The Myth of Fake Safety and How to Break It

There’s a moment in Laurie Shelby’s talk that made me laugh out loud. Not because it was funny (although it was), but because it was real.

Laurie Shelby, Vice President of Environmental, Health and Safety at Tesla, described how she began her career in the 1980s driving a white step van across three states to deliver audiometric testing. Her training? Minimal. Her warning? “If you scrape it, you're fired.”

So, naturally, when she scraped the side of the van, she did what anyone afraid of losing their job might do: sanded it down, painted it over, and kept going. For two years.

She joked: “I was doing fake safety. But my company was also doing fake safety.”

That phrase, fake safety, was the heartbeat of her entire talk.

And I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

From Fake to Real

At its core, Laurie’s keynote was a challenge to every safety leader, engineer, and executive in the room: Are you doing real safety, or are you ticking boxes?

One of the most powerful moments came early on, as she shared feedback from a Tesla colleague:

No pay rise, she joked, but that comment made it into her performance review, and her keynote slide deck.

Real Safety Saves Lives

Shelby drew a powerful throughline from her early days to her time at Alcoa, where she was part of a team implementing Human and Organisational Performance (HOP) principles, through to a tragic turning point: the death of a young man named Diego due to an unsafe extension cord.

This wasn’t just theory. It was operational reality.

Redefining Safety Culture at Tesla

Tesla, as Shelby reminded us, isn’t just a car company. It’s a robotics company. A solar energy company. A construction company with 3,000+ in-house workers. And with that scale comes complexity, and risk.

What impressed me most was how deeply the HOP principles have been integrated into their operations. Not siloed. Not bolted-on. Truly embedded.

New leaders at Tesla? They don’t just sign an induction form, they watch a Todd Conklin video and discuss it with Laurie.

What’s Real and What’s Fake?

Laurie invited us to play a game. Fake or real?

• TRIR and OSHA rates as performance metrics? Fake.

• Zero harm campaigns? Fake. They lead to silence, not safety.

• Training completion as a proxy for safety culture? Fake.

What’s real?

• A culture of capacity: visible, compassionate leadership; agile workers; engaged voices.

• A safeguard-focused approach: “What saved us? What didn’t? What was missing entirely?”

• Feedback loops like Tesla’s Take Charge system, where over 2 million employee safety suggestions have been logged.

Safeguards, Not Slogans

For me, Laurie’s call to build safeguards around the blue line, the messy, adaptive, real way that work is done, was one of the most powerful takeaways.

That hit home. Because so often, in engineering, in leadership, in life, we optimise for the plan, not the reality.

Legacy and Letting Go

Laurie closed with a reflection that’s stayed with me.

That’s leadership. Not performative. Not punitive. Not painted over with white spray paint.

But real.

See Mark in Action!