Safety–I and Safety–II: The Past and Future of Safety Management

The Issues

The Need 'Safety' is a word that is used frequently and in many different contexts. Because it is used so often we all recognise it and we all believe that we know what it means -it is immediately meaningful. Because it is immediately meaningful to us, we take for granted that this is the case for others as well. Indeed, when we talk about safety we are rarely, if ever, met with the question 'What do you mean by that?' We therefore make the -unwarranted -inference that other people understand the word 'safety' in the same way that we do. The assumption that we all know and agree on what safety means is so widespread that many documents, standards, guidelines -and even doctoral theses (!) -do not even bother to provide a definition. A search for the etymology of safety, the origin of the word and the way in which its meanings has changed throughout history reveals that it seems to come from the old French word sauf, which in turn comes from the latin word salvus. The meaning of sauf is 'uninjured' or 'unharmed', while the meaning of salvus is 'uninjured', 'healthy', or 'safe'. (Going even farther back, the roots seem to be in the latin word solidus, meaning 'solid', and the Greek word holos, meaning 'whole'.) The modern meaning of being safe, as in 'not being exposed to danger', dates from the late fourteenth century; while the use 'safe' as an adjective to characterise actions, as in 'free from risk', is first recorded in the 1580s.

A simple generic definition is that 'safety' means 'the absence of unwanted outcomes such as incidents or accidents', hence a reference to a condition of being safe. A more detailed generic definition could be that safety is the system property or quality that is necessary and sufficient to ensure that the number of events