Cognitive Gap and Correlation of Safety-I and Safety-II: A Case of Maritime Shipping Safety Management

In contrast to the conventional safety management principle, namely, safety-I, which focuses on “what goes wrong”, a new-born safety philosophy (safety-II) inspires people to investigate “how and why things go right”. In the present study, the cognitive difference and correlation between safety-I and safety-II in the maritime shipping industry are explored and investigated. For this purpose, a questionnaire is administered to survey seafarers and maritime experts, and semi-structured interviews are conducted to collect original data associated with safety-I and safety-II. Then, the data from seafarers and maritime experts are further processed by empirical statistical methods and fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (AHP) methodology. The results show that impacting factors associated with individual aspects are usually accepted as dominant with respect to views of safety-I, while organizational factors are more influential for safety-II, which is essential to developing an organizational resilience capacity. Based on the findings and discussions, potential safety countermeasures that integrate safety-I and safety-II are proposed in this article. The present study discusses the new-born safety-II perspective to elucidate the safety issues associated with maritime shipping operations, which can be seen as the main innovation of this work.