## 5 Discussion  
### Consideration About Storytelling as a Methodology  
In the context of Safety II, where the focus shifts from merely preventing accidents to understanding the variability in human performance and the conditions under which work processes unfold, storytelling proved to be particularly valuable. By presenting participants with narrative scenarios, in fact, this approach allows them to engage with the real-world complexities of workplace environments. The two different stories--one representing an accident and the other a near-miss scenario--encouraged interviewees to reflect on different facets of safety management and operational systems. The scientific literature has explored--although not extensively--the use of storytelling across various domains, as a compelling approach to enhance health and safety issues, such as training, by embedding critical knowledge into emotionally resonant, context-rich narratives. For instance, narrative case studies and \"lessons learned\" formats have demonstrated potential to foster reflection and decision-making among occupational safety professionals by anchoring abstract principles in real-world consequences [46]. Similarly, the Telling the Story Project in agriculture illustrates how emotionally charged, first-person narratives can elicit empathy, improve message retention, and disseminate prevention knowledge across vast geographic areas [47]. A similar pedagogical impact was found in virtual construction environments, where immersive storytelling improved the perception of fall hazards, offering engagement and learning efficiency comparable to OSHA training [40]. Storytelling also played a key role in health education within constrained or stigmatized contexts, e.g., facilitating the discussion about sensitive topics with children, highlighting the ability to mediate behavioral and atttitudinal change across generations and domains [48]. In the workplace, stories collected by safety inspectors have proven to be valuable not only for training but also for developing validated recommendations within communities of practice, emphasizing storytelling as a tool for participatory safety policy development [49]. However, while these studies demonstrate the value of storytelling in transferring safety knowledge, most limit themselves to knowledge dissemination or qualitative learning impact. Some, such as those using accident chronologies in the Finnish metal sector [50] or narrative-enhanced instructional material in behavioral studies [51], touch on structured story analysis or experimental validation, but they do not deeply engage with systemic safety framework  
In contrast, the present study offers an innovative methodological leap by integrating storytelling with the RAG principles and Safety II thinking. It extends beyond the narrative as a training artifact or awareness tool, employing it within a structured questionnaire to examine how organizations perceive and operationalize core resilience capacities. Rather than focusing solely on safety training outcomes, this research provides a diagnostic tool grounded in real scenarios to assess organizational safety culture and resilience maturity. While prior works have already highlighted the emotive and persuasive power of storytelling [52], and its utility in shaping communication practices and interventions [53], none have combined narrative with RAG to systematically evaluate OSH practices across a large sample of companies. Furthermore, by situating this approach within Italy's manufacturing sector and highlighting the role of technological adoption and company size, the study contributes a novel empirical perspective to the international literature on resilience engineering, an area that remains underdeveloped in non-academic industrial settings. Therefore, this work moves it into a new analytical space by using storytelling not just to inform or persuade, but to structure inquiry and measure organizational capacities for resilient performance.