During the first week of November 2014 the second “Annual Colloquium on Safety Science” was hosted by Griffith University in Brisbane (Australia). This Symposium was reserved to the closest contributors and students of Prof. Sidney Dekker, the leading scientist in the field of Safety and Human Factors.
The workshop focused on the state of research about Safety in Complex Systems. It unfortunately appears that organizations dealing with high risks environments (like aviation, medicine, nuclear and chemical related, etc.) are in considerable delay in receiving the indications of the “New View” on Human Factors and Safety.
Most of these organizations are still wired to old concepts of Safety. They consider systems in a Cartesian-Newtonian perspective, pointing at a direct cause-effect relationship that can apparently be uncovered with a reductionist analysis of unsafe events (a top down vision used to search the “failing component”). From this angle the system appears to be inherently safe and any accident/incident is due only to a mistake done at any level of it. Modern research has demonstrated that this analysis does not allow to understand the complexity which “generates” an incident or accident. In the vast majority of cases this type of approach only ends-up finding a “scapegoat” who is removed from his/her position and very often legally prosecuted.
In the New View, Safety is seen as an emerging quality coming from the actions of the operators. Personnel mediate between different and often contradicting goals (operational, productive, financial, socials, etc.) to make the best of a complex system that is under an incredible amount of environmental variables.
Dangerous conditions or incidents thus arise from interactions of perfectly functional components or from components suffering of small problems, whose non-linear connections alter the balance of the system and take it to an out of control state. Resilience Engineering, a branch of the Safety Science, analyzes the conditions that are responsible for the breakaway from the balanced contition and the effective methods which can “de-activate” catastrophic potential effects rising from that breakaway.
Captain Luca Musetti, the Head of the CRM and Human Factors Department of Flyrad, has been kindly invited by Professor Dekker to give a direct account of his experience on Safety issues in China. A series of questions related to the “universality” of the New View concepts and their applicability in cultural environment different from the Western one, were put to the panel. These questions triggered discussions and generated great interest at the academic level. Anthropologists and business management Experts were engaged to find the answers to these pressing questions.
To follow-up on this important questions Flyrad intends to coopt one of the most prominent Chinese Airlines and some renowned Universities of Shanghai to organize an International Conference, which could represent a milestone for the integration of Asian and Western Cultures on the matters of Safety.
