Workshop on Incremental Safety Culture, Questions, Reflections & Actions

Barriers to Maturity

• We are at a critical point in the advancement of safety and safety management. While the safety domain has significantly progressed over the last 30 years, we are a point where growth has plateaued. The last major stages of safety maturity occurred in the early to mid-1990’s. Since that time we have relied on compliance, behavior, culture, and management systems as the basis for safety management.
• While they did and still do provide value, they may also be creating barriers to advancing new approaches.
• There are numerous examples how they have led to such barriers. Most notably is our current obsession with outcome. We have existed in a domain that tells us that outcome tells a true story how a task was conceived, designed, setup, executed, and evaluated.  Very seldom is a task completed without multiple issues that are usually not observed nor necessarily tied to any one particular task outcome. New observation methods provide insights increasing the ability for an improvement in understanding and managing risks long before suffering a loss or harm incident.

Presentation from IWISC-1: 1st International Workshop on Incremental Safety Culture held on 24 June in Copenhagen.