Mike Fears
EP
105

Evaluating New View Safety

This week on Safety Labs by Safety Products Global: Mike Fears. Mike critically examines the principles of New View Safety, revealing its theoretical limitations and practical benefits. He explores the key themes, including error, work design, complexity, capacity, blame, learning teams and the tension between systems and human factors. His balanced perspective will help EHS professionals demystify the New View approach and effectively apply its guidance with nuance and contextual discernment.

In This Episode

In this episode, Mary Conquest speaks with Mike Fears, who describes himself as a recovering academic and has more than 20 years of experience in occupational health and safety across multiple industries.

This is a fascinating deep dive into New View Safety: its principles, how it developed, its originality and, most importantly, whether it improves safety outcomes.

Mike evaluates the core tenets of this approach to help us uncover the validity of maxims such as ‘error is normal’, ‘blame fixes nothing’ and ‘workers should decide how work is done’. His research findings help us separate unrealistic assertions from useful applications. But context and nuance are always key!

This episode gives safety professionals a balanced and measured perspective on New View Safety, encouraging thoughtful application of its ideas - rather than uncritical adoption or rejection.

Transcript

Mike Fears

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