Sailing on Friday: Developing the Link Between Safety Culture and Performance in Safety-Critical Systems

As large-scale organizations and systems become more complex and difficult to understand, and with the notable failure of organizational practices to prevent disaster in safety-critical systems, interest in identifying leading indicators (LI) of adverse events in safety-critical settings has increased. This paper examines the question of how to provide early warning of adverse events to groups in complex safety-critical settings by understanding the connection between safety culture and performance. Significant safety factors that were correlated with safety performance were identified as LIs of safety, using safety culture survey data from three industry partners gathered over a two-year period. Complementary techniques suggest further use of multiple analysis techniques in order to understand the structure, variance, and power of the identified LIs, as well as to provide validation methods for the results.