A recent post from Mark Fleming nicely highlighted how safely often goes unnoticed; that is, the things that create successful outcomes blend and integrate into normal work.
This reminded me of this wonderful quote from Karl Weick, discussed by James Reason in the attached, that reliability, but also safety, are “dynamic non-events”.
Weick argued that:
“Reliability is invisible in the sense that reliable outcomes are constant, which means there is nothing to pay attention to. Operators see nothing and seeing nothing presume that nothing is happening“
and
“If nothing is happening and they continue to act the way they have been, nothing will continue to happen. This diagnosis is deceptive and misleading because dynamic inputs create stable outcomes”.
Although this could be seen as advocating reliability and safety as focused on negative outcomes (absence of safety or reliability as incidents), I think it’s more sophisticated in that Weick emphasised the role of “dynamic inputs”; that is, the presence of specific inputs and hence, also as a positive capacity.
Not dissimilar to Deming, actually.
Ref: Reason, J. (1997). Managing the risks of organizational accidents. Routledge.
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