Ümit Kartoğlu
During the budget discussions of the Ministry of Labor and Social Security at the Grand National Assembly’s Planning and Budget Commission, the session began with a protest. Opposition members of parliament placed photos of those who died in the warehouse fire in the Dilovası district of Kocaeli on their desks and called on Minister Işıkhan to resign. In his budget presentation, Işıkhan stated, “We aim for a zero-accident culture.” Sounds just like the government announcing now and then inflation targets that never reach the end.
Everyone loves the sound of a zero accident culture. It carries the same comforting charm as sugar-free chocolate that tastes the same or weather that is perfect every day. It is pleasant to imagine, even if reality tends to be far less cooperative. Still, many organizations embrace the slogan enthusiastically, as if uttering it aloud could magically rearrange the laws of physics, human behavior, and probability.
STEPPING DOWN AS AN ACT OF POLITICAL ACCOUNTABILITY
The real trouble begins when the slogan meets daily practice. When managers are evaluated on achieving zero accidents, the most reliable path to zero is not eliminating accidents, it is eliminating reports. Suddenly, small injuries become nothing serious, slips are just a momentary imbalance, and near-misses quietly disappear into the ether. And just like that, the numbers look beautiful. A flawless safety record, achieved mostly by nobody wanting to spoil it.
And when the events are so dramatic that the numbers simply cannot be concealed, authorities shift to searching for a scapegoat, but never themselves, because responsibility is always presumed to lie elsewhere. I recall not only ministers but also prime ministers and entire cabinets resigning after such disasters: Prime Minister Hassan Diab and his full cabinet stepped down within days of the 2020 Beirut Port explosion, one of the largest non-nuclear blasts in history, killing 218 people, caused by improperly stored ammonium nitrate; Romania’s Prime Minister Victor Ponta and his cabinet resigned after nearly 20,000 people took to the streets in 2015 to protest the nightclub fire that killed 64; and Greece’s Transport Minister Kostas Karamanlis resigned after the 2023 Tempi train crash, the deadliest rail accident in the country’s history, killing 57 passengers. There is scarcely any need to enumerate which leaders in our own country failed to accept responsibility for even more lethal disasters. Aziz Çelik provides further examples in his BirGün article Murder, Political Responsibility and Resignation!.
Safety experts have been reminding us for decades: in complex systems, accidents are not moral failures but natural consequences of variability. People make mistakes, machines malfunction, environments change. Yet the promise of a zero accident culture often suggests that, with enough motivation, reality itself can be persuaded to behave more obediently.
Perhaps the most ironic part is how this mindset shifts attention. Instead of asking, “What can we learn from this incident?” organizations begin asking, “How quickly can we get back to zero?” Learning gives way to scoreboard maintenance. Safety becomes a number to protect, rather than a system to improve.
In practice, a zero accident culture often ends up meaning zero transparency, zero honest reporting, zero opportunity to learn, and zero accountability. The goal may be noble, but the slogan is deceptively simple- encouraging perfect statistics rather than genuine safety.
A healthier approach is far less dramatic: acknowledge that accidents can never be reduced to absolute zero, encourage open reporting without fear, and treat every incident, big or small, as a chance to strengthen the system. In other words, aim for zero concealment, and zero neglect, and the real safety improvements will follow.
Still, many organizations proudly hang zero accidents banners in their hallways. On paper, everything looks wonderful. In real life, things are usually more complicated- but as long as the reports stay silent, the number stays perfect.
Because in this version of safety, accidents don’t disappear. Only the evidence does.
THE INSTITUTIONAL PSYCHOLOGY OF UNATTAINABLE GOALS
We set targets the way sailors in old myths chased the horizon: knowing we will never reach it, but comforted by the direction it gives us. In government programmes, international organizations, and even corporate strategies, the same pattern repeats. Targets are announced with confidence, and sometimes with moral certainty, yet everyone in the room privately understands that the numbers are aspirational at best, imaginary at worst. And when the year ends and the target has quietly dissolved into unmet promises, nobody feels truly responsible. The cycle begins again.
Why does this happen? Part of the answer lies in the symbolic nature of targets. Many are not meant to be achieved at all; they are meant to signal ambition, to show that the institution cares. A phrase like zero accidents belongs more to political theatre than to mathematics. It gives the impression of moral clarity, even if reality will never obey such declarations. These targets are performative rather than operational.
Yet another part is cultural. In many institutions, ambition is praised and realism is punished. Anyone who proposes a modest, achievable target is accused of lacking vision. The incentive structure rewards overpromising and makes prudent planning look timid. And so we inflate the numbers, stretch the timelines, and add zeros at the end of percentages until the target becomes a distant star- something to aim at, never something we expect to touch.
Accountability rarely follows because there is no tradition of learning from failure. Missed targets do not trigger consequences; they trigger new targets. Leaders make new speeches, committees write new plans, and the missed goals fade like chalk lines in the rain. Reporting systems, eager to please, smooth the edges of failure. Data is quietly adjusted, language softened, and the story reshaped to appear “on track.”
Underneath all this lies a psychological comfort. Setting ambitious targets makes everyone feel purposeful. Staff feel motivated, donors feel reassured, and leaders feel visionary. The target becomes a shared illusion that holds the institution together. It is easier to believe in the ideal than to confront the constraints.
And so unrealistic targets persist because nothing in the system discourages them. In fact, the system subtly rewards them. We keep drawing maps to destinations we cannot reach, not because we expect to arrive, but because the map itself – bright, bold, and optimistic – has become more important than the journey.
If reality is uncomfortable, aspiration becomes a refuge. And when aspiration becomes habit, accountability quietly disappears.
THE GENUINE ETHICS OF RISK MANAGEMENT
Risk cannot be minimized by decorating reports with slogans or by declaring yet another zero accident culture from the podium. Unless risk management becomes a living habit inside an institution, an instinct as ordinary as breathing, nothing truly changes. It begins with the simplest, yet most avoided, question: “What might go wrong?” From there, one must assemble a patchwork of control measures to reduce the likelihood and severity of harm, especially when the hazard itself cannot be eliminated.
Robert Charette said it best: “Risk management is not about future decisions, but about the future of decisions we must take now.” Yet instead of grappling with those decisions, governments and many institutions prefer to craft elegant impossibilities- targets designed not to be met, but to be admired from a safe distance. Responsible thinking requires facing the messy, uncomfortable realities of the world as it is, not inventing goals that drift gracefully above it, untouched and untouched-by.
