Complexity-based Safety Science is a pattern science studying the conditions that enable safety to emerge

• Dominant views of safety science treat safety as a controlled state
  • Something that you can create, produce, implement
• Complexity‑based safety science treats safety as a living pattern
  • A pattern that emerges from interactions among people, objects, ideas, events, technology, system constraints, and context
    
    
• Complexity-based safety science becomes the study of how patterns of safe behaviour, safe decisions, and safe interactions emerge
  • It also extends to the study of how patterns of danger emerge and the early detection of weak signals

• Complexity-based safety science focuses on shaping system constraints (fixed, governing, enabling)

• Complexity-based safety science studies human relationships that emerge from interactions
  • Trust, leadership, communication, shared meaning, and psychological safety

• Complexity-based safety science analyzes narrative patterns, not just incident counts
  • Stories become essential data since shared meaning emerges from them

• Safety is not a steady state but a dynamic non-event
  • It fluctuates with workload, fatigue, leadership behaviour, and environmental conditions
  • Complexity-based safety science studies Human and Organizational Factors in the system substrate

• Safety emerges from distributed sense‑making across the system
  • Complexity-based safety science studies how people interpret situations and coordinate action