CONTEXT AND (not vs.) BEHAVIOR

It’s an interesting time in safety, and context is king. As the Human and Organizational Performance (HOP) principle states, “context influences behavior [and] systems drive outcomes.”¹ This move to adopting a more system-centered view of understanding the causes of accidents and the conditions under which safe (and at-risk) work happens is a reaction to the doggedly persistent and blame-centric approach (both inside and outside of safety) characterized by a “tendency to focus on human failure, fallibility, and person-centered, internal causes of accidents.”² There is great value in embracing the idea that context influences behavior. It carries far-reaching implications for safety and overall organizational performance, even though this position is not new or revolutionary (more on this below). This principle describing the relationship between context (i.e., environment) and behavior has produced a number of downstream effects, some beneficial, some problematic, and some misinformed. This article will walk through several implications of this principle and discuss some practical ideas for moving forward.

There is great value in the idea that context influences behavior, even though this position is not new.

It’s Not Either Or

HOP has been described as a philosophy with a set of principles, one of them being context influences behavior. How this translates to practice is still being hashed out by interested practitioners, and interpretations have varied. On one end of the continuum is the notion that a focus on context is a focus on system design, while a focus on behavior is a focus on “fixing” or blaming the individual, possibly through coaching of some sort. The implication here is that a focus on behavior involves trying to get a person to change their behavior, seemingly in a vacuum, while leaving them in an unchanged, broken system that favors undesired, at-risk behavior. 

I’m not denying the persistence of blaming workers for their behavior rather than looking to the environment for the actual causes of behavior. In fact, blame seems to be ubiquitous both inside and outside of industrial safety. In an interesting article by Richard Holden,² he describes what we now know as the “fundamental attribution error:” 

Ross (1977) found the person-centered approach to be so ubiquitous in society that he called it the fundamental attribution error. Researchers of the phenomena have found that when people observe an action or outcome, they tend to attribute its cause to the actor’s internal or dispositional traits, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that the action was caused by the situational context.

Holden goes on to explain how prominent this error is in safety across many industries, including healthcare and aviation. In fact, many have erroneously claimed that blaming the worker is somehow proprietary to and characteristic of other approaches to safety improvement, such as behavior-based safety (BBS), despite widespread evidence that blame is a much larger societal problem. This isn’t a defense of BBS, particularly those systems that have been poorly designed and executed. Instead, my point is that there’s a lot of misinformation out there, and positions that are exclusionary (i.e., systems vs. behavior) miss the mark. That behavior is influenced by the environment, or by the context in which it occurs, was proposed decades ago and has been demonstrated in thousands of scientific studies since then. While this idea is not new, unfortunately practice often lags behind knowledge, particularly given the apparently intractable tendency for people across different societies, professions, and industries to assign blame to individuals for their behavior.²

Blame seems to be ubiquitous both inside and outside of safety.

Ultimately, it’s unhelpful to recognize that behavior played a part in an accident without looking further to the environment for the causes of behavior. It’s not an either context or behavior, because a focus on behavior requires an understanding of the conditions under which desired and undesired behavior occurs, aka, the environment. Often, behavior (safe or at-risk) is the leading indicator that prompts management to look for and learn about the conditions under which things go right or go wrong. It’s hard to imagine a circumstance where a focus on behavior at any level of an organization can or should be eliminated (or even de-emphasized) given how intertwined it is with work. 

There seems to be a strange taboo developing around the topic of behavior, as if the purpose of focusing on systems was something other than influencing behavior. Even in instances where system changes completely separate workers from hazards, some behavior of workers is still required in the form of following a new procedure, monitoring information from a control room, etc., not to mention leadership decision-making (also behavior) involved in allocating resources and designing or redesigning systems. Systems don’t build, operate, or sustain themselves. As long as humans are involved, a focus on behavior and the environment in which it occurs will be required. It’s not systems or behavior: it’s both.

An Opportunity

A comment about blame is warranted here. As mentioned above, systems like BBS have been indicted for advancing the persistence of blame in safety. As discussed, the problem is bigger than safety or BBS. That said, because BBS done well is in part influenced by the science of behavior³, known as Behavior Analysis (together with the quality work of Deming³), and because BBS (again, done well) has been inaccurately portrayed as promoting blaming workers, the science is often characterized as problematic for the same reason. Again, this is not a defense of BBS per se, but instead a note on the science itself. 

