The Safety Collaborative was created to bring the latest safety science and human factors solutions into practical applications for safety-critical industries. People ask how we came up with our eye-catching brand; it’s an interesting question! We wanted a logo that reflects our foundations and core ethics. A key part of our approach is ‘getting into the tunnel’, to quote Professor Sydney Dekker. It is much easier to understand events with hindsight, knowing the outcome with a warm cup of coffee in your hand.

However, if you want to understand sense-making and work as done, you need to look with curiosity from the worker’s perspective with the information they had at the time, why it made sense for them to make the decisions they did and what performance-shaping factors were influencing their behaviour. This allows us to drive mitigations and data back into the SMS that are much more aligned with the real world. The tunnel is captured perfectly in the concentric circles of our logo.

The grey reminds us that people are often working in grey areas with ill-defined or fuzzy boundaries or incomplete information that might be quite different to the way we assume our procedures are working in the real-world. The green circle at the centre represents our strong belief in learning and improvement as safety goals, which bring quite a different perspective and go beyond simply aiming to prevent accidents. Finally, the blue type represents trust, the basis of any constructive safety culture.