Safety is about learning to do things with good technique. Surgeons learn good sterile technique--and many operations are improvisational. Precisely the same thing: If you know what you're doing, you can skillfully and safely handle the unexpected.
The idea that safety in industry is about filling out forms is also false. Unfortunately it's a tale that many academic scientists repeatedly tell themselves, and it helps reinforce the (lazy) status quot. (I do not mean that people working in academic labs are lazy; as others have pointed out, they work too much. I'm saying that as a culture, academia is lazy about safety and messages like this reinforce that.)
In industry, people learn good technique--just like the surgeon. They view safety considerations as a routine part of what they do. If you're a coder, I assume, you annotate your code, or structure it well. (Sorry, it's been decades since I did any significant coding, or had anything to do with it really.) In the lab you use good technique: sterility, controls, safety. It all fits together into the skill set that defines you as a professional and not some brilliant hack.
