Moving from protective safety to productive safety.

Our safety management approach encapsulates proven methodologies and new paradigms such as Protective Safety to Productive Safety. Protective Safety to Productive Safety argues for a reframing. So, instead of as in the old safety view thinking of as fewer things as possible going wrong (the current state of play), we start to think of as many things as possible going right.

In the way that we manage, we become much more proactive and apply a greater focus on anticipation of developments and events. In our explanation of accidents, we recognise that failures are going on all the time and that human adaption is there constantly.

We move from human error, shifting the view to humans now being seen as a resource for getting system flexibility and resilience, where resilience here is very much a system sense of resilience, not what sometimes is being talked of in individual people being resilient. This is about a system being resilient.

And the role of performance variability - instead of being harmful and that we should stop it and constrain it, what we move to is a view in which we are saying that it's inevitable, but it's also most of the time useful, so we should monitor it and manage it.

We are particularly influenced by the work of the following thought leaders:

Professor Erik Hollnagel – Safety I and Safety II (Protective Safety to Productive Safety)

Sidney Dekker – Safety Differently

Dr Todd Conklin - Pre-accident Investigations

Michael Burnham – Targeting Zero

Dr David Borys – Organisational Culture

Dr Sharron O'Neill – The Business Case for Safe, Healthy & Productive Work

Many of the elements of Dekker's "new view" of safety echo some of the recent political discussion about managerial agility, corporate vision, the importance of innovation, to staying relevant and continuing to drive business outcomes.

Beyond this, there is also a fit with the increased legislative attention to OHS due diligence. Companies are now required to be actively engaged in consultation on work health and safety issues, and these OHS issues have broadened to include psychosocial factors such as wellness, mental health and fatigue.

Capacity Assessment

Resilience is a characterisation of certain kinds of performance. An organisation must have the potentials for resilient performance.

The four potentials in summary are:

The potential to respond. Knowing what to do or being able to respond to regular and irregular changes, disturbances and opportunities by activating prepared actions, by adjusting the current mode of functioning, or by inventing or creating new ways of doing things.
The potential to monitor. Knowing what to look for or being able to monitor that which affects or could affect an organisation’s performance in the near term - positively or negatively.
The potential to learn. Knowing what has happened or being able to learn from experience, in particular to learn the right lessons from the right experiences.
The potential to anticipate. Knowing what to expect or being able to anticipate developments further into the future, such as potential disruptions, novel demands or constraints, new opportunities or changing operating conditions.

The purpose of the capacity assessment is to understand the existing potentials for resilient performance in order to improve them.

The assessment provides a basis from which specific sets of diagnostic questions can be developed. The questions are both diagnostic as well as formative. They focus on specific and concrete issues and are used as the basis for concrete activities - interventions or improvements.

Deliverables:

Prepare customised evaluation assessment tool against a recognised framework.
Conduct semi-structured interviews with various nominated stakeholders from across a diagonal slice of the organisation.
Analyse and synthesise the data.
Prepare a report with detailed recommendations for further improvement.
Present the evaluation findings to the senior management team.

Organisational Resilience

Creating a resilient workplace

Moving from protective safety to productive safety.

Capacity Assessment

From Agility to Resilience - the role of safety culture

How to improve Safety Culture in Construction

How To Plan a Successful Safety Climate Survey

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