Is there a pathway for Safety Interactions to co-exist in Safety Differently Businesses?

Spolier alert: YES

Colleagues, it's my perception that as a profession we spend an inordinate amount of time retreating to camps and firing off strongly worded counter-arguments and criticisms every time someone promotes or discusses a perspective on the theory and practice of safety. I'm trying to build a bridge. This is a small contribution to a world where we generatively build professional understanding and practice. It's a call for truce, a call for positive collaboration.

Yesterday I co-facilitated a session with one of my LJM Group colleagues Ellen Downs that trained a group of leaders in how to effectively undertake safety interactions. I went into the process with some slight philosophical trepidation because I have for a long time railed against the worst excesses of Behavioural Based Safety but I left energised and excited that perhaps we are moving towards a place where we can, at an operational level, sensibly and credibly bring together approaches that provoke so much ideological angst within our profession.

Let's just do a refresher. There are some conceptual overlaps and points of agreement between 'Safety Differently' and behavioral-based safety (BBS), as well as notable differences in their approaches. Let's explore these areas of overlap, agreement and differing emphasis:

1. Focus on Human Factors: Both Safety Differently and BBS recognise the importance of human factors in safety. They emphasize the role of human behavior, decision-making, and involvement in shaping work and safety. Both approaches recognize that individual actions and choices influence safety performance. Yes the points of control, the places to create change are different but at the core of both is the importance of the human(s) in the end to end process of work.
2. Employee Engagement: Both Safety Differently and BBS emphasize the importance of engaging employees in safety initiatives. They recognise that involving workers in identifying hazards, making decisions, and designing work leads to better outcomes. Both approaches aim to empower employees to actively participate in safety processes. Again methodologies differ, the weight given to leadership oversight and control differs but engagement and involvement are common in both. The criticism of BBS as focussing solely on the blue collar worker, as the only actor within a socio-technical system that has the agency to change work has been rightly criticised.
3. Systems Thinking: Safety Differently and BBS share a systems-oriented perspective. They emphasize the need to consider the broader organizational context and how various elements interact to influence safety. Both approaches recognize that safety is not solely determined by individual behaviors but is also influenced by organisational culture, management practices, and system design.
4. Learning from Work: Safety Differently and BBS emphasize the value of learning from the way people do work. They encourage organisations to shift their focus from blame and punishment to understanding the underlying causes and systemic factors contributing to incidents. Both approaches advocate for using data to improve work processes and prevent injury. While Safety Differently rightly encourages to learn from successful work, historically BBS has been more closely linked to the avoidance of and response to incidents. BBS has sold itself as a tool for driving incident rates down but there is nothing in the methodology of effectively and curiously talking to people about work that requires that lag indicator link.

So where can we practically bring these apparently different approaches into practical alignment?

1. Using interactions to understand one vitally important perspective on how and why work is being done the way it is. The perspective of workers.
2. Using interactions as a functional tool to pull apart work as imagined versus work as done.
3. Using the lens of behaviour as enabled, difficult or non-enabled to give insights into the whole work approach.
4. Modifying the mental-model underpinning much of the behavioural observation that workers are a problem to be controlled to one where the interaction is about curiously uncovering the issues, problems and challenges that workers face and facilitating their solutions.
5. As professionals using our curiosity and our interaction skills to engage not just at the pointy end of blue collar work, but also in key white collar decisions, particularly work design and planning.

As always I'm interested in your thoughts.

#Safety #leadership #safetydifferently

Ellen Downs Paul Hood Max Lloyd-Jones