www.thesafetymag.com/ca/news/o…

In the world of health and safety, we sometimes talk about the work of academics, coining the phrase “work as imagined and work as done.”

That phrase articulates an important concept. We often imagine things are going well somewhere and everything is being done according to plan. When we visit that place, we find that things are not so simple as we would hope, and see people deviating from established expectations and procedures.

We often point to this drift, as Rasmussen put it, to be a cause of incidents.

I recently heard some people talking about High Reliability Organizations (HROs) and Human Organizational Performance (HOP). Safety culture even came up. These are all very interesting theories and are useful to us in the health and safety realm.

The primary issue between theory and practice is operationalizing a theory or idea into something that will work consistently in most places. I say that because there’s nothing that works all the time, everywhere.