Contrast Safety-I and Safety-II models to explain why most work succeeds without formal intervention.
Occupational Health & Safety
Safety-II and Resilience Engineering in Everyday Operations
Move beyond incident counting to understand how everyday work actually succeeds, using FRAM modelling, resilience indicators and adaptive capacity assessment.
🗓️Duration5 training days
📚Content4 modules · 8 sessions
🎓On completionAccredited attendance certificate
About the programme
Course Overview
Most safety management systems are built to explain failure after the fact, yet the vast majority of daily work succeeds through constant, unrecorded adjustment that no procedure fully captures. This course introduces Safety-II and resilience engineering as a complement to traditional Safety-I thinking, shifting attention from counting what goes wrong to understanding how frontline teams routinely make things go right under variable and often conflicting demands. Participants build Functional Resonance Analysis Method (FRAM) models of real operational tasks, compare work-as-imagined against work-as-done, and learn to read the efficiency-thoroughness trade-offs that workers make when procedures no longer fit current conditions. The course works through the four cornerstones of resilient performance, responding, monitoring, learning and anticipating, and applies them to scheduling, staffing and safety margin decisions rather than treating resilience as an abstract concept. Teaching combines FRAM modelling exercises, frontline interview simulations and resilience assessment workshops based on the Resilience Assessment Grid. Participants leave able to identify brittleness before it fails, design processes that degrade gracefully under pressure, and report leading indicators of resilient performance alongside conventional safety statistics.
Expected Learning Outcomes
Build a Functional Resonance Analysis Method model to expose variability hidden in routine operations.
Identify performance adjustments workers make under conflicting efficiency and thoroughness demands.
Redesign brittle processes for graceful extensibility so performance degrades visibly rather than collapsing.
Calculate safety margins in scheduling and resourcing decisions before they are exhausted by disruption.
Develop leading indicators of resilient performance that complement conventional lagging safety statistics.
Facilitate resilience assessment workshops that translate frontline insight into concrete system changes.
Who Should Attend
Safety and human factors specialists moving beyond incident-counting toward systems thinking.
Operations managers who schedule and resource teams working under variable operational demand.
Human factors and ergonomics practitioners studying the gap between procedure and practice.
Continuous improvement leads investigating recurring workarounds in standard operating procedures.
Safety management system owners seeking indicators beyond lagging injury and incident rates.
Frontline supervisors coordinating teams through disruption, surges and irregular operating conditions.
Course Modules
Select any module to see its sessions and points.
01From Safety-I to Safety-II: Foundations of Resilience Thinking
2 sessions · 8 points
Session 1Contrasting Safety-I and Safety-II Models of Accident Causation
- Contrast Safety-I's focus on eliminating causes of failure with Safety-II's focus on understanding how work usually succeeds.
- Analyse a recent incident using both a linear causation model and a systems model to reveal what each approach conceals.
- Explain why counting negative outcomes such as lost-time injuries tells you little about the sources of everyday success.
- Identify where an organisation's safety management system still assumes work follows procedure exactly as written.
Session 2The Four Cornerstones of Resilient Performance
- Examine the four cornerstones of resilient performance: responding, monitoring, learning and anticipating.
- Assess an operational team's capacity to respond to both regular and irregular disturbances within normal resourcing.
- Evaluate how monitoring practices detect drift in performance before it produces a reportable event.
- Test anticipatory capacity by asking teams to describe threats and opportunities that have not yet occurred.
02Mapping Everyday Work Variability
2 sessions · 8 points
Session 1Functional Resonance Analysis Method (FRAM) Modelling
- Build a Functional Resonance Analysis Method (FRAM) model of a routine task, mapping inputs, outputs, preconditions and resources.
- Identify where variability in one function resonates with variability in another to produce unexpected outcomes.
- Compare the FRAM model of work-as-imagined against observed work-as-done to expose undocumented adaptations.
- Use the resulting model to prioritise which functional couplings warrant closer monitoring or redesign.
Session 2Identifying Performance Adjustments and Trade-Offs Under Pressure
- Interview frontline workers to surface the informal adjustments they make to meet conflicting efficiency and thoroughness demands.
- Apply the efficiency-thoroughness trade-off principle to explain why workers sacrifice one for the other under time pressure.
- Document workarounds that persist because official procedures no longer match current tools, staffing or workload.
- Distinguish adaptive performance that maintains safety margins from drift that erodes them without detection.
03Strengthening Adaptive Capacity
2 sessions · 8 points
Session 1Designing for Graceful Extensibility Rather Than Brittleness
- Compare brittle systems that fail abruptly at their limits with systems designed for graceful extensibility.
- Redesign a work process so that performance degrades gradually and visibly rather than collapsing without warning.
- Identify single points of failure where one unexpected disturbance removes all remaining safety margin.
- Build slack into staffing and equipment allocation so teams can absorb surges without abandoning safe practice.
Session 2Building Safety Margins Into Scheduling and Resourcing Decisions
- Review scheduling and resourcing decisions for their hidden effect on a team's capacity to cope with disruption.
- Calculate the safety margin remaining in a process once normal variability and worst-case demand are both considered.
- Negotiate resourcing trade-offs with operations managers using resilience language rather than compliance language.
- Design contingency resourcing plans that activate automatically when monitored indicators approach known limits.
04Embedding Resilience Engineering in Management Systems
2 sessions · 8 points
Session 1Resilience Indicators and Leading Metrics Beyond Lagging Rates
- Develop leading indicators of resilient performance, such as near-miss reporting quality and adaptive capacity surveys.
- Contrast lagging indicators like incident rates with leading indicators that describe the health of everyday work.
- Present resilience indicators to leadership alongside conventional safety statistics without diluting either message.
- Track how leading indicators change following interventions intended to strengthen adaptive capacity.
Session 2Facilitating Resilience Assessments with Frontline Teams
- Facilitate a resilience assessment workshop that asks frontline teams what usually goes right and why.
- Use structured prompts drawn from the Resilience Assessment Grid to explore a team's four cornerstone capacities.
- Translate workshop findings into specific changes to procedures, staffing or equipment rather than general recommendations.
- Schedule periodic resilience reviews so adaptive capacity is reassessed as work, technology and demand evolve.
What the participant receives
4 course modules
A structured syllabus
8 training sessions
across 5 days
32 detailed points
Applied, detailed content
Accredited attendance certificate
On completing the programme
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