Responding to incidents is a critical capability for any organization. Caring for those impacted, restoring or modifying equipment that is involved, and returning to normal operation is important. Learning from any incident offers the opportunity to make the changes necessary that will prevent the incident from occurring again. But in addition to being capable in our response, it is even more important that we are proactive in preventing incidents from occurring in the first place. This presentation focuses on what being proactive really means and how seeing the reality of our environment and work that our people do is key to taking the actions necessary in advance of an incident occurring. We will examine how being visually literate helps us to see hazards in the workplace that have become so familiar we no longer see them - until the incident occurs. We will discuss the linkage between visual literacy and common safety processes including hazard recognition, prevention through design, serious injury and fatality prevention, and others.