One Word, Multiple Meanings

What’s in a word?

Many of us use the words ‘safe’ or ‘safety’ every day. But how often do we consider what we mean when we use it? There are many different interpretations, underlying which are often different expectations. I undertook some reading on the different interpretations of safety last year, which I’ve shorted and summarised below. I hope these ramblings are of interest.?

Safe, Safer, Safety and all colours in between

Before considering the different interpretations, it is helpful to first reflect on how we use the word in our everyday lives, and the questions that arise from this. For example, is safety an activity, a method, a behaviour, an attribute or a trait? Is safety objective or subjective? These questions highlight the problematic relationship we have with the term. It means different things to each of us and often our own use of the word contradicts with our intended meaning. Safety is used as noun (‘safe’ and ‘safety’), an adjective in an absolute sense of something be ‘safe’ (‘safe ≠ unsafe), as a comparative adjective (‘this car is safer than that car’) as an adverb (‘safely’ to describe how safe the activity or task is performing), a verb (‘improve safety’) and a phase (‘for your own safety’).

Outlined below is a summary of some of the common interpretations of safety. Refer to the list of references below.

Safety is an absolute

When we discuss safety in our everyday lives, we often approach it from an absolute perspective as a binary thing : something is either safe or unsafe, and there is no state in between. This absolutist interpretation is one that many unfamiliar with safety and risk concepts would probably consider. Expressions such as “the risk of injury must be zero” and “failure is not a possibility” assume that the probability of failure can be reduced to zero. Whilst we may not realise it, we are describing absolute safety in a binary sense. This definition follows the standard dictionary definition, i.e. the condition of being protected from or unlikely to cause danger, risk, or injury. A pure absolute interpretation of safety implies that the risk of that harm has been eliminated. An absolute conception of safety is problematic since it unattainable. Despite, these limitation, the absolute view of safety continues to be used. For example, when discussing aviation, Miller (1988) claims that safety means no harm.

Safety is the absence of loss

This simple absolutist perspective of safety becomes more complicated when we add an outcome we wish to avoid, such an incident or injury.?While?this is still an absolute interpretation of safety, the addition of an outcome makes it quantifiable. Just as we define darkness by the absence of light and death as the lack of life, safety has often been defined and measured by the absence of accidents, injuries and ill health. It can be said that safety is present when nothing happens. Measuring safety success by the absence of accidents is broadly understood and simple, but it presents significant challenge in measurement. Hollnagel describes this as an epiphenomenon, meaning safety is a secondary effect or by-product of a primary phenomenon when it is defined as outcomes. This presents challenges for what we are attempting to control, and the lessons that we take from success and failure. Defining an organisation as safe because it has a low rate of errors or incidents has the same limitations as defining health in terms of not being sick. When someone states they are ‘healthy’, they are describing a much broader view of their medical condition that goes beyond being unwell, to encompass a range of potential factors including wellness, mental outlook and their physical condition.

Defining safety by outcomes presents theoretical and practical challenges. If the primary method of measurement is the very thing you are seeking to eliminate, namely accidents, it is of course paradoxical because the better you get, the less incidents there are and the few opportunities there are to learn. Measuring success on an outcome, such as an incident, has unintended and unpredictable consequences on organisational learning. In summary, defining safety by its absence is simple, easy and quite common. It does however raise many unforeseen challenges.

Safety is the antonym of risk

William Lowrance was the first to suggest that safety can be defined in terms of risk. He stated that “because nothing can be absolutely free of risk, nothing can be said to be absolutely safe. There are degrees of risk, and consequently there are degrees of safety”. Lowrance was also one of the first to argue that safety was a value judgement, varying over time and between contexts. But when safety is a value judgement, it is subject to individual interpretation and perception, and thus inherently variable.?

