it’s no problem to send two books. :)

P.S. Did you register for The DELTA Manual Workshop at the 2024 CHC Safety and Quality Summit? 

Want a free copy of the new book?

The DELTA Manual has certainly evolved over time - from its original manifestation as our internal workshop instructions, to the “Cultural Repair Manual” we sent to our early workshop clients, to the “Cultural Improvement Manual” as we received some feedback that repair might not have been the best word choice. :)

It then became The Delta Manual when we added a few chapters explaining the theoretical foundation of our approach and also emphasizing the importance of taking action (see chapter 5).

This latest update incorporates some lessons we’ve learned over the years with a nod to the direction we are going with Sociometri and the doors opened by capturing safety culture data in real time.

For a bit of nostalgia, here is the CHC post announcing our 2024 workshop:

CHC’s LinkedIn post announcing our DELTA Manual workshop at their 2024 Safety Summit.

It read:

How can successful interventions keep your people safe?

Join us at the CHC Safety & Quality Summit 2024 to discover practical ways to energise aviation safety culture.

Brent Vlasman, Co-Founder and Aviation Advisor at Sociometri, will guide you through leading safety intervention frameworks, including:
▪ The Lean Six Sigma DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve, Control) methodology for continuous safety improvement.
▪ The DELTA (Define, Explore, Locate, Transform, Analyse) framework for effective intervention – an advanced adaptation of the Lean Six Sigma DMAIC model – and its role in supporting staff during periods of stress and fatigue.

You'll leave with the Cultural Improvement Manual in hand, demystifying the DELTA framework's implementation within an organisation. You'll gain practical resources to promote systemic solutions over isolated fixes, enabling interventions to have a broader, more sustainable safety impact.

To register for the Summit, visit: https://lnkd.in/ejM5qcb2
#CHCSummit24 #SafetyQualitySummit #CHCSummit #SafetyCulture
#SafetyManagement #SixSigma #DMAIC #Aviation

Let me know if you want a copy, and I will be in touch.