June 2012 - Indian Airforce

What is safety culture Who and what
we are, what we find important and
how we go about doing it correctly, is
called Safety Culture. The possession of a safety
management system, no matter how thorough
and systematic it may be, is not sufficient to
guarantee sustained safety performance. To
proceed further it is necessary to develop cultures
that support higher process such as ‘thinking the
unthinkable’ and being highly motivated to be
safe, even when there seem to be no obvious
reasons to do this. But the challenging part here
is of creating a healthy safety culture and keeping
it alive.
We need to adopt a safety culture and
refine it continuously to achieve hole-proof safe
environment around. But it is natural human
behaviour to get used to a particular set of
conditions or environment and resist change.
You can easily understand this trait if you happen
to play golf. When you start the game, you learn
a particular swing and continue to practise.
After years of game, you may be advised by a
professional to adopt a change in your technique
to get a few extra yards. That is the most difficult
time, wherein you are in a period of transition.
You feel like giving up the game because you
are not able to train yourself with respect to that
technique. But it is only through your patience
and belief that you can overcome this situation.
On the same lines, we continuously need to
upgrade our safety culture in order to achieve
few extra yards of safe environment, inspite of
difficulties we are likely to face.
Recently, I read about five types of safety
culture, that are enumerated as follows:-
We care less about safety than about not
being caught.
We look for fixes to accidents and incidents
after they happen.
We have systems in place to manage hazards
(however the system is applied mechanically).
We follow the procedure but do not necessarily
believe these procedures are critically important.
We have systems in place and we genuinely
belief that safety is genuinely worthwhile.
Safety behaviour is fully integrated into
everything we do.
We may decide on our own in which category
our safety culture falls. But whatever level it may
be, the aim is to achieve the fifth level where safety
behaviour is fully integrated into everything we
do.
The underlying reason why cultural change
often fails to succeed is that the new situation is
unknown to the participants. We often believe
that the current situation is as good as it gets and
there is little scope to change.
Change agents are like golf professionals.
They can help develop a person’s game, but they
can’t play it for them. The greatest single barrier
to achieve success however, is the belief that it is
too difficult. On the contrary, in the long term it is
more difficult and dangerous not to!
- Flt Lt UB Singh
INDIAN AIR FORCE 2 0 1 2 J u n e Aerospace Safety 17