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This chapter, co-written by the industrial members of the FonCSI “strategic analysis” group, gives an overview of the various contexts and histories of safety culture/safety models throughout the four industries represented, and summarizes the main questions and issues arising from an industrial point of view. In brief, in a context of high industrial risks—both in terms of process safety and occupational safety—two main topics emerge for discussion: (i) the question of the co-existence of several safety models: what to choose and according to what criteria from the panel of tools available? And (ii) the specific notion of “safety culture”: what more does the concept bring, and how to apprehend it in complex industrial organisations? Eventually, the expression “safety cloud” is used to illustrate the overall feeling of confusion in the industrial world: the current perception is one of a nebulous offer of various models and tools, the choice of which appears difficult to rationalize and adapt to a company’s specifics and local issues. As an introduction to more academic discussions, this chapter thus sets the tone and hopes to shed light on some unanswered industrial questions.

In this introductive chapter, Claude Gilbert, President of the FonCSI “strategic analysis” group on safety models and safety culture, shares with us the group’s initial findings on this topic. This text was also used as the introduction to the research seminar organised in June 2016, key step of the project that led to this book. Depending on what is meant by “model”, the way to address the link between safety models and safety culture will be different, ranging from straightforward to very complex. This chapter adopts a viewpoint focused on the actors concerned by safety, and questions how they are led to “navigate” through a world of constraints and opportunities. It highlights the importance to consider what is “already there” (company cultures), what may drive the organisations choices among the multiple offers available on the “safety culture ideas’ and methods’ markets”. It ends up giving food for debate by proposing some research avenues to help industrial organisations better meet their expectations in terms of safety culture.

“.” With this pithy statement, psychologist James Reason expressed the potential value but also the elusiveness of this complex social-scientific concept twenty years ago (Reason, Managing the risks of organizational accidents. Ashgate, Aldershot, ). Culture had been on the mind of safety scientists since Turner’s book - from , but the term ‘safety culture’ was only coined nine years later, right after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986. Since then, safety culture has been alluring as a cause—for both occupational accidents and process related events—and as a thing to strive for, although possibly unattainable (Guldenmund, Understanding and exploring safety culture. BOXPress, Oisterwijk, ). In this chapter, I will look at various perspectives on (safety) culture, using the metaphor as an illuminative principle, to identify (what seems to be) the essence of some dominating perspectives. Firstly, however, a common understanding of what culture ‘is’, needs to be established. I will then touch upon the assessment of culture. Afterwards, I will present four metaphors for safety culture, which represent the dominant perspectives on this concept. The chapter ends with suggestions on how safety culture might be influenced.

is a misunderstood and misused idea. In this chapter I advance seven clarifying theses. (1) Culture is a characteristic of a group, not an individual, and talk of culture must always specify the relevant group. (2) Organisations have it within their power to ensure that organisational culture over-rides national cultures. (3) The most useful definition of the culture of a collectivity is its set of collective practices—“the way we do things around here”. (4) In the organisational context, it is usually better to use culture as a description of group behaviour, rather than as an explanation for individual behaviour. (5) Organisational cultures depend on the structures that organisations put in place to achieve desired outcomes. These structures reflect the priorities of top leaders. The priorities of leaders in turn may depend on factors outside the organisation, such as regulatory pressure and public opinion. (6) The distinction between emergent and managerialist views of culture is misleading. (7) The term is so confusing it should be abandoned.

Safety culture means different things to different people which subsequently guides their improvement efforts. Providing clarity, the essence of the safety culture construct is that it reflects a proactive stance to improving occupational safety and reflects the way people think and/or behave in relation to safety. The extant evidence shows the best proactive stance is to target the significant safety issues found nested within the common safety characteristics (management/supervision, safety systems, risk, work pressure, competence, procedures and rules) identified from public enquiries into process safety disasters. This is best achieved by focusing on the entity’s safety management system and their people’s safety related behaviours, by trying to change people’s values, beliefs and attitudes. A revised model of safety culture is offered to help guide readers in their quest to improve their safety cultures, along with an adapted model of safety culture maturity. In addition, based on academic evidence and practical experience gained over the past 25 years in numerous industries and countries, the author provides insights into specific issues regarding the influence of senior executives, the impact of national cultures when working on international projects, whether policies and tools should be the same or differ when addressing potential minor, serious and catastrophic events, and who should be involved to drive an organisations safety culture to achieve excellence.

