New View Safety: Shifting Paradigms in Workplace Safety

Core Principles of New View Safety:

Learning from Successes: Instead of solely analysing failures, a new view of safety seeks to understand why processes succeed, aiming to replicate these successes across the organisation. 

Employee Engagement: Recognising that those on the front lines possess invaluable insights, a new view of safety heavily involves employees in safety planning and decision-making, ensuring that their firsthand experiences inform safety practices. 

Comparisons with Other Safety Philosophies: 

Safety I vs. New View Safety: Traditional safety (Safety I) often emphasises preventing accidents by reducing risks and adhering to prescribed practices.  In contrast, the new view of safety learns from failures and normal work, fostering a more adaptable and resilient safety culture. 

Safety II: Closely related to the new view of safety, Safety II also focuses on what goes right in systems, promoting an understanding of how everyday actions contribute to safety. 

Human and Organisational Performance (HOP): Like the new view of safety, HOP emphasises understanding human factors and systemic issues but focuses more on risk anticipation and management. 

High-Reliability Organisations (HRO): HROs are designed to operate in complex, high-risk environments where the potential for error is minimised through structured and highly reliable operational practices, somewhat aligning with the new view of safety’s emphasis on resilience but with a more rigid structure. 

Just Culture: This philosophy supports an environment where employees are not only encouraged to provide safety-related feedback but are also protected when they report errors, which complements the inclusive and learning-focused nature of new view safety. 

Social Psychology of Risk: Examines how group dynamics and social contexts influence safety practices, offering a more nuanced understanding of risk that can enhance new view safety strategies. 

Engineering Resilience: Focuses on the ability of systems to return to normal operation after a disturbance, which aligns with the adaptive and resilient goals of new view safety, though from a more technical standpoint.