Safety is crucial for sustainable growth in organisations and vital for societal progress. Yet, when considering “safety”, one is often confronted with the opposite of what safety is, with a focus on events and occurrences that generate bad consequences. Decisions and actions are ever so often based on past experiences of things that went wrong, making safety habitually reactive. Safety in organisations is directly related to systems that bring about events happening or not happening. It is frequently the case that one reacts to those symptoms, as the solution seems obvious, and immediate action offers a quick relief of the problem symptom. A systemic approach precludes solely reaction to symptoms of events happening, but instead seeks to discover the underlying systems, structures and their associated mental models, in order to understand how the whole system produces its results (wanted and unwanted). Such an approach is necessary, because we live in a VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous) world. As a result, organisations in the 21st century wrestle with novel challenges, which are no longer manageable and controllable with the same paradigms and mental models that governed previous centuries. In this thesis I argue that mental models are important human factors. They are the sources of systems, and therefore determine what happens in organisations and society as a whole.Consequently, the following general research question needs to be addressed: “How can organisations proactively generate and improve safety and performance in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous environment, taking into account sustainability, human factors and mental models?”This research is based on the idea of a design research, where the methodology to pursue and achieve safety and performance proactively is to be seen as the design. In this case, the design consists of appropriate mental models, processes and activities that help organisations to pursue excellence.How one understands and conceptualizes the notions of risk, safety, security, and performance are fundamental mental models. People have an intuitive understanding of these concepts. But how one regards these words determines how one deals with them. Hence, based on an etymological and etiological study of the concepts of risk and safety, and the definition of risk proposed by the ISO 31000 guidance standard, an innovative semantic and ontological foundation for safety and security science is proposed. This foundation provides coherent, standardized notions and definitions of the constructs risk, safety, security and performance, centred on an inclusive understanding of the term “objectives”, to be used as guiding mental models in the design.But what is the significance of mental models for upholding safety in organisations? Risk, safety and security have become ever more important and are also vital to enhance sustainability. The key in achieving safety proactively depends on one’s quality of perception, where the quality of perception should be understood as the level of deviation between reality itself and the perception (mental model) of that reality by an individual or group of people. In our ever more complex and connected world, the safety of systems depends on the awareness and understanding of the interactions and performance of the much smaller sub-systems. Individual behaviours result from individual mental models that generate the gain of achieving and safeguarding objectives, but they also bring about unwanted consequences, causing loss. A proactive way to reach safety of systems is therefore to focus on the performance of the sub-systems at ever deeper levels of detail within the concerned socio-technical systems and determine how mental models affect risk, safety and performance. Implementing appropriate empowering mental models, as well as alleviating harmful ideas, allows to achieve and safeguard objectives, generating safety proactively and eliminating unwanted events. Therefore, to achieve safety and to attain sustainable safe performance, understanding and managing mental models in organisations is of paramount importance.Changing mental models is difficult. The more important they are, the more resistance will be encountered. So, how to change mental models in organizations to proactively improve safety and performance? Mastering mental models in organisations is the fundamental purpose of the design. Generating, adjusting and managing mental models involves a systemic approach, based on dialogue, in order to improve the quality of perceptions in organisations. This requires a systemic view, leadership, leadership skills that enhance dialogue, and the ability to develop a shared vision, mission and ambition, determining what is important and valuable. It allows for aligning individual mental models with those that should govern the system. In doing so, it is possible to create well-aligned corporate cultures that create and protect value and that generate sustainable safe performance. This thesis develops Total Respect Management (TR³M) as a design that acts through an innovative, systemic, organisational culture alignment model. It involves systems thinking abilities, leadership skills and acts as a process to align mental models and objectives with the purpose of the organisation. Furthermore, besides enhancing systems thinking capabilities and leadership skills (directed towards dialogue), ISO 31000 and its guidance is used as a practical tool to undertake and support this alignment process. This makes it possible to generate safe performances in organizations in a sustainable way through continuous improvement. Altogether, these elements define the TR³M design as a concept, set of mental models, a methodology, and a systemic management system. As such, TR³M acts as a design to reach safety and performance in organisations proactively. Unlike many other management systems, the TR³M methodology covers the aspects of leadership, management and continuous improvement in a holistic, systemic and integrated way, linking risk, safety and performance with the individual, organisational and societal objectives to pursue an organisational mission in an innovative, corporate socially responsible manner.But how to implement this pro-active safety management design and improve the performance of organizations of any size or sector, operating in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous environment? Since TR³M is a holistic and systemic approach, it will likely not work as well as intended and expected whenever parts of the design are not fully implemented. It involves new paradigms, a lot of change and needs education of those who are going to use the design. When executed in the appropriate order, i.e., to start with increasing systems thinking and leadership skills, then implementing ISO 31000 and finally focus on continuous improvement, the accompanying mental models and increased quality of perception should generate the systems needed to reach success.How would one know whether a TR³M implementation works? Measuring results should indicate its success. But how can safety instantly and continuously be measured in a standardised way, independent of the type or size of the organisation? For decades, scholars have been looking at ways to capture the level of safety in organisations, creating complicated measuring systems, capturing a multitude of parameters that have been determined by analysing organisations and their mishaps. But until now, no system is capable of exactly and continuously indicating a quantified level of safety of an organisation. However, starting with the clear and coherent definitions of safety and unsafety, proposed in this thesis, and a clear notion of what unsafety represents in socio- technical systems, combined with the use of a multicriteria model, using specific loss and impact categories combined with impact and severity levels, it is possible to create an aggregated model that can provide a clear and instant indication of levels of safety and unsafety in organisations, indifferent from their size, sector or industry. As such, this innovative measuring system acts as an important feedback loop for the TR³M design, increasing the quality of perception and discovering effects of the much smaller sub-systems, long before they cause harm.

