ABSTRACT
Safety management has a brief but chequered history where the institutionalised concern for safety at places of work, in the sense of efforts to prevent harm to people, goes back about 200 years. Management of organisational performance in general and safety in particular should therefore be based on an understanding of the 'nothing' that happens all the time, on the typical, everyday processes, rather than on the snapshots of dysfunctional states. Safety can be achieved by preventing things from going wrong, by preventing causes from exerting their effect, by preventing hazards from becoming realised, or by eliminating causes and hazards. The safety paradigm proposes that adverse outcomes are due to a combination of adverse events and a failure of precautions, barriers, or defences. Safety has been prescribed as an antidote to the causes of accidents, incidents, and adverse outcomes in general. The real antidote to complexity lies in realising that it is epistemological rather than ontological.
