A Cynefin Approach to Leading Safety in Organizations

Most leaders see safety issues as ordered, existing in the Cynefin Framework domains of Clear and Complicated, where best practices are valued. Yet while some safety solutions live here most safety issues do not. We will introduce you to an eye-opening mapping exercise, seeing safety as an emergent property of a complex adaptive system, and why you should manage a mixed portfolio of safety practices to increase both robustness and resilience.

All of us want to live in safe, danger-free environments. We want the places where we work, the public parks where we walk, the roads upon which we drive, and the airspace in which we fly to be safe. As citizens, we expect our cities to be safe. Yet, as we write this chapter, a major explosion has just caused catastrophic devastation in Beirut, Lebanon. For years ammonium nitrate was stored unsafely in a warehouse at the port. Why were these untenable conditions permitted to exist for so long? Why were warnings communicated to authorities and yet no action taken?

As a safety leader, either high above in the C-suite or down on the front lines, you want your organization to be safe. In this chapter we will explain that the way you perceive safety may be blinding you from detecting potential catastrophes and preventing you from taking decisive action. The Cynefin Framework can help you see safety challenges in an entirely new way.

We see safety not as a product or service, nor something to be created. Rather, we see safety as an emergent property of a complex adaptive system. Safety emerges from the relationships and interactions among people, machines, events (e.g., COVID-19), and ideas (e.g., Zero Harm). Holding this view, you can shape interactions and the environment to be opportunities for safety to emerge.

A complex adaptive system, according to the Cynefin Framework, includes the ordered Clear and Complicated domains, as well as the unordered Complex and Chaotic domains. Beside regarding various operating and environmental contexts, we now add the entanglement of human beings who need psychological safety to perform well.

According to Amy Edmundson, Novartis Professor of Leadership at Harvard Business School, “Psychological safety is the belief that the environment is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. People feel able to speak up when needed – with relevant ideas, questions, or concerns – without being shut down gratuitously. Psychological safety is present when colleagues trust and respect each other and feel able, even obligated, to be candid.” (1) In this complex system of human behavior and relationships, with our state of being always changing, what is safe one moment may be unsafe the next.