Aviation Reads - Safety I and Safety II. Shifting focus - What goes Right instead of what goes Wrong.

Disclaimer! This is NOT an opinion piece, but rather a collection of various readings and clippings which serve to spur further exploration in the topic. These are not full articles but simply excerpts from the bulk of reading material that is available.  As much citation and references were taken with regards to the topic. Legitimacy and accuracy of the clippings are read at your own discretion.
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Safety I and Safety II

Safety I vs Safety II: An overview
Different philosophies and not opposing.
What goes wrong to what goes right?
Safety should not only be reactive but proactive as well.

Pic source: https://www.americanexpress.com/en-us/business/trends-and-insights/articles/what-our-brains-look-like-on-praise-and-criticism/

The traditional thinking about safety has reached some notable landmarks, but the constantly renewed list of unexpected incidents comes to underline a need for a change in safety perception, unveiling there could be more than the traditional ways of ‘doing safety’.

A 2013 white paper by Professors Erik Hollnagel, Robert L Wears and Jeffrey Braithwaite came to redefine the way we see safety with the introduction of a new definition at the scope: The ‘Safety II’ concept argues that we should stop focusing only on how to stop things from going wrong but emphasize on why things go right instead.

The ‘Safety-II’ perspective acts as an evolutionary complement of the conventional safety thinking, referred as ‘Safety I’.

Safety I

picture source https://blog.sucuri.net/2019/07/how-to-stop-a-ddos-attack-prevent-future-attacks.html

- Takes accidents as the focus point and tries to prevent bad things from occurring
- An accident investigation through the lens of Safety I is to identify the causes of adverse outcomes, while risk assessment aims to determine their likelihood
- As little things to go wrong
- As little things done wrong as possible.
- Safety I relates to a condition where the aim is to be sure that the number of unwanted outputs will be as low as possible.

Safety II

picture source https://www.ethozgroup.com/blog/spread-positivity-not-negativity/

- emphasizing on ensuring that as much as possible goes right, expanding much more than the area of incident prevention and promoting a real safety management over a simple risk assessment.
- Accident investigations under Safety-II seek to understand how things usually go right, as this forms the basis for explaining how things go wrong, while risk assessment aims ‘to understand the conditions where performance variability can become difficult to control’.
- Safety II concerns the condition of being certain that the success of outputs will be as high as possible.
- As many things to go right? What went right?

Notably, the new concept does not seek to supersede what is already being done, but to complement the current approach, which means that many of the existing practices can continue to be used, just ‘with a different emphasis’. However, one cannot exist without the other.

SAFETY I vs SAFETY II

Picture source: https://www.cefa-aviation.com/safety2-swiss-cheese-model/

Safety I	Safety II
Learn from our errors	Learn from our successes
Safety defined by absence	Safety defined by presence
Reactive approach	Proactive approach
Understand what goes wrong	Understand what goes right?
Accident causation	Repeat what goes right
Avoid errors	Enforce successful behaviors
Reduce losses	Create new process on successful behavior

 

Safety II is to emphasize on enhancing their employees’ resilience, as the ability to monitor things and handle situations.

The way forward for a change of mentality seems long in an industry which has traditionally learned to shed focus on near miss reporting, but not on positive reporting, to claim liability but care less on praising exceptionally good performance.

Dr. Hollnagel’s book is to change the classical safety analysis process that focuses mainly on negative causes and impacts of unwanted events, and to take into account the success stories that tend to become invisible and insignificant, because they are considered as normal, i.e. as planned.

Sources:
- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285396555_Erik_Hollnagel_Safety-I_and_Safety-II_the_past_and_future_of_safety_management
- https://safety4sea.com/cm-safety-i-vs-safety-ii-an-overview/
- https://vimeo.com/89492241
- https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-man-cave/201908/toxic-positivity-dont-always-look-the-bright-side

- Loasada Ratio 3:1

- https://www.cefa-aviation.com/safety2-swiss-cheese-model/