We all aim for safe processes. However providing safety is a complex endeavour. What is it
that makes a process safe? And what is the contribution of humans? It is very common to
consider humans a risk factor prone to errors. Therefore we implement sophisticated safety
management systems (SMS) in order to prevent potential human failure. These SMS provide an
impressive increase of safety.In safety science this approach is labelled Safety-I and it
starts to be questioned because humans do not show failures only. On the contrary they often
actively contribute to safety sometimes even by deviating from a procedure. This Safety-II
perspective considers humans to be a safety factor as well because of their ability to adjust
behaviour to the given situation. However adaptability requires scope of action and this is
where Safety-I and Safety-II contradict each other. While the former restricts freedom of
action the latter requires room for manoeuvring.Thus the task of integrating the Safety-II
perspective into SMS which are traditionally Safety-I based is difficult. This challenge was
the main objective of our project. We discovered two methods that contribute to the quality of
SMS by integrating Safety-II into SMS without jeopardizing the Safety-I approach.
