Rapidly evolving technology only underscores this critical need to stay ahead of the curve. Gartner estimates cyber security spending will top $113 billion by 2020, and that number will continue to climb.

But, ‘staying ahead of the curve’ is a big challenge when dealing with safety and security in an unpredictable environment. And few people understand this better than Mike O’Neil, a 22- year veteran of the New York City Police Department and the first Commanding Officer of the NYPD Counterterrorism Division.

Today, Mike serves as CEO of MSA Security, providing security, intelligence, training, and investigative services to both public and private organizations.

“Our ultimate goal is to put ourselves out of business,” says O’Neil. “The world would be a better place if it didn’t need companies like MSA.”

Mike’s advice is for leaders to practice “constant forward thinking and anticipation of future threats. We remain nimble and adaptable. Several years ago, MSA became the first EDC company to train our bomb dogs on homemade explosives such as TATP and HMTD. Now we see this is the most prominent explosive threat we face today.”

Unfortunately, most organizations don’t often take these proactive steps to prepare for security threats. Instead, they react after a safety or security incident shakes them out of complacency.

Today’s global economy makes keeping up with the pace of change increasingly difficult. And leaders must stay vigilant as new, unexpected threats to our local and national security appear nearly every day.

So, how can government leaders stay ahead of the curve in today’s volatile and uncertain operating environment?

Here are a few ways to stay prepared:

1. Stay humble. Most important for government leaders is to put your ego in check. If you aren’t the expert, listen, ask questions, and understand what the experts are saying before you make any decisions. Otherwise, you may do more harm than good.

2. Think long term. Our society often plans in the short term, but it will be our downfall unless we change our thinking. People who play the long game win. They may lose a battle here and there, but in the long-term, they win the war. Chess is a great example of this. If you play a reactive or short-term strategy, your opponent with a long-term strategy will win every time. The cost for us not playing the long game in safety and security could be catastrophic.

3. Take training seriously. If you’re in government service, safety and security training is often required or at least offered. Once you know where you are on the curve, get some training on how to deal with these safety and security issues to get yourself ahead of the curve. Don’t assume your level in the organization (high or low) will save you from dealing with these sorts of situations. Whether you’re a janitor or the President; if you work in public service, the safety and security of the country and its people are in some way part of your job. Also, don’t assume just because you’ve had the training you are done. Get a refresher at least once a year.

4. Make connections. Get to know folks like Mike who is an expert in safety and security. These are good people to be able to call on when you or someone you know has a problem. Also, don’t only call on these folks when you have a problem. Be proactive, reach out, and get updates on the field.

5. Build a team you trust. Being surrounded by people you can trust seems like common sense, but it’s much harder in a government agency where you don’t always have the ability to pick your team. So, you will need to either figure out how and when you can trust those around you, or figure out how to clean house.

6. Promote dissenting opinions. It’s ridiculous the number of leaders who I see in public service that chastise people for disagreeing with them. You want to hire smart people you trust and have them disagree with you. Having a bunch of yes-men agreeing with your every word is a recipe for disaster. You will make better decisions if you have people who aren’t afraid to tell you when you are making a mistake. Don’t be the Emperor Who Had No Clothes.

When dealing with issues of local and national security, “it’s critical to stay ahead of the latest threats with an intelligence program,” says Mike. “Be proactive, not reactive.”

While leaders can’t always anticipate what’s next, they can stay informed, help their organizations build strategies that will address a future need, and prepare their teams with proper training as threats evolve.

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If you spend every workday sitting in front of your computer with the occasional walk to the break room to top off your coffee, safety likely is not top of mind. Yet, for millions of workers across the globe, their jobs can put them in some extremely high-risk environments where valuing safety can mean the difference between life and death.

This critical need to help people reduce mistakes is very apparent to Luke Anear, who founded the company SafetyCulture in 2004 in an effort to help organizations better manage safety in the workplace. His solution goes well beyond safety. By leveraging technology to help people conduct audits, SafetyCulture can help reduce human error and increase consistency, all while reducing process waste.

I recently had a chance to chat with Luke to learn a bit about how his company is doing just that.

Anear got his start as a private investigator, charged with ensuring that insurance claimants were as injured as they reported. It was during his tenure as an investigator that he realized how broken the system truly was. “The entire safety system was mobilized into action after the fact. Someone gets injured or killed and legislators move to create legislation, for example,” Anear shared.

Setting out to find a more proactive way to drive safety behaviors in the workplace, Anear examined the market and came to a realization. “Checklists have been used for years to help ensure safety performance,” he says, “but nobody created them so that the information could be analyzed quickly and easily in order to drive faster change.” Thus SafetyCulture iAuditor, now the most used inspection app in the world, was born.

If you aren’t a commercial airline pilot, the concept of checklists may leave you scratching your head. But they are used around you all the time to help ensure that essential tasks are completed in a safe and efficient way. Procedural checklists also ensure accountability for auditing and supervision purposes.

By taking these paper audit checklists and digitizing them, SafetyCulture helps management ensure key tasks are being completed on time and to standard. In addition, the software allows their employees to share information much faster than ever before.

Let’s take the example of a food market that Luke shared with me. By equipping the workforce with a tablet or smartphone and the technology to conduct inspections digitally, employees in the market were able to carry out their audits quickly and consistently. If they came across an issue, say overripe produce on the shelf, they could take a digital picture and upload it so that others in the organization could understand the situation on the ground.

Now, this doesn’t seem like that big a deal at face value but consider this: You are the owner of a chain of markets and you just find out through a digital audit that you’ve been buying wholesale produce that is overripe and becomes unsellable too quickly at twenty of your markets. Understanding this quickly and changing your produce vendor can add up to big savings. How long would it have taken to receive and process twenty hard copy inspection sheets from your markets in order to come to that same conclusion?

The business case for leveraging technology to drive inspections and checklist activity makes sense. What Anear didn’t expect to find was that organizations using his software also began to experience a shift in the way employees interacted with their employers. The ability to report and capture images in this way empowers employees to take ownership in proactively identifying issues and discussing potential solutions in near real-time.

“By speeding up the data collection and management process, we are able to give leaders the ability to drive positive change faster,” says Anear. “The use of checklists and audits drives compliance behavior, which is necessary but not sufficient. The real power is when people start moving beyond simple compliance and they use the tools they are provided to add preemptive value to their organizations. These tools are one way to give people a voice.”

With over a million inspections being conducted each month through the SafetyCulture iAuditor platform, Anear feels that it is adding value at scale, and his customers are feeling the positive effects. Luke shared an example of a construction company who uses their app who has conducted 2.5 million work hours without a single lost-time injury.

Of course, in order for tech solutions like this to work effectively, leaders within organizations must truly care enough about safety to invest resources in training, technology, and equipment that drives safe behavior. Simply throwing an app at an issue may seem like a silver bullet, but tools alone cannot create a culture that truly values safety in all aspects of the work environment.

Still, giving employees a voice and the right tools empowers them to take a more active role in their work. Technology like SafetyCulture iAuditor allows these organizations to collect data and react faster to potential issues that may adversely affect productivity or safety. And considering that safety is a very real concern for thousands of organizations and their employees around the world, these proactive solutions can mean a meaningful difference in the number of work-related injuries.

This article originally appeared on Forbes.

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