According to this interpretation, the lower the risk, the higher the level of safety, a definition that M?ller describes as the standard definition of safety. This Society for Risk Analysis refers to this perspective as the antonym of risk, which they define as “the safety level is linked to the risk level; a high safety means a low risk and vice versa”. A simplified version adopted by several scholars is safety equals “acceptable risk”, whilst ISO and the WHO reverse this, defining as “freedom from unacceptable risk”. A relative concept of safety is also expressed in the US Supreme Court’s statement that "safe is not the equivalent of risk free” and contemporary UK interpretation would be “so far as is reasonably practical”.

Viewing safety as the antonym of risk leads to a simple and easily understandable definition. But when our perspective of safety is shaped by risk, our understanding of the forces that shape and influence the risk can under-estimate the things we do not know or we are uncertain of.

When safety is the antonym of risk, it is necessary to consider the complications that arise when we view safety, something we typically view as positive and want to achieve, through the perspective of risk, a property we view as negative and want to quantify. M?ller demonstrates the conundrum that arise when framing safety as antonym of risk using the example of two undesirable outcomes: plague and cholera. If there is a high risk for both the plague and cholera, but slightly less for cholera, it may be strange to say that we are safer from the one than the other, even if that would be correct from a simple antonym. A further complication arises when notions of acceptable and tolerable risk are introduced. This raises questions of morality and ethics over who decide a risk is acceptable or tolerable, and who losses or gains from such decisions.?

Safety is a dynamic non-event

In response to major accidents over the past 40 years, there have been various attempts to redefine safety, promoting the idea that its more than just avoiding accidents or an antonym of risk, but involves understanding the mechanisms by which safety is or is not achieved in complex work systems and processes. Karl Weick summarises this perspective when he defines safety as a dynamic non-event. Safety is dynamic because “it is an ongoing condition in which problems are momentarily under control due to compensating changes in components”. The dynamic conditions that Weick refers to are the system variability and fluctuations that naturally arise within any complex sociotechnical system involving reciprocal interrelationship and inter-connection between humans and technical components. The concept of sociotechnical system emerges from general systems theory and seeks to understand how the components of a complex system function and interact with each other, and within the whole system. It means that a system cannot be accurately predicted by focusing on individual elements of the system. Complexity arises from the multiplied networks of relationships, interactions and interconnectedness between the components and subsystems.

James Reason agrees with this perspective stating “safety is dynamic because it is preserved by timely human adjustments; it is a non-event because successful outcomes rarely call attention to themselves. According to this interpretation, safety is a continuous (dynamic) process of dealing with expected and unexpected circumstances to ensure their avoidance (i.e. resulting in a non-event). In other words, because safe outcomes are constant, there is nothing to pay attention to. However, Hollnagel challenges the concept of a non-event, arguing that by definition something that does not happen or that has not happened is difficult to observe or measure. When things go wrong, there will be something to measure when safety is absent, but paradoxically nothing to detect or measure when safety is present. Hollnagel proposes to address this problem by redefining safety as a “dynamic event” where the emphasis is placed on the activity succeeding. In other words, reversing the statement by measuring successful work as an outcome rather than failure. ?Central to this interpretation is the premise that “safety an emergent property of systems and not of their components” (Woods and Cook 2002, p. 140). Safety therefore relates to the wider system.

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Safety as a social construct

An extension of the dynamic non-event interpretation is the proposal that safety is a social construct. When viewed from a social constructionism lens, our knowledge and perspective is shaped by perceptions, feelings and thoughts. Viewing safety through the lens of social construction denies it an objective reality. Slovac argues safety does not exist “out there independent of our minds and culture, ready to be measured, but is a constructed human concept, more easily judged than defined” (1992, p 119). This view is supported by Rochlin (1999) who argues safety is not conceptualised as an abstract system-level outcome such as the absence of major failures, but as a set of concrete interactions that occur at the level of front-line operations. According to this interpretation, a large part of how safety is delivered by frontline workers, and, more importantly, how workers operate safely, is a property of the interactions, rituals, and myths of the social structure and beliefs of the entire organisation, or at least of a large segment of it. This aligns with the revised view of the International Atomic Energy Agency who now view safety as “more than a technical or personnel issue, but a social construct”. Through the social constructionist lens, the meaning of safety is situated, negotiated, generated, and transplanted in the historical, socio-material, and cultural contexts in which interaction occurs. The social knowledge and individual assumptions about safety are not based on formal and rationally validated process defining what is safe or not, but depends on an individuals’ available knowledge and this stems from their social context. The social construction perspective challenges the orthodox focus on failures and accidents. However, the practical use of social constructionism beyond an explanatory theory of social and cultural context has been criticised. The most notable critique of social constructionism was made by Sokal and Bricmont who argued that it was fashionable nonsense.

