[SystemSafety] Safety Culture

[Matthew Squair]

Just my observations from the field, but I’ve certainly seen that ‘culture’
can interact with designing for safety in interesting ways.

1. Org/product structures and culture. I forget who first pointed it out
but you do find product structure tends to reflect organisatiostructure and
that in turn can introduce issues into the design. For example a very
strongly functionally oriented organisation (culture) will tend to have
problems with transverse and emergent issues, safety being one of these.

2. Cultural tolerance of risk/uncertainty. An organisation scoring low on
Hofstede’s cultural index for uncertainty will be more risk averse and deal
with that risk through the application of hard rules and barriers in
design. I think it unsurprisingly that Boeing and Airbus have come up with
different approaches to flight protection laws given that the US and France
score differently on Hofstede’s index of uncertainty tolerance. The degree
of risk aversion can also drive a culture of ‘I can’t tell you until I’ve
finished the design’ and the associated use of problematic bottom up
techniques such as FFMEA.

3. Not so much a cultural issue but as Weick pointed out organisations
define themselves as much by what they ignore as what they attend to. This
explains why you get supplier world views that are focused on ‘product’
safety (whatever that is) but studiously ignore the operational context of
the end user, human error and dealing with external faults and failures.

4. Contingency. We execute system design through projects and contracts and
much like marriages each one can be unique, and sometimes diabolically so.
Change the people, or the contracts and you change the culture.

These sort of issues explain to some degree the ‘why’ a system might be
designed the way it is. Once you’ve built it of course the laws of logic,
science and mathematics apply.

Regards,

Matt Squair

On 10 December 2017 at 7:39:25 am, paul_e.bennett at topmail.co.uk (
paul_e.bennett at topmail.co.uk) wrote:

> On 10/12/2017 at 11:58 AM, "Andy Ashworth" <andy at the-ashworths.org> wrote:
>
>
> Paul,
> That aspect of safety culture addresses work place employee
> safety. The company I currently work for have a reasonably strong
> culture with respect to such safety; with respect to funcational
> system safety, however, their processes followed are totally
> different matter. If design engineers are not systematically
> considering functional safety during their work, I would suggest
> that a company does not have a good safety cultue. A strong safety
> culture to me is one where safety is considered during all stages
> of a system’s deployment is considered systematically, including
> ultimate third-party end-use, and not just focused on the
> employees of the design/construction organisation.
> Andy
>
>
> Andy,
>
> Whilst your observation was correct in that the examples I gave were
> to do with workplace safety, I find that such a focused culture will tend
> to
> do better when dealing with functional safety of the equipment they use
> and/or deploy in their workplace. The sense of their culture makes an
> impact into their supply chain. If such organisations design systems for
> themselves they will have functional safety very much in mind as a
> natural part of their development strategy. It is, after all, a synergistic
> relationship.
>
>
> Regards
>
> Paul E. Bennett IEng MIET
> Systems Engineer
> Lunar Mission One Ambassador
> --
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> Paul E. Bennett IEng MIET.....
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