Integrating Safety-II into Safety Management e-bog

We all aim for safe processes. However, providing safety is a complex endeavour. What is it that makes a process safe? And what is the contribution of humans? It is very common to consider humans a risk factor prone to errors. Therefore, we implement sophisticated safety management systems (SMS) in order to prevent potential "e;human failure"e;. These SMS provide an impressive increase of safety. In safety science this approach is labelled "e;Safety-I"e;, and it starts to be questioned because humans do not show failures only. On the contrary, they often actively contribute to safety, sometimes even by deviating from a procedure. This "e;Safety-II"e; perspective considers humans to be a "e;safety factor"e; as well because of their ability to adjust behaviour to the given situation. However, adaptability requires scope of action and this is where Safety-I and Safety-II contradict each other. While the former restricts freedom of action, the latter requires room for manoeuvring. Thus, the task of integrating the Safety-II perspective into SMS, which are traditionally Safety-I based, is difficult. This challenge was the main objective of our project. We discovered two methods that contribute to the quality of SMS by integrating Safety-II into SMS without jeopardizing the Safety-I approach.