Safety culture is about the prioritisation of risk inside of an organisation
and it's a phenomenon that dates back to the 1980s.
It emerged from a series of
major accidents, so, Chernobyl, which was a nuclear power plant that went into meltdown,
the NASA Challenger space disaster and also the Piper Alpha accident, which was an oil and gas
installation that exploded off the coast of Scotland in the late 1980s.
But first that explosion at a nuclear plant in the Soviet Union.
It does now seem likely that sometime in the last
couple of days there's been perhaps the worst accident in the short history of the world's nuclear power industry.
Well it was just four hours ago when Soviet viewers were watching their
evening news bulletin and the announcer revealed that the accident had taken place.
It's now clear the explosion that ripped a north sea platform apart was the world's worst oil field disaster.
164 men are almost certainly dead. A short while ago the American operators Occidental Oil
said a leak in the gas compression equipment led to a series of massive explosions.
There has been a serious accident involving the space shuttle Challenger,
on this 25th space shuttle mission.
Less than two minutes after launch a massive explosion
off the coast of Florida and it appears that there are no survivors.
And what all of these accidents revealed was that an institutional focus on productivity,
on getting the job done,
producing oil, ensuring the shuttle launches occurred, it led to employees and management taking their eye
off of safety and they focused, so kind of getting the job done over the management of risk.
And so safety culture really emerges from those series of accidents.
And safety culture is also still a
phenomenon that's really relevant today.
So if you think about something like the Deepwater Horizon accident,
which was another oil and gas platform that exploded off the coast of the US in 2010,
or the recent Boeing Max accidents, these more recent accidents were also found to emerge from
a institutional focus on productivity – getting the job done over effective risk management.
The tension in every drilling operation is between doing things safely and doing them fast.
Time is money. The explosion was spectacular and catastrophic. The Deepwater Horizon was under
contract with BP, drilling a new well in the Gulf of Mexico.
Our breaking news: an Ethiopian Airlines flight has crashed shortly after takeoff from Addis Ababa.
A scathing congressional house
report blames a horrific culmination of a series of faulty technical assumptions by Boeing's
engineers, a lack of transparency on the part of Boeing's management and grossly insufficient
oversight by the FAA.
And so what researchers and practitioners on safety culture are really
interested in is how does an organisation get the balance right.
To what extent do they focus on
productivity, ensuring performance and to what extent do they focus on risk management.
So, the balance between safety and productivity can be quite difficult to get right.
So, obviously if you focus everything on safety, you'd get nothing done.
Planes wouldn't fly. Oil and gas installations wouldn't pump oil.
But if you focus everything on productivity, you endanger your organisation
through taking a lot of risk.
And one of the real challenges of safety culture and safety management
more generally is that safety is something that never happens.
It's an accident that doesn't occur, it's people that don't get harmed
or and something that doesn't blow up, and so what
that means is through time as your organisation drifts and doesn't experience safety problems,
questions emerge on, 'well, are we investing too much on safety and should we be putting more into productivity?'.
And so there's a real tension for many organisations on how they manage safety and productivity.
And what does this look like on the ground?
I mean this looks like the type of protocols and rules that you ask people to follow.
It can look like the type of industry regulation
that you have for managing risk. It can go into organisational decision making.
Where is money spent? What kind of risks are acceptable to the board?
To what extent is information about risk being collected?
And so here safety culture and the balance between productivity and safety, it's quite dynamic.
So a good example of this is the Challenger disaster and it's an interesting
case study because there were technical problems with the Challenger shuttle that were recognised
in the late 1970s, and these problems which were around, the fact that the Challenger couldn't,
the space shuttles couldn't be launched safely at very low temperatures, these were known for
a number of years. But they were just sort of accepted within the organisation, and something
that was dangerous initially became normalised and was no longer seen as dangerous anymore.
And this is sometimes called organisational drift. It's where a threat to an organisation,
because it hasn't manifested, is just sort of accepted and not seen as threatening anymore.
And this is really what happened with the with the Challenger disaster, whereby the threat which was
known but ignored through time, it came back to haunt NASA in the late 1980s when the shuttle launched.
Kind of imagine that something like a child that runs in the
in the road and the parent is very upset and says, 'it's very dangerous' and the child
comes back and says, 'but nothing happened'. Again and again I saw in looking through these
statements, 'this new flight is within our database', which just means nothing happened
before, it's about the same as we did before, so it can't be unsafe because it was okay last time.
So these high-risk domains where safety culture is a real priority and it's something that's
constantly managed has a lot to teach other organisations. I think and in particular
those trying to manage through the pandemic. So, organisations which have a strong safety culture
tend to have three sort of clear distinct properties.
The first is that they're very focused on behaviour.
They're very clear on the types of behaviour they want people to engage in.
So if you think about something like an airline and an aircraft, pilots are trained to engage in
particular communication behaviours to constantly check safety. There's a whole load of routines
and processes for managing safety. Now you wouldn't want all of these routines perhaps
for an organisation on a day-to-day basis but what they do is they signal to people
the kinds of behaviours they should be engaging in and the importance of safety.
The second thing that organisations have done is redesigned themselves.
So perhaps sticking with the airline
example, you know the whole cockpit has changed massively over 30 or 40 years, where automation
has been used to remove lots of aspects of human error. And if you think about something like how
we're adapting to the pandemic, organisations have redesigned themselves.
We work from home, we've redesigned space as well, so this sort of aspect of redesign is really important.
And the last thing that organisations that are very good at managing safety do is they're very
good at collecting information. They have very effective instant reporting systems.
They have an open culture where people can report problems. They can report making mistakes and they
collect and analyse information and this is really important i think with managing COVID too.
If you think about something like track and trace or the sort of testing that we have,
this is a load of instant data being collected. It's a lot of safety data
and the analysis of this and collection of this is critical to managing risk.
The safety culture research has often focused on this sort of dichotomy between
safety and productivity and I think what we've learned is that it's a false dichotomy.
It's not really the case that you can focus on productivity or safety and that one eats into the other,
rather that for many organisations they can't operate without safety.
This is to say to be productive they need to be safe.
If you think about, again, something like an airline,
or the nuclear power industry, or even a hospital, they can't deliver what they deliver – they can't produce –
if they're not safe. And I think this is the same, and this will be the same,
for many organisations through the pandemic and even indeed economies and countries.
You can't effectively produce what you want to produce if your country isn't safe or your organisation isn't safe.
Health is part of your income, OK? It's not that you can separate health from income.
If you have poor health your productivity is less.
So this dichotomy is a bit false
and we've learned that that the management of safety is critical for productivity.