Managing safety culture appears to be a very difficult task, including in the context of high-risk industries. A clear opposition exits between academics about this issue. On the one hand some deny the possibility for an organization to “manage” any kind of culture. Doing so would just be a manipulation of groups’ and individuals’ behaviors that has nothing to do with culture but refers to coercive power and domination. On the other hand, some build up theoretical frameworks and good practices to support the development and the maintenance of a strong and homogenous organizational culture such as safety culture. Our contribution to this debate is to open a way between these two opposite approaches. The aim is to introduce a pluralist approach of safety culture that makes its management possible, meaningful and valuable for both managers and practitioners. It is based on the clear distinction between two sets of safety cultures: Safety-Culture-as-Tools (SCT) and Professional-Safety-Cultures (PSCs).

Culture is not about outcome, nor about human error. Culture is choice, framed by shared values and beliefs. Creating a strong safety culture means helping employees make good, safe choices. To do that, we must first clearly articulate to our teams both the mission, and the many values we work to protect. For safety, we need to let our employees know where safety fits into the mix, both in theory, and in real world role modeling. Next, we must design our systems and processes to facilitate the choices we want to see. Human choices are somewhat predictable—meaning the system design process can anticipate and resolve impending conflicts before we introduce system or procedural changes. Culture requires work: the everyday task of role modeling, mentoring, and coaching in a manner so that our employees understand how they are to make choices around the value of safety, given a world of conflict between the mission and the many disparate values we hold. And lastly, we need to have the systems in place to monitor our performance. Are we making choices that are supportive of our shared values?

In this chapter, I address what I believe to be a complementary discussion for this book on the relationship between safety, models and culture. One interesting angle of analysis is indeed to focus on drawings, graphics or visualisations that have supported powerful heuristics designed to channel ways of thinking the complex topic of safety, analytically and communicatively. In order to build the argument about the importance of how drawings, pictures or visualisation structure the understanding of safety individuals and become a support for action, some illustrations are offered, covering different categories of actors populating high risks systems, from process operators to engineers and managers. From there, a discussion of more research oriented drawings is developed, based on two illustrations: the Heinrich-Bird pyramid and the Swiss Cheese Model. They are considered from several analytical categories including their generic, normative, metaphoric aspects along with their status as inscriptions, boundary and performative objects.

There is no one best way to improving safety performance. Rather, organizations need to have the ability to operate in different organizational modes depending on external and internal conditions. Organizational actors need to recognize and implement switches between modes of operation, e.g. changing from more centralized to more de-centralized work processes and vice versa. It is argued that organizations are confronted with but also actively construct different conditions for safety with respect to the amount of uncertainty they have to manage. Choices about reducing, absorbing, and creating uncertainty along with external demands on the organization require teams to operate in the face of various mixes of stability and flexibility demands. Culture is a strong stabilizing factor, needed particularly when teams have to be very flexible and adaptive. Culture can also help to build the interdisciplinary appreciation required for integrating highly diverse knowledge in search of the most effective solutions to safety problems.

The goal of this chapter is to explore the generic organizational challenges faced by any high-risk organization and how they shape the social production of safety. Confronted with six generic categories of challenging dilemmas, high-risk organizations differ in their organizational responses, and in the mitigation strategies they put in place. However, this diversity does not mean that there is an infinite number of options. In the chapter, we introduce the concept of “safety regimes”, as a way to tackle the diverse ways in which companies operate, hence leaving aside the somewhat overused “safety culture” concept. The notion of “regime”, understood as a stable enough organizational equilibrium, offers an alternative way of documenting the organizational responses that high-risk organizations choose to develop and their direct or indirect consequences for the production of safety. The conditions for devoting such attention to the quality of organizing cannot be prescribed and decided upon once and for all. Rather than proposing top-down safety culture programs, and trying to make them fit into an ever-diverse and surprising reality on the ground, this chapter looks at another analytical option: clarifying the key dimensions that are fundamental to the establishment and comparison of safety regimes.