Modern Safety theories that are grounded in systems thinking present exciting opportunities to reshape safety thinking and practices.
- Safety Differently
- Safety II
Safety Differently (Sidney Dekker)
Key messages:
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Trust, collaborate and empower staff to provide solutions to safety problems. They are experts in their work and often know best how to keep things safe.
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Safety is the presence of positive capacities that allow things to go right, not just the absence of accidents or harm.
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Focus on building the capacity for things to go well, rather than just making sure rules are followed. This means giving people the support and tools they need to succeed.
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Learn from every day successes to understand what contributes to safety, and build on these capacities.
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Safety is a shared responsibility across the system. Create an environment where everyone can speak up, share ideas and contribute to making work safer.
Safety II (Erik Hollnagel)
Key messages:
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Encourages us to study everyday successes to understand why things go right most of the time.
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The ability of workers to flex and adjust is critical to safety. People are problem solvers who adapt to challenges.
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Variation and adaptation is essential for making things go right, but also can contribute to things going wrong. Understanding variation and adaptation can help improve system safety.
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Study how people do their jobs every day to learn how to make more resilient systems capable of handling unexpected situations.
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Advocates a systems perspective, rather than focusing on individual parts. Safety comes from all different parts working together effectively.
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Safety II accompanies Safety 1 measures (audit, compliance and learning from failures).
