Accidents are not due to good or bad luck

Fatalistic culture is based on the belief that some of what we do is beyond our control. Some teams still believe that incidents and accidents are, to some extent, due to bad luck.

But fatalism is incompatible with prevention. ‘We were lucky’, ‘it would have happened whatever we did’, these ideas often cut short the search for the root causes of situations. The fatalistic culture becomes the breeding ground for normalized deviance, unacceptable risks become acceptable and degraded work situations become the norm.

In his Thoughts on Safety Culture, Philippe Balzer highlights the danger of the fatalistic safety culture and emphasizes that accidents have a rational explanation. It is, therefore, possible to take action to avoid them.