While I agree that X>0 accidents/year could be seen as quite cynical, what sense does it make to set an objective that can't be met ?
I'm still in school, so that is surely naive, but we've been taught that objectives must be realistic (Achievable, cf. SMART ?)
While I'm sure a near-zero accident target can be attained over time, I doubt it's feasible "like that" in a single year, starting from 150 events.
Having an unattainable objective means you already got excuses ready when you fail to meet your own requirements, I'd think. "Hey no biggie, we weren't really expecting success" (so did we really provide time money and efforts adequate to success ? Probably not. So what's the whole point ?)
While temporarily raising your target (I'd rather call it setting a realistic objective for the first time) may not mean that you fully accept the 150 accidents/year, but that you aknowledge the weaknesses and plan steps of improvement that you *really* want/can achieve in order to reach 100, then 50, then 0 accidents/year.
Of course I set the hypothesis that the 50 accidents/year is a temporary objective that will be met then lowered until it's 0 (or we can figure a way to have negative accidents, where workers leave the company in better form they came in
)