When looking at socio-technical systems from a systems thinking and systemic perspective, it becomes clear that mental models govern the behaviours and determine the achievements of socio-technical systems. This is also the case for individuals, being systems themselves and, as such, being elements of those socio-technical systems. Individual behaviours result from individual perceptions (mental models). These individual behaviours ideally generate the desired outcomes of a system (team/organisation/society) and create value. However, at the same time, mental models and the associated individual behaviour also bring about unwanted consequences, destroying or diminishing value. Therefore, to achieve safety and to attain sustainable safe performance, understanding and managing mental models in organisations is of paramount importance. Consequently, in organisations and society, one needs to generate the required mental models that create successes and, at the same time, to avoid or eliminate damaging perceptions and ideas in order to protect the created value. Generating and managing mental models involves leadership; leadership skills; and the ability to develop a shared vision, mission and ambition, as this helps determine what is valuable and allows for aligning individual mental models with those that preferably govern the system. In doing so, it is possible to create well-aligned corporate cultures that create and protect value and that generate sustainable safe performance. To achieve this aim, a systemic organisational culture alignment model is proposed. The model is based on the model of logical levels of awareness according to Dilts (1990), Argyris’s ladder of inference (1982) and the organisational alignment model proposed by Tosti (1996). Furthermore, ISO 31000 (2009, 2018) and its guidance are proposed as a practical tool to accomplish this alignment and sustainable safe performance in organisations. Altogether, these elements define Total Respect Management as a concept, mental model and methodology

When discussing the concepts of risk, safety, and security, people have an intuitive understanding of what these concepts mean and to a certain level, this understanding is universal. However, when delving into the meaning of the words and concepts in order to fully understand all their aspects, one is likely to fall into a semantic debate and ontological discussions. As such, this chapter explores the similarities and differences behind the perceptions to come to a fundamental understanding of the concepts, proposing a common semantic and ontological ground for safety and security science, introducing a definition of objectives as a central starting point in the study and management of risk, safety, and security.

In the past one hundred years, concepts such as risk, safety and security have become ever more important and they represent a growing concern in our society. These concepts are also important subjects of study to enhance sustainability. During the past fifty years, safety science has gradually developed as an independent field of science. In this period, different concepts, theories, models and research traditions have emerged, each with its specific perspective. Safety science is now focused on finding ways to proactively achieve safety versus reaching safety in a reactive way. We think this increasing awareness and search for proactiveness can be found and presented when viewed in light of the systems thinking iceberg model, where increasing awareness and proactiveness can be seen as digging deeper into this systems thinking iceberg, discovering the levels of systems, structures and ultimately the mental models that are "below the waterline". It offers a way forward in understanding, and proactively managing, risk, safety, security and sustainable performance, in organizations and ultimately in society as a whole.

