Systems Intelligence and the HF Tool in foregrounding human factors in systemic safety

The safety of sociotechnical systems ultimately depends on the success of people’s everyday activities at work. This is the core idea of Safety-II. However, practical tools for applying Safety-II thinking in practice are scarce. In this study we present a new approach to managing human factors (HF) in safety, spotlighting people’s own experiential and interactive perspective at everyday work. We combine the research-oriented and practically tested HF Tool with the conceptual Systems Intelligence (SI) framework and present how this combination strengthens the mastery of HF in actual safety practice. SI focuses on ways how people can succeed in socio-emotional wholes viewed as systems and brings to the forefront the hidden aspects of human actions, related to personal reflection and interpersonal relationships, often neglected in actual safety management. This combined HF-SI framework provides an approach for implementing Safety-II in practice.