Beliefs About the Causes of Safety: What Do Safety Professionals Think?

John Carroll, from the MIT Sloan School of Management, will lead this discussion about insights gained from two surveys of CHOL members asking for beliefs about the causes of safety and identifying sources of variation associated with demographic characteristics, work experience, and cognitive style.

The first survey relied primarily on open-ended questions and the second allowed selection from a list of causes of safety, developed after coding responses from the first survey into 36 categories of causes. Notably, few causes were external to the operating organization. In the second survey, we added additional causes to create a list of 42 causes from which respondents could choose their most important causes. We found considerable variation among respondents, with even the most frequent safety causes given by fewer than 25% of respondents. We grouped the 42 causes into a parsimonious yet meaningful list of 15 higher-level cause categories. Causal beliefs varied by…