Section 3 - Changing the Safety Culture

To understand how to affect change you must understand the evolution of the safety culture from past to present and how it needs to evolve in the future. Figure 1 illustrates this evolutionary process.

Traditionally, when something broke, it was fixed; if there was an accident, a change was made to prevent the accident from reoccurring. This reactive approach depended on a “command and control” style of management in order to achieve a safe environment. Lack of Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) required close supervision to ensure safety. With the advent of company safety programs in the 1980s the aviation industry moved to a more team driven approach to safety. This approach continued to reduce the accident rate by creating safety awareness through programs such as Crew Resource Management (CRM) and Human Factors training. Documented SOPs allowed the training of consistent, repeatable procedures with the emphasis on individuals acting as a team. However, safety programs were still mostly reactive in nature.

The goal of a systems approach to safety is to further reduce the incident rate by making safety “behaviour driven”. In other words, if everyone is trained to do their job in a safe manner and proactively look for hazards, then a company can improve their defences and build an organization more resistant to human error.

Figure 1: Evolution of the safety culture
After Jacques Whitford, Safety Management Systems, 2002. Used with permission