The Practical Consequences

A short-hand characterisation of the differences between Safety-I and Safety-II is to note that Safety-I leads to protective safety while Safety-II leads to productive safety. Safety-I and Safety-II both want as few tings as possible to go wrong, but they do it in different ways. Protective safety means that the number of adverse outcomes, the number of things that go wrong, is reduced by preventing things from going wrong - by elimination, barriers, and protection. Productive safety means that the number of successful outcomes, the number of things that go right, is increased as much as possible. This can be done by understanding how work goes well and find ways to support and facilitate that. And since somehing cannot go right and go wrong at the same time, an increase in the number of things that go right will obviously lead to a decrease in the number of things that go wrong. QED.

The practical consequences of the two perspectives are shown by the table below. The two columns summarise the questions and concerns that are characteristic of the two perspectives.

Focus of Safety-I	Focus of Safety-II
Where can work go wrong? Where are the weaknesses?	What do we do well? Where are the strengths and skills?
Where are the risks and hazards?	Where are the opportunities?
Which kind of protection do we need? (Barriers)	Which kind of support do we need? (Facilitators)
How can the variability of work (deviations, non-compliance) be limited or constrained?	How can the ubiquitous performance adjustments (variability) be recognised, managed and supported?
How can we ensure that work-as-done corresponds to work-as-imagined? How can we increase standardisation?	How can we reconcile work-as-done with work-as-imagined? How can we learn from useful adjustments?
How can we ensure that people are reliable or compliant?	How can we motivate and inspire people to do a good job?

Safety-II in a regulated corporate environment

The Australian Journal of Health, Safety & Environment recently published an interview with Tom McDaniel from Siemens in the USA. The topic was "Safety-II in a regulated corporate environment - pending or happening?"

You can download a copy of the article here.

According to the conventional interpretation of safety, here called Safety-I, safety denotes a condition where as little as possible goes wrong, the focus of practical efforts whether in management or analysis is therefore on the occurrence of unacceptable outcomes and on how to reduce their number to an acceptable level, ideally zero and the emphasis is on how to manage safety eo ipso, as seen in the ubiquitous safety management Systems (SMS).

This approach, however leads to somewhat of a paradox since Safety in this way is defined and measured more by its absence than by its presence, as noted by Reason, (2000). According to a Safety-I perspective an accident thus represents a situation or a condition where there is or was a lack of safety. Which immediately raises the obvious question of how it is possible to learn about something if it only is studied in situations where it is not there?No known sciences can do that-- except safety science!!! And furthermore how is it possible to manage something that is not there? The simple answer is that it is impossible! THE UNACCEPTABLE OUTCOMES THAT SAFETY MANAGEMENT FOCUS ON ARE THE RESULTS OF SOMETHING THAT HAPPENED IN THE PAST,BUT DOES NOT HAPPEN ANY LONGER IT CAN THEREFORE NOT BE MANAGED!!!-- While you can manage a process you cannot manage a product.These paradox fortunately disappears in the view proposed by Safety-II, where safety is defined as a condition where as much as possible goes well. An acceptable outcome therefore represents conditions where safety is present rather than absent, and efforts are accordingly directed at understanding how this happens and how one can ensure that it will happen also in the future. Logically, if as much as possible goes well, then as little as possible goes wrong,since in practice something cannot go well and go wrong at the same time. A Safety-II approach therefore achieves the same objective as a Safety-I approach, but does so in a completely different way. In Safety-II the concern is not to manage safety as a static outcome, hence using safety as a noun but to manage system performance safely, as a dynamic process, hence safely as an adverb. There is a crucial difference between managing safety and managing safely. The former represents a cost, since the purpose is to avoid something rather than to achieve something, while the latter represents an investment that directly contributes to productivity as well as increased revenue. It is therefore clearly more important and useful for a company to manage safely than to manage safety.

Since most work and most activities in practice go well, even though we fail to pay attention to them there will also be more cases to study sand learn from. Best of all, perhaps is that there is no need to wait for something to happen, i.e., to fail or go wrong. Something is happening all the time all we need to do is to pay attention to it

Reason, J. (2000). Safety paradoxes and safety culture. Injury Control & Safety Promotion, 7(1), 3-14.