Integrating Safety-I and Safety-II Approaches in Near Miss Management: A Critical Analysis

Abstract

Safety-II is a recently theorized approach, considering safety as the ability of a system to reach a positive outcome under variable conditions: analyzing “what goes right” can help to understand the dynamics of the analyzed system and improve its inherent safety level. On the contrary, a more traditional perspective, defined as Safety-I, aims at analyzing “what goes wrong”, thereby relating the safety level of a system to the number of adverse events that occurred. This study explores the potentialities of integrating these two approaches in near-miss management. Through a Safety-I approach, near-miss events are analyzed to identify the root causes generating the event chain, in order to delete them and prevent future accidents. Applying a Safety-II approach, the analysis can include elements that contributed to limiting the consequences and blocking the event chain, revealing the resilience level of the systems. This study presents a critical analysis of the two approaches and proposes a practical framework to integrate them into near-miss management systems. A test case shows the potential benefits of this integration. This work provides a tool to support the implementation of Safety-II on the operative level while suggesting a new perspective for near-miss management.