The Greatest Myth of Safety Culture

Recently, I was asked what I thought is the greatest myth of safety culture. I did not need to think very long, although there is much to choose from. But I would like to offer the following:?

The greatest myth of safety culture is that many people assume that safety culture exists as a thing that they can measure and manage for their own purposes by reductionist approaches.

In a way this statement cheats a bit because we can separate this statement in a couple of keywords, or elements, which all provide important myths in themselves. Let me elaborate on each of them.

Thing

When you encounter a group of people and observe them for a time, you will be able to sense that there is something ‘between’ the members of this group. You notice regularities in the way they interact, the language they use, the way they do things and perhaps even in the way they dress. There seems to be an invisible force guiding these behaviours. This invisible force has been called ‘culture’.

While we in a way can ‘feel’ this force, and see its results, we cannot actually see it and we cannot touch it. Culture is not a physical object, it is not a thing. Culture is an explanation we have constructed to make sense of something we observe. Therefore, we call such an explanation a construct.

Measure

Constructs depend very much on our perception, interpretation and how we choose to define them. That makes constructs very hard to count and measure – unlike physical objects. Even though rocks, chairs or dogs may look very different, most people will agree on what they are and what should be classified as one. Most people have no problem counting them and we may expect only small margins of error between various measurements.

This is not the case for constructs which we use to explain individual or group properties as for example intelligence, personality, or culture. Because opinions of what these properties consist of vary wildly, and because the same applies to how we interpret our observations, it will be very difficult to get consistent and valid measurements. Besides, we will only measure some elements of the construct, not the construct as such, and usually we measure those elements by proxy. But let’s not complicate things further. Measuring a construct as culture is problematic, to say the least, and often useless.

Manage

As we saw, culture is about a group of people. A group of people can be characterised as a system – after all, it comprises of several parts which interact with each other. A group of people can even be characterised as a complex system because of the great number of variations and interactions.

Contrary to simple or even complicated systems, we cannot fully understand complex systems. The sheer number of possibilities and uncertain rules that govern the interactions are just too big for our capacity to cover and understand them all. Many of them will be unpredictable and unforeseen. There will be unknown and surprising feedback loops.?

Complex systems are hard to manage in the sense that one draws up a plan, details it in a five- or seven-step plan, including various milestones, and then starts rolling it out. Because we lack full knowledge of your system, we cannot fully understand it and we cannot predict its behaviour, there will be unintended side effects and the outcome of what we planned to do can be very different from what we hoped for.

Reductionist

Above we characterised culture as something that is found between members of a group. So, culture is a property of a group of people. It is not a property of the individual people in that group. Because culture is a group property, not an individual property, this means that we cannot reduce culture to individual properties as behaviour, awareness, or motivation.

Accepting that culture is the emergent property of a complex system makes it even more futile to try to manage it by reductionist approaches, e.g., by trying to make workers more ‘motivated’ to work safely. The whole has properties that you will not find in the individual components because the whole emerges (comes into existence) because of the interactions of the various elements, not because of the various elements.

Exist

Finally, the one keyword that I have not discussed so far, is the first. Does safety culture exist at all? Does a specific culture dedicated to safety exist? Can we separate safety culture from the overall organisational or group culture? Here we can ask ourselves whether we can separate safety from the ordinary work or actions we perform. We sometimes pretend that we can, for example to simplify analysis or detail some critical steps. But it always needs to be seen in connection with the context it happens in. Safety is just one of the many aspects that we need to take care of in what we do, and will always interact with other aspects as quality, efficiency, or production.

Likewise, it is impossible to see safety culture separate of other aspects of the group culture. For example, when it comes to priorities, we need to take account of the other objectives and balance among those. Think about it and you will realise that it is very hard where to draw the line of what is in or out? We can speak of safety culture, but then we need to keep in mind that it is merely a shorthand for elements of organisational or group culture related to safety.

And so…

Having said all this, should be just forget about the idea of safety culture? I think we should watch out not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Culture can provide us with a very useful lens to look at our organisations and work groups. However, working on it is best done by not directly trying to deal with culture and speaking about it. Rather try to influence how people interact, through the language used, the questions asked, the response to bad news and challenges and the ways conflicts are discussed and resolved. Doing so will have a much greater and lasting effect than any safety culture assessment and safety culture program. And your people will probably thank you for it.

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Want more where this came from? This is based on the first chapter of my new book, The First Rule of Safety Culture.

https://mindtherisk.com/publications/227-the-first-rule-of-safety-culture