From Safety to Safely

The conventional interpretation of safety, known as Safety-I, denotes a condition where as little as possible goes wrong, and the focus of practical efforts in management or analysis is on the occurrence of unacceptable outcomes and on how to reduce their number to an acceptable level, ideally zero. The emphasis is therefore on how to manage safety as such, as seen in the ubiquitous safety management systems (SMS). As Professor James Reason astutely points out, this raises the interesting question of how it is possible to learn about something, let alone manage it, if it is studied only in situations in which it is absent? The solution proposed by and described in this book is to stop using safety as a noun, and instead use it as an adverb: safely.

Now often referred to as Safety-II, this solution is the logical consequence of resilience engineering and will require new methods, several of which already exist and have proved their worth in practice for years. The question ceas