CRITICAL RISK AND THE WATERMELON EFFECT

27 Aug

On paper, everything looks great.

Your safety KPIs are green across the board. No recordables this quarter. Near-misses have been logged. Toolbox talks or pre-starts are getting delivered. Tick, tick, tick.

But dig a little deeper, get to site and talk to the people actually doing the work, and you might uncover a very different story.

This is what we heard from a recent collaborator looking to refresh engagement on their critical controls program, and safety more broadly. Everything looked safe and well on paper, but the compliance rates didn’t reflect the actual safety practices of this company’s people. And with a seasonal influx of workers due over the Southern Hemisphere Summer, it was time to act.

For the EM team, the problem to overcome was the Watermelon Effect: where everything’s green on the outside, but red on the inside.

For high-risk industries, it’s probably more common than we’d like to admit.

WHY IT HAPPENS

You would have no doubt seen this in your safety career, when there’s an over-reliance on top-line or lagging indicators to tell organisations how safe they are. But we know, most KPIs are only a slice of the story. They often reflect what’s reported, not necessarily what’s real. Compliance becomes a checkbox, not a reflection of lived experience.

The risk is exacerbated when leaders are disconnected from the frontline or when there's low psychological safety, meaning people don’t feel comfortable raising concerns, challenging unsafe norms, or reporting ‘small’ issues that could spiral.

WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE

Here are a few of the signs of red we’ve heard from collaborators when they think the Watermelon Effect is in play.

Workers saying “we just work around that” when a control is ineffective.
Our people tell the auditors what they think they want to hear.
Pre-starts that are ticked off, but not really that engaging.
Near-misses are underreported because they’re seen as not worth the admin.
Hazards identified, but not acted on in a timely way.
Workers are generally underreporting because they fear blame.

MORE AVOCADO, LESS WATERMELON

For the collaborator with the incoming seasonal workforce, they’re taking a thoughtful and phased approach to cutting through the green gloss, turning their watermelon into a ripe avocado, green on the outside, but more importantly, green on the inside too.

The strategy for leaders, workers and new-starts is to cultivate constructive doubt by encouraging people to call things out. In other words, don’t just assume things are safe — always approach work with a questioning mindset.

Over the next 15 months we’ve supported them with a strategy and rollout plan to:

Seed the right mindset — just because it’s signed off, doesn’t mean it’s safe. Real safety for this team starts with care, curiosity and courage.
Nurture the right behaviours — it takes guts to speak up. So they want their team to ask themselves: is anyone truly safe if we keep quiet?
Sustain the momentum — being safe on paper isn’t enough. They want to be people-safe, people-first.

It won’t be an overnight fix, but it will likely be more long-lasting than sheep-dipping everyone through the same critical risk training once again.

The ambition for this company is to be as safe as they look on paper and reset how their people think about their safety.

So essentially, more avocado and less watermelon.

CASE STUDY: WATERMELONS, AVOCADOS AND THE EMPIRE STATE BUILDING

One of the clearest early examples of the avocado vs. watermelon effect comes from Paul Starrett, head of the firm that built the Empire State Building in just 13 months (1930–1931).

Most sites of the era were run like watermelons: green on the outside but red inside. Accident numbers looked good because reporting was discouraged, but in reality sites were unsafe, slow, and riddled with hidden problems.

Starrett flipped the model. He paid fairly, treated workers with respect, and encouraged open reporting of accidents and near-misses. On paper, his sites looked “worse” — more incidents showed up in the stats. But like an avocado, the inside told the real story: fewer serious injuries, stronger morale, and record-breaking productivity.

The Empire State Building, then the tallest in the world, rose in just over a year. Similar projects without this culture often dragged on for three or four years. Starrett proved that transparency and fairness didn’t slow progress — they sped it up.