Safety II professionals: How resilience engineering can transform safety practice. Two modes for safety management: centralized control, or guided adaptability. Centralized control, labelled by Hollnagel as Safety-I, aims to align and control the organization and its people through the central determination of what is safe. Guided adaptability, or Safety-II, aims to enable the organization and its people to safely adapt to emergent situations and conditions. Safety-II has been presented as a paradigm shift in safety theory, but it has created practical difficulties for professional practice. We define the two modes and explain the challenges in changing the roles to support Safety-II. When should safety professionals re-enforce alignment, and when should they support frontline adaptations? We outline specific activities to adopt to move towards a guided adaptability mode. This moves towards their fundamental responsibility—to create foresight about the changing shape of risk, and facilitate action, before people are harmed. ScienceDirect 
We prepare to collect and compare notes for an async papers-we-love conversation.