Inspired by Professor Sidney Dekker’s Safety II

For the longest time, safety was all about one thing: stopping people from making mistakes. The idea was simple: humans mess up. So we train them harder, watch them more closely, and throw more rules and procedures at them until they fall in line.

People were not picked for how well they could handle the job, but for how unlikely they were to screw up. The system stayed as it was. It was the people who had to adjust, bend, fit, or break.

Then Professor Sidney Dekker came along and said, “Hang on, maybe we’ve been looking at this the wrong way.” He introduced what is now called Safety II, a completely different way of thinking. One that sees people not as the problem, but as the reason things do not fall apart.

As operations and technology got more complex, we started seeing what was really going on. Most of the time, it is not the person on the ground who causes trouble. It is the system itself: bad design, unclear rules, missing support, unrealistic expectations, or decisions made far away from where the real work happens.

That is when the idea of “human factors” came into the picture. It opened our eyes to the truth: people are not just surviving the system, they are constantly patching it up. They adjust. They absorb shocks. They quietly prevent problems before anyone even notices.

But now we seem to be drifting back again. Back into the comfort of paperwork. Audits. Checklists. Safety has started to feel like something we prove with forms, not something we live and breathe on the ground.

We are going backwards. Once again, people are being treated as the weakest link.

Dekker’s Safety II reminds us, people are not the problem. They are the solution. Real safety does not come from more control. It comes from trust. From giving people the tools, the space, and the freedom to do what they already know how to do, safely and well.

Truth is, most accidents do not happen because someone did something foolish or careless. They happen when decent people do their best in a system that has quietly drifted off course over time. And no one saw it coming.

Old-school safety still treats the world like a machine. Something breaks, you find the broken part, and replace it. But that is not how the real world works anymore. It is complex and interconnected. One small change can ripple through everything.

So where do we go from here?

We do what Safety II suggests. We shift the focus. We stop obsessing over rare failures and start learning from what goes right every day. We build systems that support people, not punish them.

Because if we do not change how we think about safety, even the safety system itself could be the next failure.

It is time we stop blaming people, and start learning from them.

That’s doing safety, differently.