Safety II professionals: How resilience engineering can transform safety practice (March 2020)

Summary

This paper provides a practical description of the purpose, tasks and activities of a safety professional through the theoretical lens of resilience engineering and safety II.

The authors propose that the fundamental responsibility of safety professionals can be best described as: creating foresight about the changing shape of risk, and facilitating action, before people are harmed. Such that, if we get to count the bad things that have happened to people, then we have already failed. Thus, safety management must be proactive, not reactive, but how do safety professionals achieve this and identify problems before there are obvious failings?

This paper answers this question by presenting an outline of the activities and tasks of safety professionals in support of a guided adaptability mode of safety management, which has not previously been attempted in the high reliability organizations, resilience engineering, safety differently or safety-II literature. It does this by: outlining the existing role of a safety professional in a safety management mode of centralised control, describing the breakdowns of the safety professional role when operating in this mode, and then providing direction for how the role can be reframed to support a safety management mode of guided adaptability.

In addition to the primary purpose of this paper, the authors also aim to clarify aspects of the resilience engineering theory that have been misrepresented and misunderstood in the literature and practically within organisations.

Content

In order to create centralised control for safety management, organisations focus their effort on developing their capacity to:

• Analyse hazards - Analysis of the factors that could cause operations to become unsafe.
• Implement controls - Implement Controls (physical and behavioural) to manage hazards.
• Monitor conformance - Control performance is informed by proactive and reactive information.
• Delegate authorities - Line management and safety professionals make safety decisions.
• Standardise safety culture  - Promote leadership and front-line commitment to prioritize safety.

The authors propose the following safety professional activities to support the centralised control mode of safety:

1. Support the task-based identification of hazards (e.g. take-5) and assessment of risk.
2. Facilitate the identification and assessment of system level hazards.
3. Develop controls for tasks (e.g. working at heights) and processes (e.g. contractor management).
4. Monitor controls proactively (e.g. inspections) and reactively (e.g. incident investigation).
5. Provide safety incident and compliance reporting to line management and regulators.
6. Support line management decision-making and arbitrate between stakeholders as necessary.
7. Promote an 'authority to stop work' for safety across the frontline workforce.
8. Develop and promote safety culture improvement programmes.