Work = Risk. Work is energy directed by people to create value. If an operation has the capacity to do work, it has the capacity to do harm. But people are imperfect. Workers, including managers, make mistakes. Therefore, work is the use of force under conditions of uncertainty—human fallibility.

Safety. Consequently, absolute safety is impossible to achieve with any human endeavor. Risk—the specter of losing control of hazards—is continually present. Most operations require some degree of human oversight and/or control of work. That means that some human actions MUST go right the first time, every time—when “failure is not an option.”

Operational safety is achieved through two sources. There are fixed sources of safety—controls, barriers, and safeguards—designed and built into a technology and its physical structures. However, there are variable sources of safety attributable to the organization and conduct of work—via human performance, which must be managed in real time at the worksite. Therefore, safety is what people do to protect assets from harm during work—in a manner of speaking, people ‘complete the design’ through their capacity to respond to gaps in the original design.