How Leaders Create Safety Differently and HOP

By Brett Read

A common message in Safety Differently (Dekker, 2015)[i] , Safety II (Hollnagel, 2015)[ii] and Human and Organisational Performance (HOP) is the need to focus on our capacity to perform. This new thinking has created a big step forward when compared to conventional safety which focuses on where we are not performing – where things are going wrong.

Hollnagel defined the difference as, “Most people think of safety as the absence of accidents and incidents (or as an acceptable level of risk). In this perspective, which we term Safety-I, safety is defined as a state whereas few things as possible go wrong. A Safety-I approach presumes that things go wrong because of identifiable failures or malfunctions of specific components: technology, procedures, the human workers and the organisations in which they are embedded.

Humans—acting alone or collectively—are therefore viewed predominantly as a liability or hazard, principally because they are the most variable of these components.” (Hollnagel, 2015)

Dekker suggests that, “a new era for human factors calls for a different kind of safety thinking. A thinking that sees people as the source of diversity, insight, creativity, and wisdom about safety, not as sources of risk that undermine an otherwise safe system.” (Dekker, 2015)

Todd Conklin has also written extensively on this need for a different approach, “First, the New View of safety changes the definition of success. Safety is not the absence of accidents; safety is the presence of capacity. Secondly, we have to change the way we view our workers. Traditional safety saw workers as problems to be fixed. That is why we have had so many programs that track worker behavior. For a long time, we thought the problem was our mistake prone and uncontrolled workforce. If we wanted safety to improve, we would simply need to fix each worker, one at a time, until all workers conducted work safely.” (Conklin 2019)[iv]

Ten years ago, we published a paper (Winter, et al. 2010) that outlined the research we had done on the leadership practices that drive performance. The key findings from the research we conducted were:

• Contrary to conventional management and safety thinking, improved team performance was not achieved through more management of the first 3 Dimensions of performance.
• >70% of team performance was driven by leadership (the 4th Dimension) and even more crucially it was the frontline leaders that created this.
• What the conventional approach to management and safety typically focuses on, through existing KPI’s, does not measure any of this 70%.
• The same leadership practices that create safety performance also drive all other areas of team performance.

If you want to create Safety Differently, focusing on capacity to perform is not enough of a distinction. 

Performance in socio-technical systems is even more complex than just the difference between Safety l and Safety ll. Hollnagel makes the point that we need to focus on the things that make things go well. I believe we need to understand the performance at a level of complexity beyond that distinction.

With Dr Keith Owen and research partners we conducted research studies over a 3-year period with more than 1,000 work teams and 10,000 workers. (Winter, et.al., 2010)[v], (Owen, et.al., 2011)[vi]

The results of the study showed that a set of just four leadership practices were particularly important in influencing work team performance:

1. An achievement orientation, keeping clarity on group purpose and providing team members the means to make daily progress towards more fully realizing the purpose.
2. A relationship focus, grounded in high levels of trust, dialogue, respect, collaboration, and transparency. In other words, superior leaders focused on their teams: communicating, motivating, disciplining, managing conflict, and training subordinates.
3. A problem-solving/solution orientation that focused on being highly responsive and adaptive to producing results and consistently and efficiently removing barriers to doing so. This leadership practice can be considered a supporting factor contributing to an achievement orientation.
4. Self-Leadership, or the ability to behave congruently with values across diverse situations and demands. This measure includes both the ability to regulate one’s emotional and behavioural response to a situation as well as the strength of character and personal integrity to do so. This leadership practice can be considered as a supporting factor contributing to relationship focus.

The work we were doing helped us understand that getting the technical aspects of socio-technical systems right is not enough. The technical systems, the stuff that we can manage, are just the enablers of performance – they don’t create performance. Understanding this requires a paradigm shift, a change in how we think about performance. But like all paradigm shifts, once you understand the new paradigm, the previously incomplete view suddenly becomes clear. Our filtered vision from our old paradigm is no longer constraining our thinking.

“Our acts can be no wiser than our thoughts, our thinking can be no wiser than our understanding”

George Clason, The Richest Man in Babylon, 1926

We call this paradigm shift, moving from 3D to 4D thinking. The 3D approach is the world of management and it is about managing 3 Dimensions of our technical systems:

1. Production and schedules,
2. Costs and resources,
3. Systems and processes using a mixture of lag and lead indicators.

The 4th Dimension is about people, the socio part of HOP. The 4 Dimensions are a way of understanding HOP. The paradigm shift comes from understanding the distinction between the first 3 Dimensions and the 4th Dimension. The 4th Dimension is leadership, and more specifically, leadership which influences the people in the organisation, the human part of HOP.

Managing the first 3 Dimensions provides the functional capacity to perform; they don’t of themselves drive performance. It is the 4th Dimension that drives performance. A seed has the capacity to become a plant, but it is not until you add water that you unlock that potential and create a plant.

“A system or a procedure never achieved anything, it is people being committed to implementing the system that achieves the performance needed.”

