If you are frustrated with your current safety outcomes you are not alone. The safety plateau is a near universal across the industry. If you add to this the pressure to remain compliant and ensuring “no one goes to jail”, for many of our client’s Safety has stopped being a fulfilling career some time ago. That is until they found a way to do safety differently.
Safety-II, Safety Differently, the New View. Call it what you will, Safety-II is the most effective, most exciting and most necessary evolution of industrial safety ever. In Traditional Safety (known as Safety-I or S1) work systems are basically safe because all components, and their effects, can be described, offering a predictive effect. A belief is created that all procedures are correct, complete and applicable to all contexts. System developers are capable of anticipating and designing for all contingencies.
Now, for things to go right all we need is for people to people to follow the specified rules and procedures. However, this is not the human condition. Humans are variable by nature. This makes people a liability, a problem to control, or even a threat to safety. To avoid negative events, humans thus have to be controlled.
Safety-II challenges the prevailing attitude towards people and systems. Systems are no longer seen as inherently safe but thwarted by the despicable unreliable workers. Instead, humans are seen as a valuable and necessary resource for the flexibility and resilience of an organisation to succeed. Workers are a source of the ever-necessary solutions required to manage the increasingly complex nature of work. Only the people know how to deal with time pressure, inadequate tools, incomplete system design, and trade-offs, such as being thorough and efficient at the same time. Rules and procedures are no longer regarded as entirely complete and applicable to any work situation.
For work to succeed, people have to constantly adapt and adjust their performance to the local circumstances.
Small Giants Advisory is not taking new safety clients until the completion of our current safety engagements.
The current estimated wait time is 4-6 months.