The beauty of the multifaceted surface of the concept of safety is often overlooked. In this essay, I will give an overview of the different viewpoints in which safety can be addressed. Each viewpoint is shortly illustrated with a brief example or explanation (in italic).
Safety can be addressed by focusing on the technical factors, human factors and/or organisational factors into the engineering design.
An airplane can crash because the engine failed due to fatigue or other technical factors. It may crash because the pilot was distracted or other human factor, or it may crash because the organisation did not allow for sufficient rest to the pilots or other organisational factors.
Safety can be addressed by the type of measures to intervene into the system; measures for reducing the occurrence probabilities of the causes leading to undesired events (often referred to as preventive measures), and measures for reducing the consequences following the undesired events (often referred to as mitigating measures).
A dike can be heightened to reduce the probability of a flood inland, or the exposed population to flood risk may be given evacuation instructions on how to leave an area in case of imminent flooding.
Safety can be addressed at different spatial scales; the micro-level (an individual), the meso-level (an organisation) or at the macro-level (a region).
A drunken car driver has a higher probability to be involved in a car accident than a sober car driver. A software company with a good cyber hygiene has a lower probability of cyber incidents than in case of a sloppy hygiene. A country with a strict certification system on driver licences, has fewer traffic fatalities than in countries where driver licences can be bought.
Safety can be addressed at unintentional random factors leading to incidents (safety) and at intentional malicious factors leading to incidents (physical – and cyber security).
Earthquake risks are caused by unpredictable seismic loading and therefore belong to the safety domain, whereas terrorist attacks are adversarial risks and belong to the security domain.
Safety can be addressed at different levels; the product level, at the process – or service level, or at the socio-technical system level.
The safety of a toy can be studied on a product level. The safety of a chemical process plant or a delivery service can be studied on a socio-technical level, in which human-machine interactions make the systems very complex.
Safety can be addressed at different actor levels in the supply chain.
The safety of the supplier of raw materials, the manufacturer of the product, the inspectorate authority, to the end user of the product can be studied.
Safety can be addressed by the level of uncertainties present in the system.
There is no risk if all variables in the system are deterministic and fully predictable in space and time. Normalisation and standardisation therefore lead to safety improvement.
Safety can be addressed in relation to other (conflicting) values.
Safety is often in conflict with values such as privacy, sustainability, recyclability and aesthetics. Multi-criteria decision-making techniques may be used to deal with these trade-offs.
Safety can be addressed by its forensic engineering. Forensic engineering is the investigation of materials, products, structures or components that fail or do not operate or function as intended, causing personal injury or damage to property.
Instead of looking to what goes safe and well, we can investigate what fails and what are the causes of failure.
Safety can be addressed by the viewpoint of efficient communication about safety and by disseminating and learning from failure events.
In blame cultures where people are blamed about their mistakes, more accidents occur,
then in just cultures, where people are open and communicate about their mistakes in order to learn and to avoid making these mistakes again.
Safety can be addressed via safety perception, safety awareness and via objective safety levels.
People perceive risks often differently from the actual risk levels, and their perceptions are strongly influenced by factors such as trust, familiarity, level of control, level of benefits.
Safety can be addressed at different didactic levels.
School children should be taught differently about risk and safety, then construction site workers.
All these different angles make the science of safety so multi-disciplinary and challenging. The multi-faceted nature of safety is overall present in the FLS Europe community.
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