First, BBS is a tool or set of practices based on principles and methods from the field of Behavior Analysis, but the tool is not the science. BBS systems that blame workers for their behavior contradict the science’s basic premise—that behavior is shaped by the environment—and therefore do not justify dismissing behavioral science as a foundation for safety and organizational improvement. Take the example of a hammer used to drive a nail. The hammer is a tool that uses principles based on the field of physics to accomplish some outcome. If the hammer is poorly designed, made with cheap materials or assembled incorrectly, and used improperly such that its use is ineffective or results in an injury, would you disregard the underlying science that informs the tool?

The science of behavior fills in the blanks around how context influences behavior

Behavior is integrally tied to work and safety, therefore, the science of behavior is a fundamental instrument for understanding the relationship between context (or environment) and behavior. And here’s where the opportunity lies. I would suggest that what’s missing from the HOP framework is not the idea that context influences behavior on this point HOP and the science of behavior are perfectly aligned. What’s missing is a fundamental understanding of how context or the environment influences behavior. Knowing that the environment influences behavior isn’t enough. We need a common language and conceptual framework for understanding how the environment affects and is affected by behavior. The science of Behavior Analysis offers this framework.

Practitioners of behavior analysis have never blamed individuals for their behavior. On the contrary, the goal is to understand the environmental conditions under which people engage in different behaviors so the environment can be arranged to favor desired behavior. I applaud HOP proponents for emphasizing the environment and its relationship to behavior. The time for this is long overdue. In fact, behavior science principles have been around for decades,⁴ and in part, they served as a strong influence for early Human Performance work in the nuclear industry, from which current HOP thinking emerged.⁵ I’m suggesting that the science of behavior complements and expands on this notion of context influencing behavior by filling in the blanks around how this happens.

One last comment about the science. Fundamental concepts from the field like antecedents and consequences, positive and negative reinforcement, etc., are often poorly understood and misrepresented. It’s beyond the scope of this article to explain these terms in detail, but it is important to note that these misunderstandings have led to misinformation about the science and its value in understanding the causes of behavior. “Great is the power of steady misrepresentation.”⁶ This is unfortunate, and there’s work to be done to improve dissemination and generate productive dialogue around the science so people can continue to benefit from the application of its concepts. That said, no one benefits from discarding what is useful. Instead, we take what is useful, carry it forward, and add or build onto it. Where the science has been applied, it has been helpful in organizing a multitude of contextual variables into a coherent framework that helps us discover commonalities, functional relationships between behavior and environment, and make sense of potentially chaotic and complex behavioral systems. The process of continuing to advance and evolve approaches to safety improvement is iterative and need not be exclusionary. 

Moving Forward

Where possible, safety efforts should prioritize design. It’s important to re-emphasize that whether we’re talking about leaders making decisions about designing or redesigning systems or responding well to employees’ work stoppages, or workers recognizing hazards and implementing controls, it is all behavior. Until people are removed altogether from work, human behavior will need to be a critical focal point in implementing and maintaining safeguards that improve safety and prevent injuries. A focus on systems is a focus on behavior, and a focus on behavior is a focus on systems. Behavior is central to safety and attempts to disentangle them are nearly impossible and offer no benefits to organizations.

Although human performance (HOP) principles note that “error is normal,” this does not mean at-risk behavior should be accepted or treated as unchangeable. Best practice requires understanding the conditions under which at-risk and safe behavior occur, then using behavioral science to promote safer practices. While all errors may not be preventable, many are, and behavior change without blame is still the goal.

Combining behavioral science with HOP principles gives organizations a clearer, more practical understanding of how environment drives behavior. Modernizing safety management isn't about starting over—it’s about building on what works while integrating new, forward-thinking approaches.

Continuous improvement in safety is iterative, not exclusionary.

References

1.↩Conklin, T. (2019). The 5 principles of human performance: A contemporary update of the building blocks of human performance for the new view of safety. Sante Fe, NM: PreAccident Media.

2.↩Holden, R.J. (2009). People or systems? To blame is human. The fix is to engineer. Professional Safety, December, 34-41.

3.↩Krause, T.R. (1997). The behavior-based safety process: Managing involvement for an injury-free culture. New York, NY: Van Nostrand Reinhold.

4.↩Skinner, B.F. (1953). Science and human behavior. New York, NY, Macmillan.

5.↩https://drillingcontractor.org/a-brief-history-the-evolution-of-human-f…

6.↩Darwin, C. (1962). The origin of species (6th ed.). New York: Macmillan. (Original work published 1872)