Progress towards the prediction of adaptation in the safety of UK air traffic control
Authors: Foster Craig , Plant Katie , McIlroy Rich 
Published: June 2024

Safety is stated as the primary objective for organisations charged with managing systems, services, infrastructure and manufacturing across a range of industrial domains where there is a risk of harm or of accidents that could affect the users of those services or products. Therefore, the control of risk is a fundamental objective for ensuring safe system performance. A key source of risk in such systems is change and the importance of assessing the risks from change is part of a comprehensive framework for safety management.The traditional approach to risk assessment has focused on engineering design, component reliability and apparent human behaviour and its limitations. This has served the safety industries well; however, in the last 20 years, new theories, ideas, and disciplines of safety have emerged to address the evolving nature of risk.As many systems have become safer, by existing metrics based on accidents and failure rates, yet also become more complex and intractable, the challenge for safety management has become one of explaining how accidents are successfully avoided and how organisations maintain safety over extended periods of time despite operations appearing to be inherently risky. Termed a fourth age of safety or the ‘adaptive age’ of safety, there is now increasing recognition of adaptation as being at the heart of safety management.The adaptive age of safety identifies the key role of people in complex sociotechnical systems and that through their interactions and work, the people in the system together create a shared meaning of what safe work is. It recognises that, because of their capacity to adapt, people are an asset not a weakness and that in complex sociotechnical systems ‘people create safety’.In the adaptive age, one of the core research challenges is the evolution of the risk assessment to support the needs of identifying both risks resulting from adaptation, and any potential unintended consequences, alongside assessing risks to the adaptive capability that is necessary and recognised as being a core component for the production of safety in complex sociotechnical systems.The question this paper addresses is whether pre-existing, safety-reinforcing adaptations can be uncovered, and how risks from future adaptation (e.g., as a result of a change) and impacts to existing adaptive capacity can be predicted, prior to implementation of a change. Thus, whether risk assessment practices can be supported with approaches that explicitly address adaptation.This paper presents the results of a programme of work to develop an approach to exploring adaptation in a predictive manner and adds to the literature on HF methods development. The described approach focuses on the people at the heart of safety production by unlocking the experiences, strategies and skills of subject matter experts through a directed, semi-structured interview that is inspired by, and builds upon, existing HF techniques. The approach achieves a number of goals for prospective hazard identification, and we believe could be readily integrated into safety management processes in use in industry whilst retaining flexibility and avoiding disproportionate changes to existing hazard analysis processes.