Theory
What is Brain Based Safety?
Brain Based Safety aims to increase safety in organizations by stimulating safe behavior. The approach is developed on the basis of recent knowledge about the brain. Brain Based Safety explains how both safe and unsafe behavior arise. Behavior has three sources: innate, learned, and activated.
Innate behavior refers to the fact that we are born with a fear system. This fear is directed at objects or events. For example, fear of snakes or large insects. This fear makes us more cautious. We also have an innate sense of how much risk we can handle.
However, the world has changed significantly in a short period of time. We hardly encounter snakes anymore, but we do work with powerful machines and hazardous substances. The second source of safe behavior is everything we have learned about the risks of today’s world, including how to deal with those risks when they occur. This riskawareness forms the foundation of onboarding an employee into a new role.
Environmental stimuli form the third source of behavior. We are sensitive to what happens around us. What we see or hear influences which programs in our brain are activated and how strongly they are activated. The way we design our work and our workplace therefore has a major impact on our behavior.
Brain Based Safety uses each of these three sources to better understand human behavior and to offer ideas for making the world safer.
Behavior sometimes appears strange and unpredictable. Why would an employee be willing to do something during working hours that could injure or even kill them, while the benefit of that action is minimal? Yet behind every action there is a logic that we do not see at first glance. For example, why do so many people in the Netherlands show up at out-of-hours medical services on Saturday afternoons with fractures and bruises?
Every Saturday, around 50 men fall off a small kitchen step ladder while doing DIY work at home. How is that possible? First of all, no one considers a kitchen step ladder to be dangerous. We are familiar with it and no longer perceive the risk. This is called underestimating risk. In addition, everyone believes they are the king of the step ladder. People perform acrobatics at the top, thinking they can just reach a bit further. This is known as self-overestimation. On top of that, everyone wants to work efficiently. Moving the ladder slightly takes only ten seconds, yet we often fail to do so. While painting the very corner of a wall, we lose our balance and fall as a result. That already gives us three causes of unsafe behavior.
Unconscious processes
After a workplace accident, it is often said, “They didn’t think,” or “They should have followed the rules.” A warning is given and the rules are explained once again. “Not thinking” is a simplistic explanation that does not help us move forward.
In the step ladder example, it helps to examine how underestimating risk and self-overestimation arise. Why does efficiency outweigh safety? All of these processes take place unconsciously in our brain. We are not aware of them. Even when we are lying on the floor with a broken wrist in a pool of paint, we still do not understand how it could have happened. Safety management is about understanding and influencing these unconscious processes in the brain.
So how should we approach this?
Brain Based Safety has mapped a number of these processes. Sometimes they do not seem logical at all. They are, in fact, biases of our mind. These biases were once very useful, but in today’s changed world they can work against us. When we understand where these biases come from, we can address them and sometimes even use chances.
Brain Based Safety has identified how these biases can be influenced—in other words, where the controls of our behavior are located. When you turn those controls in the right direction, desired behavior emerges. This increases the likelihood that everyone behaves more safely. Brain Based Safety has captured this knowledge in books, training programs, and toolbox sessions. Together, we can make the world a little safer and ensure that everyone returns home healthy.
Now we can only hope that someone is holding the step ladder steady!
Summary
Brain Based Safety focuses on safe behavior, builds on what is innate, stimulates the learning of riskawareness, and helps design an environment that activates safe behavior.
It explains our sometimes difficult-to-understand willingness to take risks and clarifies the principles behind it. It describes the unconscious biases of our mind and shows how we can work with them to live safely and healthily.
Scientifically grounded
The Brain Based Safety approach is based on extensively studied scientific literature from fields including behavioral sciences, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience.
For those who wish to explore the scientific foundation in more depth, we provide an overview of the referenced literature upon request.