B SAFE Safety Culture FROM SAFETY I TO SAFETY II Jacob Damgaard jdamgaard@tindallriley.com Published: 11 May 2020 Whereas the traditional approach to safety is typically focused on analysing past undesirable events, Safety II is based on the principle of seeking to also learn from why things mostly go right, to help further develop an effective safety culture The ISM code becoming mandatory introduced a new era in ship operations, where safety was systemised and terms like LTI (Lost Time Injury), RCA (Root Cause Analysis) and KPI (Key Performance Indicators) became commonplace both on board and ashore. A Master now had to regularly report to the new established Designated Person function on his ships safety performance, and the latter then determined the company’s overall safety level by calculating whether they were in line with the safety KPIs. Safety was then defined as – the lesser the accidents the higher safety standard. However, as ship operations have become more complex is this approach still adequate? Defining safety based on the an absence of accidents and incidents, or as an acceptable level of risk, has been common within most industries since being introduced in the 1960s.  This  theory, also termed as Safety-I [1] is based on a reactive approach, where accidents are investigated in order to identify a root cause and contributory factors that then can be eliminated or mitigated in the hope of preventing similar accidents. The reason things go wrong is viewed as either due to technical (equipment malfunction), organisational (safety culture) and perhaps most significant human factor (error, fatigue etc.) causes. A safety system is regarded as functioning when no accidents occur over a certain period of time and malfunctioning when an accident does occur. The purpose of safety management is to maintain the efficient functioning of the system by reinforcing compliance audits and eliminating any variability through additional procedures. While Sa