About / Our story
Founded 2009 · Mornington, Victoria
Fix the work, not the worker.
JointAction was founded in 2009 — but the conviction beneath it goes back further, to ergonomics research that located musculoskeletal injury risk in the design of the work, not the worker.
The origin
The shearer-safety research.
The story starts with shearers — among the most physically demanding jobs in Australian rural work, where musculoskeletal injury was effectively an occupational expectation. Michael Lawrance went to look at the work: not to write a report, but to build a research program that could measure what was happening to a shearer's body across a shift, and identify which features of the work were creating the injury rate.
The work was done with members of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, recognised with awards, and it produced something more durable: conclusions about how musculoskeletal injury actually arises that didn't sit comfortably with the orthodoxy of "lift with your legs." The orthodoxy located the problem in the worker. The research located it in the work.
The Australian Coal Research Board funded the extension of that research into mining — a far larger, far more hazardous industrial population. The methodology held up. Fix the work, not the worker turned out to be a position you could defend across very different settings, when the methodology was good enough. That body of research became the spine of what is now the Consequential Risk Score.
The orthodoxy located the problem in the worker. The research located it in the work.
The conviction the platform is built on
2009
JointAction Group is founded.
By the late 2000s the methodology to identify risk drivers existed, and the hardware to capture biomechanical data in the field was emerging. What didn't exist was a platform that combined the two and turned the result into something operationally useful inside a serious prevention program. JointAction Group Pty Ltd was incorporated in January 2009 in Mornington, Victoria, to be that platform.
Michael Lawrance brought the research foundation and the conviction. Co-founder David Bick brought the clinical lens — the reason the platform's score is consequence-weighted rather than just exposure-weighted, linking biomechanical exposure to injury severity, recovery pathway and claims cost. Around them, a team drawn from inside the work: practising ergonomists, insurer-side risk advisors and safety practitioners.
In the years that followed, Dr Forbes Smith brought the senior clinical and ergonomics rigour that connects the platform to the wider research community, and Stephen Cowley anchored the UK arm through Finch Consulting and the European ergonomics network.
The years since
Seventeen years of the conviction holding up.
Since 2009 the company has produced patents granted in Australia and the United States, a published methodology, and active deployment across three countries — Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom — in mining, utilities, manufacturing, logistics, defence, infrastructure, hospitality and aged care.
The methodology is examined and applied with research partners including the University of Waterloo (CRE-MSD) and Cranfield University, and a practitioner network that keeps the platform close to the realities of the work. The conviction the company started with — evidence over opinion, the work as the problem, a program that reaches the work where it actually happens — has held up across seventeen years of deployments. The platform is what that conviction has become.