#97 – Safety is a capacity

What up folks! This is another short podcast on the idea that safety is a capacity, not an outcome. This idea comes out of Todd Conklin & Sidney Dekker’s work on organizational safety where they discuss two ways of looking at safety: The Safety 1 Perspective or the old way of thinking is that safety is about minimizing errors.  It’s about identifying risks, including human behaviors, and implementing steps to prevent errors from happening.  Success is often measured in low to zero error rates and errors are punishable offenses.   The Safety 2 Perspective doesn’t overlook the need to minimize errors.  But it focuses on building the capacity for the right thing to happen versus a feverish focus on whack-a-moling potential risk and, frankly, whack-a-moling the people who make mistakes. The idea is that safety is not an outcome but rather a capacity that’s built up over time through thoughtful design of systems and careful handling of people and systems both when things go right as well as when errors happen.  It’s about figuring out how humans are doing the work – including all of their workarounds – in order to generate successful outcomes and finding ways to support and foster positive outcomes on a consistent basis.  And when things go wrong, people aren’t punished.  While egregious error or outright negligence is always possible, Safety 2 presumes people are smart and are trying to do the right thing.  So if something goes wrong, there is likely a system input, factor or design that created a high probability that something would in fact go wrong.  So the focus is on understanding how the worker performed in a faulty system and trying to improve that system so there’s a higher likelihood that the right thing happens the next time around. Check out the short podcast for a couple of illuminating stories to bring these principles to life. As always, drop me an email or message on social media if you’d like to connect! Resources: Todd Conklin’s Pre-Accident Investigation podcast Sidney Dekker’s professional website Upcoming conferences I’m speaking at: Maine Association of Nurse Anesthesiology: https://meana.org MEANA Fall Conference in Portland, Maine (virtual option available) Encore Symposium’s New England at the Cliff House, Cape Neddick, Maine October 16-19, 2023 Encore Symposium’s Autumn in Bar Harbor & Acadia National Park, October 14-17, 2024