Is there a future for Safety Management Systems?

The concept of Safety Management Systems (SMS) to control the risks of operational activities has already been introduced in high-risk industries some decades ago. Nevertheless, this SMS is often criticized as burdensome and complex. The introduction of the legal obligation to develop a SMS may also have introduced a misunderstanding in terms of how to do it. Through its requirement to formalise all main activities, the SMS is perceived as bureaucratic and as a vehicle for pure compliance, often detached from an organisation’s core and operational activities, and it is questioned whether it can deliver the safe performance that was hoped for.Moreover, the complexity of the socio-technical system in most of the high-risk industries has increased significantly in recent decades and continues to do so, making the overall performance of the system less predictable and less transparent for the human operator. In addition, because of climate change and other global challenges, surprises of different kinds have become part of our expectations, which requires from safety-critical systems that they be able to adapt to an uncertain and potentially fast changing environment. All of this has led to questioning the traditional way of managing safety and to alternatives being sought, resulting in a multitude of often conflicting opinions and models. The idea, however, that the performance of a (socio-technical) system should be approached in its entirety, seems to be endorsed by a large part of the safety management community. This requires acknowledging (human) variability as well as considering the complex and emergent phenomena that result from system interactions, to complement more traditional safety approaches. Against this background of very distinct and possibly contradicting approaches that have dominated the discussions on safety management over the last decades, and with SMS as a clear artifact of a more traditional approach, the relevance of SMS as a viable concept can be questioned as well as whether more traditional and newer approaches can ever be reconciled or coexist in harmony. To answer the existential question whether the concept of SMS can effectively contribute to the new perspective(s) on safety management, and with the aim of understanding better how to build resilience and adaptability into the railway system, this paper builds on the logic of the Extended Safety Fractal (Accou and Reniers, 2020) to re-think the traditional building blocks of an SMS from the perspective of controlling (human) performance variability. This requires that influences on/from human and organisational factors are explicitly identified as elements of the safety strategy to follow. Furthermore, this will require from organisations and its leaders as well as regulators to develop the capability to perceive, understand and pro-actively manage the tensions between (changing) demands for stability and flexibility, for which solutions should then be consequently implemented through both formal and informal cultural enablers.