Safety-II in Practice

Safety-II in Practice

Safety-I is defined as the freedom from unacceptable harm. The purpose of traditional safety management is therefore to find ways to ensure this ‘freedom’. But as sociotechnical systems steadily have become larger and less tractable, this has become harder to do. Resilience engineering pointed out from the very beginning that resilient performance – an organisation’s ability to function as required under expected and unexpected conditions alike – needed more than the prevention of incidents and accidents. This developed into a new interpretation of safety (Safety-II) and consequently a new form of safety management.

Safety-II changes safety management from protective safety and a focus on how things can go wrong to productive ...