Many people talk as if a safety culture can only be achieved through some awesome transformation akin to a religious experience. We take the opposite view, arguing that a safety culture can be socially engineered by identifying and fabricating its essential components and then assembling them into a working whole. It is undoubtedly true that a bad organizational accident can achieve some dramatic conversions to the “safety faith”, but these are all too often short-lived.
Safety culture is not something that springs up ready-made from the organizational equivalent of a near-death experience, rather it emerges gradually from the persistent and successful application of practical and down-to-earth measures.
There is nothing mystical about it.
Acquiring a safety culture is a collective learning process, like any other. Nor is it a single entity. It comprises several interacting elements, or ways of doing, thinking, and managing, that have enhanced safety and health as their natural byproduct.
Source: Managing the risks of organizational accidents by James Reason, 1997
