How Can We Manage Safety If We Don't Agree What It Is?

A recent study published in Safety Science provides a fascinating overview and summary of the schools of thought regarding how we define (and study/discuss/manage) safety itself. We'd like to thank the original authors whose work we build upon in this blog: Yaqoob Raheemy, Fred Sherratt, and Matthew R. Hallowell.

A Thought Experiment...

As a thought experiment, and before reading further, please take a moment (without consulting any references) to write down YOUR definition of safety. Save it and we'll come back to it towards the end of this blog post.

Key Points from the Paper

The paper traces the interesting origins of the word "safety" in the English language, which (predictably) has its roots in French language and earlier Latin:

The term “safety” emerged in the late fourteenth century, used to describe a state of being free from danger. Later, in the 1580s the term “safe” took the form of an adjective to describe conditions or situations “without risk” was first recorded (Harper 2001). These definitions are slightly different in their nuance to the very first iterations of safety because they look outwards and speak to an individual’s environment rather than the state of the individual themselves. These latter definitions reflect more contemporary simple generic definitions of safety, such as “the absence of unwanted outcomes like incident or accident”(Hollnagel 2014a, p. 1; Manuele 2013, p. 2).

Based on a survey conducted amongst 518 participants from different industries, the study concluded that there is no consensus among professionals about how we define (or think about) safety itself. Safety broadly fell into three categories, structured around time (past, present, and future).

Future-oriented: Safety is seen as proactive actions to prevent injuries, focusing on risk management, hazard control, and continuous improvement.

Present-oriented: Safety is defined as the current condition of being protected, emphasizing the presence of controls, feeling protected, and accountability.

Past-oriented: Safety is viewed as the absence of harm, accidents, or injuries, reflecting on historical performance to inform future practices.

Applying these concepts to outdoor and experiential education programs

More than just an academic concept, this paper provides some useful and interesting implications for outdoor and experiential education programs. The paper also parallels the ways in which some outdoor and experiential education programs have evolved over the years in how we talk about safety. As far back as the mid 1990's, outdoor programs began to recognize that "safety" means "freedom from risk of harm" and started talking about "risk management" instead. Organizations such as AEE and the WRMC advanced these conversations, and continue to do so. More recently, we have begun to ask questions similar to those posed in the paper.

Some questions for you to consider:

1. Does your organization have a clear, unified definition of "safety" or specific safety goals? By choosing one definition, could we potentially lose the value we gain from other definitions?

2. How might your definition inform your organizational approach to risk tolerance or risk philosophy?

3. How do operational elements (such as the form you use for incident reports) align with your actual views and definitions of safety? (For example, perhaps your goal is to look into the future but your entire incident reporting system is focused on the past)

4. Does your organizational approach to risk management potentially confuse process (engagement with risk) with outcome (did anything bad happen)? If everyone crosses a glacier unroped and no one falls in a crevasse .. were they safe, or were they lucky?

5. Does your organization take the absence of (reported) incidents as an indicator of current safety, or as a predictor of future safety?

Our Thought Experiment Continues...

Returning to your definition of safety that you wrote down earlier, after reading the paper and considering the perspectives from this blog post, does your definition fit into any of the three categories above (past, present, or future)? Do you define safety as the absence of something or the presence of something? Is your definition something that is achievable?

Remember the "zero paradox" concept mentioned in the paper above - setting a goal of "zero incidents' may sound good to those in high level leadership roles, but is unrealistic and even demoralizing for those on the front lines of work, and can drive incident reporting underground. If the goal is zero, who wants to be the one to speak up and report an incident (or even a near-miss)?

Having reflected on these concepts, is there anything you might change about your definition of safety? If you conduct this thought experiment with your colleagues at work, what do you think the results will be?

Drop a comment here or reach out to us at Experiential Consulting to share your thoughts!

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