When discussing the concepts of risk, safety, and security, people have an intuitive understanding of what these concepts mean, and, to a certain level, this understanding is universal. However, when delving into the real meaning of these concepts, one is likely to fall into semantic debates and ontological discussions. In industrial parks, it is important that (risk) managers from different companies, belonging to one and the same park, have the same understanding of the concepts of risk, safety, and security. It is even important that all companies in all industrial parks share a common understanding regarding these issues. As such, this paper explores the similarities and differences behind the perceptions of these concepts, to come to a fundamental understanding of risk, safety, and security, proposing a semantic and ontological ground for safety and security science, based on an etymological and etiological study of the concepts of risk and safety. The foundation has been induced by the semantics used in the ISO 31000 risk management guidance standard. Hence, this article proposes a coherent, standardized set of concepts and definitions with a focus on the notion "objectives" that can be used as an ontological foundation for safety and security science, linking "objectives" with the concepts of safety, security, risk, performance and also failure and success, theoretically allowing for an increasingly more precise understanding and measurement of (un)safety across the whole range of individuals, sectors and organizations, or even society as a whole.

Industrial safety performance has, for a long time, been the domain of health and safety specialists, measuring injury and absenteeism rates to discover patterns and trying to prevent accidents from happening. The drawback of this approach is that safety is reactive to accidents, mostly caused by operations. As a result, safety (performance) has become the reverse side of operations (performance) and is often seen as a hinderance in making the best possible profit for organisations. However, now already for a period of time, industries have become aware of the possible benefits of a more proactive approach towards safety. Therefore, increasingly more organisations are looking for more proactive methods in measuring and achieving safety performance. As a result, in recent years, important efforts have been undertaken to improve the understanding of safety culture and safety climate and how to measure these concepts in organisations, for instance in the process industry and chemical plants. Likewise, substantial efforts have been made to determine and develop a wide range of leading and lagging safety indicators that can reflect and predict safety performance. While developing leading indicators and making culture measurements are helpful, they both measure safety conditions indirectly. Because, an organisational culture or climate can be regarded as a specific indicator of a possible future performance, in the same way leading safety indicators aim to predict the future. Yet, little tools are currently available for the instant measuring of actual safety conditions and performance in organisations, providing information that allows for benchmarking between different sectors and industries. Nevertheless, when safety and its opposite “unsafety” are carefully defined, it becomes imaginable to develop tools that instantly measure the safety performances and actual safety situations in organisations so that they can be used for benchmarking regardless of sector or industry. In this article we will expound this way of thinking, based on an original paradigm about safety, unsafety and performance.

This article proposes an ontological and semantic foundation for safety science, based on an etymological and etiological study of the concepts of risk and safety. The awareness regarding the concepts of safety and risk have both evolved in similar ways because of increasingly more demanding situations and events that impact society in an economic way, also linked to the value of human lives. From a purely negative view on risk and safety, this awareness has grown into a more systemic and even holistic perspective on these concepts. The proposed foundation is aligned with the semantics and concepts used in the ISO 31000 risk management standard. Based on this foundation, the article also advocates a theoretical model and a metaphor on how to look at safety and performance in any organization.

This book is not about performance. It is also not about safety. It is about both performance and safety, and how these two are unavoidably linked, in all circumstances whether they like it or not. It is the combination of tireless attention for and performance and safety that delivers sustainable profits in any organisational context. To this end, the authors elaborate and describe an approach that can be used exactly for dealing with performance and safety in one go, and asking the right questions at the right time to the right people. The idea is to align the different teams and levels within the organisation through shaping the right mental models, dialogue, and respect. Leadership and management practices are indispensable in this regard, and the book therefore explains their roles and tasks as well. Applying the concepts, approaches, models, practices and recommendations given and expounded in the book leads to excellent sustainable results as well as the long-term viability of any organisation. This book includes chapters on mental models, measuring unsafe situations/activities, risk management, dialogue skills, leadership models, change management, and organisational alignment. The approach that is explained herein is called Total Respect Management and can be considered as a user-friendly way to achieve safety (Safety-I) and performance (Safety-II) proactively in any organisational context. (Imprint: Nova

Indicators for process safety can provide insight into safety levels of a process or of a company, but it is clear that the 'silver bullet' has not yet been identified. In secondary literature a difference is made between leading and lagging safety indicators. Primary literature questions this distinction, as well as the quantification of safety indicators. Safety Indicators for management and organisation have an ambiguous relationship with latent errors and conditions, being mentioned over and over in retrospective safety analyses of major accidents. Indicators for occupational safety do not necessarily have a relationship with process safety. In addition, it can be expected that regulators of major hazard companies will ask to identify and implement both lagging and leading indicators, and anchor these indicators in a safety management system. Therefore, the subject ‘safety indicators’ will remain in the spotlight, at least in the time to come.