The Myths of Safety The Management of Behavioral Risk: Risk Competency Safety

摘要

The management of safety has undergone a number of radical changes in the past 100 years. The most important paradigm shifts occurred in through the work of Heinrich, then the advent of the safety systems era, and of late, the behavioral safety approaches that became popular around the world. All of these 'approaches' to safety each left an indelible mark on the way we targeted safety improvements, what interventions were deployed and how those were measured. It also resulted in a number of strongly held "myths" of safety management, each discussed, analyzed and challenged in this paper. The paper also analyzes the effects of some of these approaches and points to a complex problem of the increased levels regulation and of perceived protection that workers enjoy in the work place - leading to what is commonly known as 'complacency'. A second problem of modern safety management is a consequence of the superficial treatment of accidents through procedures and rules changes, leading to a phenomenon called accident migration. The most recent approach to safety is generally known as behavior-based safety and flowed from the human sciences and quality management era. This approach had a dramatic impact on the way safety was managed around the world, but is still falling short on a number of key aspects, most notably the area of risk cognition and risk compensation. Many workplace accidents occur simply because the risk was unidentified, underestimated, not understood or ignored. The paper proposes a new direction for safety, called risk competency safety, which is based on cognitive psychology, to combat this consequence of modern protection.