How Safety-II is Changing Safety Management

Prof. Erik Hollnagel has raised the challenging view that safety management needs to shift from just minimising the ‘few things that go wrong’ (Safety-I) to maximizing the many ‘things that go right’ (Safety-II).
 
The Professor highlights that whilst organisations can never completely remove the risk of failures in design and practice, they can improve the robustness of the system by concentrating on Safety-II. As systems increase in complexity there is a need to understand the difference between the way “work is imagined” and “work is done”. All too often safety is viewed through the lens of what has happened, where everything thing appears to be obvious after the event. Safety management needs to shift to being proactive where making things right and early interventions are the focus. When this shift occurs valuable time is saved through only having to make minor adjustments and efficiency and productivity is increased.
 
Generative HSE is currently partnering with Thiess to incorporate these proactive Safety-II thinking and practices into their day-to-day safety tools and practices.