Systems Thinking

Using Safety Science and Systems Thinking to Build a Safety Culture

Safety science is an interdisciplinary field that draws learning from a number of professionals such as psychology and engineering to understand how humans interact and make decisions in complex environments. In essence, safety science helps us understand how basic human limitations like bias, stress and fatigue impact us, and how recognizing and normalizing these limits can help us create more safe, effective and reliable helping systems. Using strong systems thinking practices, we can unpack how systemic vulnerabilities can overextend, misalign and/or under-resource child welfare professionals and the families they serve, and we can generate and scale improvement work.