Integrating Safety-II into Safety Management - Toni Wäfler Rahel Gugerli Giulio Nisoli Kartoniert (TB)

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 dev iating 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.