Safety or safely

All material (c) Erik Hollnagel, 2021.


What's in a name?


In "safety" where there's now a 't',
there might as well
be an 'l'

The word safety is grammatically a noun which, according to https://www.etymonline.com/, has been used from the beginning of the 14th century. The origin is, no surprise, from the Latin word salvus which means “uninjured, in good health, safe”. In a technological context its use as “safety-valve”, the name of the valve in a steam engine which diminishes the risk of explosion, is from 1797. The same term was used in a figurative sense from 1818 onward. And “safety first” as an accident-prevention slogan is from 1873.

Today the word safety can be found everywhere and the concern for safety – in the sense of being free from danger, risk or injury – is ubiquitous. No one could sensibly argue against the need to be safe in that meaning. Indeed, in Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, safety is described as a fundamental need, second only to physiological needs (food, water, warmth, rest).

Being safe is, however, not the same as safety. The term “safety management system” is by now used so often (Google hits: 11.900.000) that we have stopped thinking about what it actually means. Taken literally is means a system that is used to manage safety. This immediately raises the question of what this “safety” is, that is supposed to be managed.

A safety management system is a systematic approach to managing safety, including organisational structures, accountabilities, policies and procedures. (1)

But defining a safety management system as a systematic approach to manage safety doesn’t actually make it any clearer what safety is. (In Kantian terminology it is an analytic rather than a synthetic proposition. Stating that "an X management system is a system to manage X" does, however, not really explain what X is.) I suggest that the problem is mostly due to the use of the noun safety, and that it would be more in line with the etymology of the word to use it as an adverb. In other words, as “safely” rather than “safety”.

Instead of talking about a safety management system (SMS), we should talk about how to manage a system safely: how to manage an airline safely rather than how to manage airline safety, how to manage a mine safely rather than how to manage mining safety, how to manage healthcare safely rather than how to manage healthcare safety, and so on. This is indeed what we actually mean when we use the SMS term: it is about managing how a system, a process, or a company performs so that the outcome is acceptably safe, rather than to manage the safety of that system, etc. (And being safe means, of course, that as much as possible goes well rather than that as little as possible fails.)

SMS is a structured process that obligates organizations to manage safety with the same level of priority that other core business processes are managed. (2)

As the above quote from the FAA kindly points out, being safe is not the only concern of a business. (And once again FAA's definition is an analytic rather than a synthetic proposition.) Depending on what the purpose of a system is, there will be several priorities or criteria that have to be considered in parallel. There is a need to be productive, to be efficient, to be reliable, to have acceptable quality of products or services, to satisfy customers / clients / stakeholders, to generate revenue, etc. Each objective is usually pursued by itself, with specialised organisation roles and structures, methods, terminology, and traditions. So the situation looks something like this.


The question is, however, whether the management is of n different systems or whether the management is of one system but with n multiple interdependent objectives and criteria in mind. If the latter is the case (as I happen to believe), we should make an effort to avoid using safety as a noun, as in safety management, quality management, production management, etc. The first step would be to use the adverbial forms and talk about managing (activity X) safely, productively, etc. This is easily done for some of the terms, but not for all of them. Yet it is not enough to change “safety” to “safely”, “production” to “productively”, and so on. It is also necessary to acknowledge the need to manage them together, as multiple interdepend aspects or facets of the same underlying process or system. There is, fortunately, a term that captures just that: synetic management.


Of which more may be said later.


Footnotes

(1) https://www.casa.gov.au/safety-management/safety-management-systems/what-safety-management-and-safety-management-systems

(2) https://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/sms/

According to the conventional interpretation of safety, here called Safety-I, safety denotes a condition where as little as possible goes wrong, the focus of practical efforts whether in management or analysis is therefore on the occurrence of unacceptable outcomes and on how to reduce their number to an acceptable level, ideally zero and the emphasis is on how to manage safety eo ipso, as seen in the ubiquitous safety management Systems (SMS).


This approach, however leads to somewhat of a paradox since Safety in this way is defined and measured more by its absence than by its presence, as noted by Reason, (2000). According to a Safety-I perspective an accident thus represents a situation or a condition where there is or was a lack of safety. Which immediately raises the obvious question of how it is possible to learn about something if it only is studied in situations where it is not there?No known sciences can do that-- except safety science!!! And furthermore how is it possible to manage something that is not there? The simple answer is that it is impossible! THE UNACCEPTABLE OUTCOMES THAT SAFETY MANAGEMENT FOCUS ON ARE THE RESULTS OF SOMETHING THAT HAPPENED IN THE PAST,BUT DOES NOT HAPPEN ANY LONGER IT CAN THEREFORE NOT BE MANAGED!!!-- While you can manage a process  you cannot manage a product.These paradox fortunately disappears in the view proposed by Safety-II, where safety is defined as a condition where as much as possible goes well. An acceptable outcome therefore represents conditions where safety is present rather than absent, and efforts are accordingly directed at understanding how this happens and how one can ensure that it will happen also in the future. Logically, if as much as possible goes well, then as little as possible goes wrong,since in practice something cannot go well and go wrong at the same time. A Safety-II approach therefore achieves the same objective as a Safety-I approach, but does so in a completely different way. In Safety-II the concern is not to manage safety as a static outcome, hence using safety as a noun but to manage system performance safely, as a dynamic process, hence safely as an adverb. There is a crucial difference between managing safety and managing safely. The former represents a cost, since the purpose is to avoid something rather than to achieve something, while the latter represents an investment that directly contributes to productivity as well as increased revenue. It is therefore clearly more important and useful for a company to manage safely than to manage safety.


Since most work and most activities in practice go well, even though we fail to pay attention to them there will also be more cases to study sand learn from. Best of all, perhaps is that there is no need to wait for something to happen, i.e., to fail or go wrong. Something is happening all the time all we need to do is to pay attention to it

Reason, J. (2000). Safety paradoxes and safety culture. Injury Control & Safety Promotion, 7(1), 3-14.