When national and international "accidents" occur, it is reasonable to assume that safety professionals would be consulted and would play an active role in analyzing the causes and remedies as well as strategies and tactics to insure that there are not reoccurrences of the mishaps. If we look at the history over the 100 years of the existence of the ASSE that has almost never happened. When lives were lost in the Columbia and Challenger NASA space efforts, little recognition was publicly displayed for the involvement of safety professionals. But, the media had lots of "talking heads" that analyzed the causes and remedies. Commissions were appointed to perform in-depth analyses. That was done; but none of the members were ASSE members or even safety professionals. More recently the "gusher in the gulf" has been labeled the worst environmental disaster of all time. It has been analyzed endlessly in every form of media. There has been no presence of ASSE members, the Society or almost anyone portraying themselves as "safety" experts. They have been absent from television and the print media. Why is that?
There are at least four areas in which safety professionals can and should be able to contribute to responding to and analyzing untoward events. We have a significant number of our members who are involved in so-called risk management or insurance and related to the finance function. We have lots of exposure to public relations but very few of our members know much about it. Behavior-based safety gained credence in the 80s but most of the proponents were not safety professionals and – after about a 20-year run -- has been largely discredited. Now, many of those proponents have changed the nomenclature to "relationship-based safety" and overcome some of the flaws in their earlier work. The problem is that the solutions to avoiding untoward events are not tied up in the behavioral sciences: They are found in the social sciences. So these efforts are somewhere between a "blind alley" and a "sinkhole" for safety professionals. In the physical sciences, "the theory of everything" may be the string theory or tied up in black holes. In the natural sciences, DNA could be said to be the theory of everything. The theme of this paper is that in the social sciences…culture is the theory of everything. You neglect this "fact" at your peril: Or, the peril of never finding the answer to why losses occur: Or, how to stop them from happening.
