In the twentieth century we have had an enormous increase of our human capabilities; we have put satellites in orbit, we made immense progress in curing diseases and physical harm, we have transport systems to carry people all over the world in under 24 hours, and we can control our money with one touch on a smartphone. Inherent to these activities is the fact that these things can turn bad every now and then. Although the globalization and technological revolutions are mushrooming in front of our eyes, our ways of explaining failure are lagging behind. The incidents, accidents and disasters that we are confronted with nowadays are beyond the reach of our traditional theories and models to explain failure. The trend we see today is that our progress on safety comes to a hold. We have made our systems immensely complex in our efforts to be more productive.
The issue in safety in our present day is how we understand and manage complexity.
We have to be able to synchronize different people in different roles with different information, different skills and different goals when challenges appear that were not thought about in advance.
To be able to do that, safety science is currently developing a whole new paradigm; we have to start thinking safety differently. A complete different perspective on what safety is, how it emerges from daily practice, with a different language and different views on how to deal with people involved in accidents and disasters. When safety scientists study systems that are good at creating safety, they find the same critical last element that creates safety: the human. It is the human that steps into the breach time after time with the right information and expertise to make the system work.
At Voqx we convert the latest insights from safety science into operationalized knowledge and skills at all levels in organizations involved in safety critical business, so that our clients can start doing safety differently.
Please have a look at the service section for the services provided by Voqx.