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I’m going to start this blog with a confession! When I was asked to speak at Rail Forum’s Rail Safety Week Conference 2026 about the importance of psychological safety, I decided to spend my ten minutes arguing with a word that almost everyone in our industry agrees with: resilience.
Not because I’m against it, but because I think we’ve come to lean on it too heavily, and in the wrong place. Let me explain.
Resilience is the word we reach for when we talk about keeping people safe. We build programmes around it, train for it, measure it. But over the years I’ve come to believe it points us at the wrong thing. The most important safety control we have isn’t the programme we wrap around people, it’s whether they feel able to speak up in the first place.
A bit of context first. I’m a civil engineer by background and I’ve spent most of my career in the rail sector. I’m also a director of the Lean Construction Institute UK, and it’s especially through this role that I’ve engaged in some particular conversations over the last few years (in rail, aviation and across wider construction) about how we look after people during periods of change.
Right now, change in rail is substantial. With Great British Railways and the Railways Bill set to reform how the network is owned and run, we’re heading into one of the biggest structural shifts the industry has seen in a generation.
In my experience, when change happens at that scale, something predictable follows and it’s almost identical in every industry I’ve worked in. The people closest to the work go quiet.
I want to explain why I think that matters, and what I think we can do about it.
When the experts stop talking
A lot of the knowledge that keeps complex work safe isn’t written down. It lives in the heads of the people physically doing that work.
The standards, procedures and audits are all necessary, but they only come in after we’ve had to rely on the operational judgement of the people doing the work. When that person stops speaking up, the system quietly loses the part of itself that knows when something is wrong. And it usually loses it without anyone noticing.
Respect for people and what it actually means
There’s a discipline built specifically around stopping that from happening. It doesn’t come from rail; it comes from car manufacturer, Toyota! In the 1950s, decades before we had any modern language for wellbeing, they called it respect for people, and I think it’s one of the most misunderstood phrases in our industry.
It sounds soft. It isn’t.
On a Toyota production line, respect for people means something very specific and quite demanding: any worker, at any moment, can pull a cord and stop the entire line if they see something wrong. When the cord is pulled, a board lights up above the workstation, and a team leader is expected to be there within sixty seconds to fix the problem where it appeared, not pass it to a quality department down the corridor. Everyone has permission to do it. And when the line stops, there’s no blame. It’s treated as a chance to learn.
Think about what that builds in. The person nearest the work is trusted to judge it. Stopping the line is a good day, not a bad one. And the people who design the work go and stand where it actually happens, rather than designing it from a distance.
That’s not a wellbeing initiative. It’s a safety system.
What it can look like in rail
I’ve seen a version of this on the railway. Some years ago, I delivered a project installing a sixty-metre footbridge over the railway cutting at Basingstoke ROC. The usual approach would have been a full possession. We did it inside a four-hour line blockage instead and that was the safer way of working, not the riskier one.
It worked because every voice on that job had been heard early, and the plan had been built with the people who’d go on to deliver it. Any one of them could have stopped it. That was the right to stop the line, designed in before anyone set foot on site.
The uncomfortable part
Which brings me to the harder thing I wanted to say.
When we look back at the disasters this industry has learned from, and the Cullen Inquiry into Ladbroke Grove is the one that stays with me, the detail that strikes me most isn’t technical. It’s that there were people, beforehand, who knew the system wasn’t right. That information already existed inside the organisation. It just couldn’t find a route through.
The risk in front of us in 2026 isn’t that we forget those lessons. It’s that we quietly re-create the conditions they warned us about, while telling ourselves we’re managing wellbeing.
The question hiding inside the wellbeing question
I want to be careful here, because I’m not arguing against the people doing wellbeing work. At the same conference, colleagues spoke about mental health support and psychological safety, and that work matters – I’m a trained Mental Health First Aider myself.
My argument is simply that they shouldn’t have to do all the heavy lifting on their own. There’s more we can do earlier: in how we design the work, how we plan it, and how we treat the voice of the person nearest to it. That’s the organisational question hiding inside the wellbeing question, and I think we’ve been a bit slow to take it seriously.
One thing to take away
So, here’s the one thing I’d ask.
Sometime in the next fortnight, before your next safety leadership meeting, go and stand where the work actually happens. Not the planned walk-around, I mean go on your own and just watch the work for thirty minutes.
I’ll be honest: it’s harder than it sounds. It feels self-indulgent. You’ll think of ten more important things you could be doing with that time. It forces you to hold back when you hear something you’d love to explain or defend on the spot. And the people you’re watching probably won’t believe you mean it the first time.
But it’s one of the best safety controls we have. It’s the operational definition of respect for people.
Respect before resilience
When we talk about looking after people through change, we shouldn’t only mean the programme we wrap around them afterwards. Just as important, maybe more, is how we’re asking them to do the work in the first place.
Respect for people, in the older and harder sense, comes first. Resilience flows from it.
That’s the word I set out to argue with. Not resilience itself, the place we’ve come to give it. And in my experience, the gap between those two things, in any industry, is exactly where the next preventable failure quietly grows.
Sven Heuten, Business Unit Director, Onwave and a director of the Lean Construction Institute UK.
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