1. WHAT ARE THE CURRENT GAPS IN OUR KNOWLEDGE?
Natasha Scott & James Barker

2. Session Objective:
Identify the current challenges and gaps in knowledge and practice that still need to be addressed to advance safety culture across industry.

3. Taking Stock of What We Currently Know
Safety culture is important – identified (directly or indirectly) as a contributing factor in most major accident investigations
Safety culture is a shared phenomena – involving values, attitudes, beliefs, perceptions about safety
There are enough safety culture models – may have different dimensions, but there is overlap among them
Leadership – key role in shaping safety culture
Assessment – two methods are always better than one
Culture change is hard – culture change does not happen overnight and company’s still struggle to make sustained improvements in their safety culture
Key points:
This conference highlights the importance of safety culture
Although there are lots of different definitions of safety culture they all describe culture as a shared phenomena and all described safety culture as some combination of values/attitudes/beliefs/perceptions about safety
Again, there’s lots of different models of safety culture, but at the end of the day there’s some amount of commonality among them all and coming up with a new model of safety culture or arguing over which model is better is not going to advance safety culture improvement across industry
One example of the commonality among different models of safety culture is leadership
Culture is complex and therefore requires a complex assessment methodology – using multiple methods of assessment provides you with better data on the current state of your culture, using some combination of surveys, focus groups, document review, observations or something else is better than just using one of those methods.
This is why we’re all here at the conference and what we want to dive into in this session – what makes it so hard to improve culture, what knowledge, tools, etc. could make it easier, what can be done to make culture change less of a struggle?

4. Taking Stock of What We Need to Know
What needs to be on the agenda?
Setting the agenda for safety culture in North America
What new knowledge do you need to have?
How do you need new knowledge packaged for your use?
How can we better facilitate shared learning?
Within organizations and between organizations
Cross sector collaboration
Social media, virtual platforms
What does safety culture leadership look like?
How do we get past “safety culture change is hard”?
Key points:
If the tag line is setting the agenda for safety culture in North America, then what needs to be on the agenda?
What research needs to happen? How do practitioners need to receive this knowledge?
What do we need to do to facilitate shared, peer learning? How can we better connect organizations internally and externally. How can we learn from cross-sector partnerships?
What does it mean to lead in terms of safety culture?
How do we craft a better attitude toward safety culture?