You can think of the first 3 Dimensions as what provides the capacity to put a perfectly functional aircraft on a runway. That aircraft has so much functional capacity. It can transport people and equipment, by day and night, in a wide range of weather and environmental conditions. It can fly around or over storms, over jungles, deserts and oceans. But it is not until you put a skilled and competent pilot into that aircraft that you unlock that potential capacity. It is people that unlock the performance capacity of the organisation.

In 2010 when we published our paper on our research findings, we also published another paper that discussed how these leadership practices created what is now thought of as Safety Differently and embraced the principles of Safety II. (Read et.al., 2010).[vii] In that paper we discussed how we helped a client change their performance paradigm. Our focus in that engagement was to improve safety performance, but our goal was to improve organisational performance across the board. A major improvement in safety performance was achieved by focusing on the 4 Dimensions of:

1. Production and schedules,
2. Costs and resources,
3. Systems and processes using a mixture of lag and lead indicators, and
4. Leadership practices that create commitment to a common purpose.

If you want to create Safety Differently in your organisation it is important to understand what leaders do to create performance. And even more important than understanding what leaders do is to understand how they do it.

Through our research (Winter, et al. 2010)[viii] we have identified what leaders do to create performance through a framework that is captured in the acronym, CARES.

CARES stands for:

• Creating an
• Achievement Oriented
• Relationship Based
• Endeavour
• Sustainably.

How leaders do these things is the essence of the paradigm shift that I talked about earlier. Rosa Carrillo in her book The Relationship Factor in Safety Leadership puts it this way, “Traditional safety-performance improvement efforts—assessment, gap analysis, action planning, implementation and measurement—aren’t lowering the fatality rate because they don’t address the socio-emotional issues we face on the human side of safety management. This deficiency affects technological issues as well because in retrospect so many of the failures could have been prevented in an environment that enabled people to speak up and to listen in spite of uncertainties.” (Carrillo 2019)

Todd Conklin in his book, The 5 Principles of Human Performance said, “I wish there were a model that we could use to describe this change from the traditional safety and reliability methodologies to the more enlightened “safety differently” approach that is so foundational to Human Performance.” (Conklin, 2019) I am not so conceited to think of our work as the perfect solution. I do believe that the solution to changing to a Safety Differently mindset and approach must come through leadership, psychological safety, trust and belonging. With this belief in mind, this series of articles will share what we have learned in terms of the leadership practices that create sustainable performance.

How leaders do what they do is through a process that builds capacity to perform. The how is captured in our Six Factors that Create Relationship and Achievement.

Getting these Six Factors right is essential to sustainable performance. Having leaders who understand the Six Factors and how to create them in their teams is the key that unlocks the performance potential in your organisation.

Our years of researching leadership and performance and applying that understanding with our clients has enabled us to understand the gaps and this in turn has led us to develop the 4D Performance framework and the 4D Safety approach.

Safety Leadership Series – Article #1

This article is the first in a series of articles on the leadership practices that unlock performance. These articles are a pre-taster of a book on Safety Leadership that I am writing with my long time colleague, Rod Ritchie.

If you want more information about what leaders do to create great performance and how they do what they do, contact – [email protected]

References

[i] Dekker, Sidney.(2015) Safety Differently: Human Factors for a New Era, Second Edition. CRC Press. Kindle Edition.

[ii] Hollnagel E., Wears R.L. and Braithwaite J. From Safety-I to Safety-II: A White Paper. The Resilient Health Care Net: Published Simultaneously by the University of Southern Denmark, University of Florida, USA, and Macquarie University, Australia.

[iii] Dekker, Sidney.(2015) Safety Differently: Human Factors for a New Era, Second Edition (p. vi). CRC Press. Kindle Edition.

[iv] Conklin, Todd. (2019) The 5 Principles of Human Performance: A contemporary update of the building blocks of Human Performance for the new view of safety . Kindle Edition.

[v] SPE Paper SPE-129035-PP, Winter, J., Owen, Dr. K., Read, B., Safety Leaders Group;., & Ritchie, R., OMV E&P. (2010) How Effective Leadership Practices Deliver Safety Performance AND Operational Excellence,.

https://www.onepetro.org/conference-paper/SPE-129035-MS

[vi] Owen, K., Culbertson, R., Mink, O., (2011), Winning Leadership Practices – Revisited, Published in: https://trainingmag.com/training/reports_analysis/ (see: https://www.safetyleadersgroup.com/articles/)

[vii] SPE-126901-PP, Read, B.R.,; Zartl-Klik, A., Veit, C., Samhaber, R, Zepic, H., OMV, A.G. (2010) Safety Leadership that Engages the Workforce to Create Sustainable HSE, SPE International Conference on Health, Safety and Environment in Oil and Gas Exploration and Production, Brazil, April 2010.

[viii] SPE Paper SPE-129035-PP, Winter, J., Owen, Dr. K., Read, B., Safety Leaders Group;., & Ritchie, R., OMV E&P. (2010) How Effective Leadership Practices Deliver Safety Performance AND Operational Excellence).

[ix] Carrillo, Rosa Antonia. (2019) The Relationship Factor in Safety Leadership (p. 68). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.