Do we Truly Understand Safety Culture?

Behavioural safety programmes seek to turn "unsafe cultures" into "safe cultures". Although safety culture improvement campaigns often successfully reduce accident rates, their effectiveness fades over time, with a persistent rump of accidents and incidents remaining. That this is because the steps taken to improve occupational health and safety culture differ from those necessary to improve systems safety culture. Behavioural safety programmes are unsuccessful due to an over-simplistic application of social science theories by engineers. A more sophisticated cultural model is offered to help improve future campaigns and to help understand why systems safety needs contributions from multiple disciplines. Finally, risk-free cultures are contrasted with strategies to adapt an existing project culture.