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Conclusions

After nearly 100 years since the emergence of some of the first theories of safety, a commonly accepted definition of safety remains elusive. Safety, as Le Coze has stated, is “a multifaceted topic that can be approached from many different perspectives”. It has become polysemous, a word with several meanings.

As our understanding of safety developed as a result of accidents and the growth of psychology and human factors, relative concepts of safety became more commonplace. When we discuss safety, we often wrongly assume there is a shared meaning of things. It can be useful to ask about others’ perspectives and interpretations.

References

Selected references below. A full list available on request.

Ale, B.J.M. 2002. “Risk assessment practices in The Netherlands.” Safety Science 40 (1-4): 105-126.

Antonsen, Stian. 2009. “The relationship between culture and safety on offshore supply vessels.” Safety Science 47 (8): 1118-1128.

Aven, Terje. 2009. “Safety is the antonym of risk for some perspectives of risk.” Safety Science 47 (7): 925-930.

Aven, Terje. 2014. “What is safety science?” Safety Science 67: 15-20.

Blazsin, Hortense, and Frank Guldenmund. 2015. “The social construction of safety: Comparing three realities.”

Haavik, Torgeir K. 2014. “On the ontology of safety.” Safety Science 67: 37-43.

Hansson, Sven Ove. 2010. “Risk: objective or subjective, facts or values.” Journal of Risk Research 13 (2): 231-238.

Hansson, Sven Ove. 2012. “Safety is an inherently inconsistent concept.” Safety Science 50 (7): 1552-1527.

Hollnagel, Erik. 2014. “Is safety a subject for science?” Safety Science 67: 21-24.

Le Coze, Jean-Christophe. 2013. “New models for new times. An anti-dualist move.” Safety Science 59: 200-218.

Lowrance, William W. 1976. Of Acceptable Risk: Science and the Determination of Safety.

M?ller, Niklas. 2005. “Analysing Safety: Epistemic Uncertainty And The Limits Of Objective Safety.”

M?ller, Niklas. 2012. “The Concepts of Risk and Safety.” Handbook of Risk Theory

M?ller, Niklas, Sven Ove Hansson, and Martin Peterson. 2006. “Safety is more than the antonym of risk.”

Reason, James. 2000. “Safety paradoxes and safety culture.” Injury Control and Safety Promotion

Rochlin, Gene I. 1999. “Safe operation as a social construct.” Ergonomics 42 (11): 1549-1560.

Searle, John. 1995. The Construction of Social Reality. London, UK: Penguin Books.

Sokal, Alan, and Jean Bricmont. 1999. Fashionable nonsense : postmodern intellectuals' abuse of science.

Sujan, Mark, Huayi Huang, and Jeffrey Braithwaite. 2016. “Learning from incidents in health care: Critique from a Safety-II perspective.” Safety Science.

Turner, Nick, and Garry C. Gray. 2009. “Socially constructing safety.” Human Relations 62 (9): 1259-1266.

Weick, K, and K Sutcliffe. 2001. Managing the unexpected: Assuring high performance in an age of complexity.

Weick, K, K Sutcliffe, and D Obstfeld. 1999. “Organizing for high reliability: Processes of collective mindfulness.”

Weick, Karl E. 1987. “Organizational Culture as a Source of High Reliability.” California Management Review 29 (2): 112-127.

Westrum, Ron. 2006. “Resilience Engineering Concepts and Precepts.” In Resilience Engineering: Concepts and Precepts.

Woods, David D and Hollnagel, Erik. 2006. “Epilogue: Resilience Engineering Precepts.”