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This explored how Safety-I (S-I) and Safety-II (S-II) perspectives can be jointly adopted in construction projects – one in Brazil and another Norway. Safety planning and event reporting were evaluated.

For background, S-I has a long and established history and is largely “based on understanding of risk through failure and past events” whereas “Safety-II has emerged in recent years as an approach for understanding what goes well, and how safety and risk arise from everyday work technical systems” (p2).

The construction industry is said to have complex socio-technical system characteristics, like a large number of stakeholders, sub-systems, regulations and procurement approaches and thus extending the focus from what goes wrong to resilient potentials may hold value for the industry.

S-II is promoted as a complementary approach to S-I, emphasising the understanding and learning from normal work.

Safety documents were analysed on both projects, as with semi-structured interviews and field observations.

Interview questions consisted of:

• Safety-I (e.g. How does the organization learn from incidents and accidents?
• For ‘lagging’ indicators, how long is the typical lag? Is it acceptable?) and
• Safety-II (e.g. Does the organization try to learn from the things that go right in every day work?
• Does the operational procedures allow workers to adjust their actions as they deem appropriate?)

Results

Overall, it was found that “although the Safety-I is adopted through methods, practices and tools in both projects, some aspects of Safety-II are also present but in a less formalized way” (p11).

Event reporting

In the Norwegian construction project, event reporting was part of a formalised system performed by workers and managers. There was no formal reporting system in the Brazilian construction project, whereas workers would voluntarily report situations and concerns to safety personnel and during weekly safety meetings.

Event reporting was mainly focused on negative events (accidents) or deviations project, although some positive observations were noted on the Norwegian project.

The researchers suggested that the Brazilian project adopt a ten minute segment to their existing meeting to focus on “successful events/things that go right” using an illustrative poster with photos and notes detailing project performance factors [** which they provide an picture of the discussion board in the paper]. Workers were encouraged to share observations and experiences around performance variability and other facets of performance and safety.

A colour scheme was used to categorise the observations with green for desirable/successful situation, blue intermediate and red an undesirable situation.

Introducing a new focus also on successful and normal work was noted by the site safety personnel as a challenge to gather examples of these types of insights. However, this focus could “illustrate situations beyond the well know best practices, e.g. the correct use of personal protective equipment or the tidiness of the common facilities and hygiene” (p8).

Although examples of both S-I and S-II were observed for safety observation reporting “the data are only analysed through Safety-I lenses looking at what went wrong and trying to avoid it from happening again, although the collected data could offer insights into instances that achieved the intended outcome” (p9).

Both projects mostly looked at the reported events for proximal causes and neglected the role that resilient potentials played in performance. In the Norwegian case, a strategy for coping with performance variability was the use of a reactive indicator – i.e. the number of deviations reported.

Safety planning

Compared to event reporting, use of S-I and S-II perspectives for safety planning are “implicitly integrated” across both projects.

For example, planning of safety activities are said to always take into account things that went right in previous successful projects, e.g. experienced planners and subcontractors, use of training, testing tools and equipment etc; in conjunction with things that went wrong.

For Norway, their master & phase scheduling at the start of the project only incorporate a S-I perspective, focusing on identifying hazards based on past accidents and unwanted events. Use of a SJA (safe job analysis) is said to be one mechanism used to help manage performance variability and emergent risks – particularly when “some of the planning assumptions are no longer valid” (p7).

Use of the SJA in the real-time moment and updating plans and actions to the emergent performance is “considered as a Safety-II approach to the extent that a SJA is developed on the spot to account for variability in real-time” [** this is one area of struggle with from the S-I/S-II perspectives].

 For the Brazilian project, safety planning “is mostly limited only to the physical protections, equipment and work permits that are necessary to avoid the well-known risks that are associated related to past events” (p7), such as falls from heights, power tools etc. The use of their work package schedules blend S-I and S-II as far as considering normal work & successful/deviations in the planning process. However, no further analysis on “why things went right” was undertaken, and rather a bias was towards unpacking failed packages.

For constraining variability, both projects relied on the usual selection of barriers, i.e. physical, functional, symbolic, incorporeal. Standardisation was also utilised, as with relying on the tacit knowledge and diversity of workers to manage variability in real-time.

The latter factor was said to be strongly aligned to the S-II perspective “since the improvisations and adaptations performed by experienced workers normally lead to positive outcomes” (p7).

In wrapping up the paper, it’s highlighted that the formal activities and tools used across the projects, such as risk analysis, work procedures and most of the reported events were largely framed from the S-I perspective.

However, many of these practices have features of S-II perspective and particularly at the operational/worker level, where workers “constantly adapt their performance to the current conditions in face of, for example, limited resources and information as well as the opportunities that arise from knowledge transfer between experienced and novice workers as well as between different organizational levels” (p10).

This disparity can further widen the gap between work-as-imagined and work-as-done; leading to the “making do” approach. That is, when tasks are started without all of the necessary inputs or “the execution of a task is continued although the availability of at least one input has ceased” (p10). This effect is said to lead to improvisations and reworks which impact safety performance.

While some degree of S-II was applied, the vast majority of practices and tools were tipped towards S-I perspectives (i.e. focused on failure), while for learning a S-I was the only lens that was observed.

Opportunities therefore were present to expand learning and planning from a different perspective. E.g. risk assessments in the Norwegian project could have benefited from more input earlier in the piece from operational workers during critical operations. For the Brazilian project, drawing on more proactive use of the real-time observations of safety work “could reveal aspects of variability which could be useful to reduce the uncertainty in safety planning” (p10).

In concluding they said there is potential to better integrate and formalise the two approaches in construction, where designing more flexible plans and procedures that take into account variability of everyday work and tactic knowledge of workers could be improved.

Nevertheless, the authors argue that “there will always be a trade-off between the use of these approaches, meaning that not in all situations Safety-I and Safety-II should be jointly used” (p10). For instance, S-I may be better suited for stable and regular activities where high compliance with procedures and plans is possible and sufficient to achieve the desired performance. More S-II focus, in contrast, may be better suited under varying conditions where it can enable the identification of necessary adjustments to performance.

Finally, they state that “There is potential to integrate Safety-II in current safety management, through for example the use of observations, discussions and storytelling” (p11).

Authors: Peñaloza, G. A., Wasilkiewicz, K., Saurin, T. A., Herrera, I. A., & Formoso, C. T. (2019). In REA Symposium on Resilience Engineering Embracing Resilience.

Study link: https://open.lnu.se/index.php/rea/article/view/2417

Link to the LinkedIn article: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/safety-i-safety-ii-opportunities-integrated-approach-ben-hutchinson