Traditional approaches to safety management, also referred to as Safety-I in the context of the “New View”, focus on eliminating hazards and preventing accidents.
The focus of the “New View” is not on learning from accidents, but on learning from day-to-day operations—from what goes ‘right’.
Safety-I equates safety with freedom from risk and accidents and measures safety by the absence of undesirable events, e.g., accident rates or accident-free days.
This strategy leads to improvements until organisations reach a plateau in accident figures.
In recent years, there has been a growing movement towards an expanded view of safety, with resilience and so-called capacity taking centre stage.
The most prominent representatives of this new perspective are Erik Hollnagel with Safety II, Sidney Dekker with Safety Differently, and Todd Conklin with Human Organizational Performance (HOP).
The shared philosophy:
– People are fallible. Safety is not about assigning blame.
– Employees are the experts.
– Safety is a property of the system.
– Continuous curiosity and learning from what works well and is done correctly.
All approaches assume that day-to-day operations are essentially the same regardless of the outcome; i.e., there is always variation in how work is done, but it does not always result in an accident.
The focus of the “New View” is therefore not on learning from accidents, but on learning from day-to-day operations—from what goes ‘right’.
In Fig. 1, the black line represents how work is planned. However, because we do not live in a perfect world but in a complex one, decisions must be made every day to adapt the plan to current conditions. That is the blue line—how work actually takes place. The red line represents the potential for injury—the “work-in-practice” must not drift into the red-line area.
The aim is to work together with the experts, i.e., employees, to identify where the blue line lies—i.e., the discrepancy between “work as planned” and “work in practice”—in order to build resilient, i.e., fault-tolerant work systems. In these systems, the distance between the red and blue lines (English: capacity) is always large enough that human errors do not lead to accidents.
Good to know
The “New View” can be seen as a further development of the Human Factors and System Safety branch within safety science and has its origins in the school of Cognitive Systems Engineering (CSE), which has a long research history.
What is new, then, is less the approaches themselves than the way the content is presented and communicated.
I like to use a combination of proven and modern approaches. With its philosophy, the expanded “New View” perspective particularly supports the necessary shift in perspective when developing from a rule-based to a proactive and generative safety culture.
If you are looking for an easy-to-read, practice-oriented book, I can recommend “Do Safety Differently” by Dekker and Conklin (no: not an affiliate link, but genuinely just a book recommendation, albeit in English).
