The


Emperor has no


clothes The SAFETY I vs


SAFETY II proposed and debated by Dr. Dominic Cooper


Abstract


Relatively new to safety, Resilience Engineering (RE) is known by various pseudonyms: Safety-II, Human & Organizational Performance (HOP) and Safety Differently. Collectively termed New-View, they have created a stir amongst OSH practitioners by challenging them to view key areas of occupational safety in a different way:


[1] how safety is defined; [2] the role of people in safety; and [3] how businesses focus on safety.


When subject to critical scrutiny, New-View’s major tenets are shown to be a collection of untested propositions (ideas, rules, and principles). New-View’s underlying RE philosophy is predicated on repeatedly testing the boundary limitations of systems until a failure occurs, which paradoxically requires more risk controls that create the very problems New-View criticizes and attempts to address – constraints, complexity, rigidity, and bureaucracy. This continuous threat- rigidity cycle indicates New-View’s raison d’etre is somewhat circular. New-View entirely lacks any new associated practical methodologies for improving safety performance: it uses traditional Safety-1


methodologies to tackle actual safety problems. Moreover, no published, peer-reviewed empirical evidence demonstrates whether or not any aspect of New-View’s propositions are valid. Currently we don’t know


how, or if, New-View improves safety performance per se, or if it reduces or eliminates incidents/injuries. The extant Safety-1 literature suggests that New-View’s propositions lack substance. The inescapable conclusion, therefore, is ‘the emperor has no clothes’ and that ideology and emotion has triumphed over science and practice. It is also clear that the OSH profession has an immense crisis of ethics across its entire landscape.


“Safety II” or “Safety Differently” have made headlines in recent years as an evolutionary complement of the conventional safety thinking, referred to as ‘Safety I’. The new safety concept comes to dislodge the interest from ’what goes wrong’ to ‘what goes right’, reminding that safety management should not only be reactive, but proactive as well.


However, recent research approaches Safety II, or the “New-View” as it is framed, as a collection of untested propositions, questioning whether these are valid or not.


What exactly is the New-View?


Officially seen as “Resilience Engineering (RE)”, this New-View concept has emerged in recent years aiming to redefine the way in which health and safety practitioners see safety, the role of people in safety; and how businesses specifically focus on safety. As a leader in the Safety II concept, Professor Erik Hollnagel says


112 | The Report • June 2022 • Issue 100


the term is concerned with ensuring how and why things go right, rather than how and why they go wrong, as is the case with the Safety I concept. Meanwhile, the closely related term of “Safety Differently” rejects the notion of “human error” as incident causation, viewing them as symptoms of system problems affecting Human Factors, according to Professor Sidney Dekker who has led research on the topic.


While the conventional approach focuses on prevention of harm through standards and rules, Safety II focuses on promoting long- lasting resilience by promoting the human ability to work safely without adhering to the rule book. For example, an accident investigation under the scope of Safety I is to identify the causes of adverse outcomes, while risk assessment aims to determine their likelihood. On the contrary, accident investigations under Safety II seek to understand how things usually go right, as this forms the basis for explaining how things go wrong.


For shipping, an industry particularly vulnerable to safety and heavily reliant on rules and regulations, progressing from traditional safety approaches can be challenging, if not risky. Human error is estimated to account for around 80% of maritime accidents, but this cause is pretty vague and “barely scratches the surface of an incident investigation”, Alvin Forster from the North P&I Club said.


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