The Dirty Dozen of Safety Myths: A Survival-First Guide to Navigating Complexity

Risk is a fickle, complex, and often incomprehensible companion in life and work. While safety practices and regulations offer a sense of control, they often operate on the illusion that risk is calculable, predictable, and entirely preventable. This illusion comforts us with tidy metrics and rules, but it blinds us to the messy, chaotic nature of reality. The truth is, many risks arise from interactions we can neither foresee nor fully understand. The traditional focus on eliminating hazards or mitigating probabilities leaves us unprepared for the vast unknowns lurking in complex systems. A risk that remains incalculable cannot be managed solely through spreadsheets and checklists.

Drawing from my decades of experience in high-risk industries, I’ve come to see that survival is fundamentally different from safety. Survival doesn’t rely on rigid controls, static plans, or the false promises of predictability. It thrives on adaptability, resilience, and an unflinching acknowledgment of the world’s inherent uncertainty. Unlike safety, which is often reactive and compliance-driven, survival prioritizes equipping individuals and organizations with the mindset and tools to endure, recover, and learn. It sees the whole picture, the known, the unknown, and the unknowable. To illustrate this shift in perspective, I’ve identified a “Baker’s Dozen” of survival realities, 12 of which safety frequently denies or ignores, with one final addition that ties them all together.

1. The Unpredictability of Risk

Safety assumes that risks can be reduced to probabilities, neatly packaged into categories of high, medium, and low. But in reality, risks in complex systems often emerge unpredictably, with small variables triggering disproportionate outcomes. Survival recognizes that we cannot predict everything and instead focuses on building readiness for the unthinkable. This means preparing not just for what we expect but for what we can’t anticipate, because the greatest threats often come from where we least expect them.

2. The Role of Chance

Chance, luck, randomness, fate, plays a significant role in outcomes. Safety largely ignores this, relying on the comforting belief that every outcome can be traced back to a cause we can address or control. Survival, however, embraces the inherent randomness of life. It prepares for situations where everything goes right but still ends badly or where everything seems doomed yet miraculously resolves. Accepting the role of chance fosters humility and encourages us to prepare for scenarios where luck may not be on our side.

3. Cognitive Biases

Human biases, like overconfidence, hindsight bias, and the normalization of deviance, heavily influence decisions. Safety systems often fail to address these biases, assuming rational actors in all situations. Survival recognizes that our perceptions, assumptions, and shortcuts can either protect us or lead us into danger. Effective survival strategies focus on training and systems designed to counteract these biases, ensuring that we make decisions based on reality rather than flawed mental models.

4. Interconnected Failures

Safety tends to isolate events, dissecting one failure at a time as if it exists in a vacuum. Survival understands that failures in complex systems are often interconnected, cascading in ways that no risk matrix could predict. Think of how one small oversight can ripple into disaster, it’s the domino effect safety rarely accounts for. Survival emphasizes understanding these interdependencies and creating safeguards that can absorb and mitigate cascading failures.

5. Dynamic Contexts

The world isn’t static, yet safety often treats it as if it is. Rules and procedures are written for ideal conditions, ignoring the dynamic and ever-changing nature of real-world operations. Survival strategies adapt in real-time, always considering the shifting context. It’s about staying alert to what’s changing and making decisions that align with the evolving environment, rather than relying solely on fixed protocols that may no longer apply.

6. Emotional and Psychological Factors

People under stress or fatigue don’t behave as they do in a sterile training exercise. Survival acknowledges that emotions, mental states, and cognitive overload influence performance and decision-making — factors that safety protocols often disregard. Recognizing these realities means creating environments where people can recover, manage their stress, and maintain their decision-making capacity even under extreme pressure.

7. Human Variability

Safety often aims for uniformity, expecting everyone to follow the same procedures perfectly. But humans are variable, our creativity and adaptability in the face of uncertainty are our greatest strengths. Survival celebrates this variability, seeing it as an asset rather than a liability. It focuses on leveraging individual strengths and adapting systems to align with human variability rather than trying to eliminate it.

8. Coexistence with Risk

Safety often operates on the assumption that risks can be eliminated entirely. Survival accepts that risk is endemic, it’s always there, and we must learn to coexist with it rather than futilely trying to erase it. Coexistence means balancing risk and reward, preparing for worst-case scenarios, and acknowledging that zero risk is neither achievable nor desirable in most contexts.

9. Recovery and Resilience

Safety prioritizes prevention but often neglects recovery. When things go wrong, and they inevitably do, survival hinges on our ability to recover quickly and effectively, using resilience as a cornerstone. This means building systems and teams that can absorb shocks, adapt to new realities, and bounce back stronger than before.

10. Normalization of Deviance

Over time, small deviations from standards become the new normal. Safety tends to dismiss these as minor rule-breaking, while survival sees them as vital signals that the system is under strain and requires intervention. Survival focuses on identifying and addressing these patterns early, before they escalate into larger failures.

11. Learning from Failure

Safety often views failure as a breach of compliance, leading to blame and punishment. Survival treats failure as an opportunity to learn, adapt, and grow stronger. Failure isn’t the end, it’s data for improvement. Survival systems encourage open reporting, root cause analysis, and iterative improvement to ensure that failures are stepping stones rather than stumbling blocks.

12. Interdisciplinary Insights

Safety tends to remain siloed, relying on compliance and engineering perspectives. Survival thrives on interdisciplinary learning, pulling from psychology, sociology, complexity science, and other fields to craft holistic approaches to managing risk. By integrating diverse perspectives, survival strategies address the multifaceted nature of risks more effectively.

13. The Fragility of Control

Here’s the keystone reality: safety rests on the illusion of control, but control is fragile. No regulation, no checklist, no compliance audit can guarantee safety. Survival acknowledges this fragility, emphasizing humility, preparation, and adaptability over rigid structures. When we recognize that control is fleeting, we free ourselves to focus on what truly matters, enduring and withstanding without life-altering harm.

Moving Beyond Safety

If we’re to navigate the complexity of modern work and life, we need to move beyond traditional safety paradigms. Survival isn’t about replacing safety but expanding our perspective. It’s about preparing for the unknown, building resilience, and embracing the messy, unpredictable nature of reality. Survival accepts that risk cannot be fully controlled, but it can be managed by focusing on equifinality, multiple paths to success, and developing the capacity to adapt when conditions shift.

When we shift our focus from control to coexistence, we unlock new possibilities for learning, growth, and resilience. Survival strategies align people and organizations with the complexities of their environments, making them more capable of withstanding shocks and emerging stronger. By acknowledging these thirteen realities, we can equip ourselves, and our organizations, not just to comply, but to thrive. Survival is about ensuring that when systems fail, people don’t. It’s about enduring, withstanding, and adapting in a way that keeps us coming back, stronger than before.

And that’s a risk worth taking.