Safety is dead, long live safe working

Jurriaan Cals & Ruud Plomp

We can almost hear you thinking, 'What are they babbling about now? An

other language-related thing that won't make a difference. Safety or safe working, what's in a name?'

Safety language

Ludwig Wittgenstein, an Austrian-British (language) philosopher, once made the famous statement, 'The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.' What would be the effect if we adapted our (safety) language? Would we see things differently? What would happen if we replaced the noun 'safety' with a verb? Does our understanding change if we start talking about 'working safely' from now on? We believe it does!"

To further elaborate on this, let's go back to 1969 when Karl Weick wrote his groundbreaking book 'The Social Psychology of Organizing.' In this book, he already cautioned against the use of nouns as if they were tangible, objective entities. He believed that such terms could lead to a static view of organizations, hindering the understanding of the dynamics and complexity of organizational processes.

More than 50 years later, the use of this static view of processes has only increased. Complex processes are ruthlessly simplified into straightforward events, only to be visualized by a single number. Safety is treated as a measurable entity, creating the illusion that it provides insight into the state of the organization or the project.

Is measurement the magic word?

Examples abound, such as the signs with safety numbers at the entrances of (high-risk) organizations, safety dashboards, the quantification of 'safety culture,' and spreadsheets filled with statistical data intended to provide organizations with an overview of their safety status. Measurement is the magic word, and for many professionals, it equates to knowledge.

This leads us to the following quote: 'safety is one of the few 'subjects' measured through the absence of its opposite.' In other words, when we measure little or no unsafety, it would imply that the organization is 'safe.' The question that arises for us is, what is this belief based on? Why do we think that the absence of incidents, near misses, etc., means that an organization is safe, let alone that safe work is being conducted in that organization? (However, we acknowledge that the opposite is also debatable to some extent).

Safe working

This blog post does not delve into this question in detail (we will certainly revisit it in a future blog), but it is clear that we hold a different opinion. With well-intentioned lists of numbers, we are fooling ourselves.

If you want to learn more about this, we recommend reading ‘The Number Bias' by Sanne Blauw. This book provides interesting examples of 'subjective' topics (such as safety) being converted into objective numbers through a simple calculation. And that’s not so strange because humans prefer objective certainties. Think, for example, of all those people who insist on making things SMART, only to add that we must 'be realistic after all' (quote from Jaap Peters).

So what can we do ?

 Instead of considering organizations as fixed entities, Weick encourages thinking in terms of verbs and process-oriented concepts. He emphasizes the importance of understanding organizations as ongoing activities of individuals constructing meaning in their interactions. We carry out our tasks, whether in consultation with others or not, in such a way that we find the associated risks acceptable.

And when we look at the execution of our work in this way, we can't help but talk about working safely.

Sources

·       Weick, K. (1969), The social psychology of Organizing (first edition, McGraw-Hill

·       Blauw, S. (2018), The number bias), How numbers dominate our world and why that's a problem we need to fix, The Correspondent.