Safety thinking

Safety experts in aviation often refer to the notion of a Just Culture - a way of safety thinking that promotes a questioning attitude, is resistant to complacency, is committed to excellence, and fosters both personal accountability and corporate... 

Yet whilst Hollnagel (2014) warned of the allure of the graphical presentation that propelled the accident pyramid to its continued prominence in safety thinking (as discussed in Chapter 4), zero should arguably come with several warnings of its own the allure of the big round number, the allure of mathematics and measurement, and the allure of the snappy slogan - aptly illustrated in Figure 8.1. 

Old safety philosophy assumes that at any given time workers make a choice to work safe or not, whereas modem safety thinking assumes that accidents are defects in the total system and that people are only a part of the system. 

The method for safety improvement, according to antiquated safety philosophy, is to persuade and appeal to workers to be safer, whereas modem safety thinking is that methods for improvement involve identifying appropriate ways to improve the system. 

Redmill Anderson (2005). Preface to Constituents of Modem System-Safety Thinking, Proceedings of the 13" Safety-Critical Systems Symposium, February 2005, Springer-Verlag, London. ISBN 1-85233-952-7. 

The integration of safety thinking and action into all aspects of work practice, so that it is seen as an inseparable, but explicit part of the organisation. 

As-Imagined. (Scientific Management also extended the first stage of safety thinking (the focus on technology) to humans by treating people as machines or as part of the larger machine. And this was even before human factors as such came into its own.)... 

Sam Peltzman s methodological approach differs from the technological approach in that he focuses on human behavior especially driver choice. He begins with an individual benefit-cost framework to traffic safety and combines with it findings from other safety studies to construct counterfactual estimates of traffic fatality rates, hypothetical rates which would have occurred without a national traffic safety policy. We will examine his study in some detail because most of the studies are similar m crucial aspects and hence we can examine other studies more quickly. Peltzman s study is pivotal in that it was one of the first comprehensive evaluative studies. It reintroduced human behavior into traffic safety thinking. 

The Safe System approach is a fundamental shift from traditional traffic safety thinking. It reframes the ways in which traffic safety is viewed and managed. Its aim is to support development of a transport system better able to accommodate inevitable human error. The recognition that humans do make, and will continue to make, errors of judgement as road users is one of the core shifts in thinking. 

Johnston, I. Beyond best practice road safety thinking and systems management A case for culture change research. Safety Science, 2010, 48 1175-1181. 

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