"If you lived a safe life, you were never alive."

Safety has become one of the most abused terms in the english language. It is immoral to pretend that safety is possible, when you know that risk is involved.

Safe as defined by numerous dictionaries means an "absence of risk" or "free from harm or risk". So any risk means an activity is not safe.

We typically find safe and safety in very close proximity to high-risk activities like: Highway safety, Aircraft safety, Workplace safety, and one of my favorites recreational safety. Simply put "If Risk exists, SAFETY does not".

You can manage risk if you identify it, but managing risk means you are careful not safe. There are no degrees of safety, you can not be more safe or safer. Either there is risk and the activity is not safe or there is no risk(safe).

So what has no risk? Nothing, with risk comes enjoyment and skill. Typically we use risk management to achieve a comfortable level of risk or our risk acceptance level, when we accomplish this we consider activities "SAFE". When we call an activity safe we no longer identify risk, but it still exists.

You can manage risk more effectively, but if risk exists safety can not.

You may chose not to participate in high-risk activities, clearly this has the greatest impact on risk management, but not participating in activities leaves you available time to be exposed to other risks. For example, you chose not to parachute and you watch instead, someone's chute does not open and they land on you. Some risk still exists and therefore, you still are not safe.

Again, "If Risk is exists, SAFETY does not".

This vocabular infraction is common in training cultures because some people believe you can teach safety, when you can not. You can teach risk management, you can provide skills training, but you can not teach "Safety".

For example do we teach Driver's education but motorcycle safety. Shouldn't education be the focus of motorcyle training, not safety? Risk is greater on motorcycles, but it is not safe to drive a car either. Clearly, those who developed driver's education understood that they could not teach safety because risk exists always.

I urge leaders, educators, and society to remove the term safety from their vocabulary. Some replacements are "be careful" or "drive skillfully". The first step to risk management is to identify risk. To use the term safety means that an activity can be done without any risk.

Risk management works. How can anyone claim to identify or acknowledge risk, and state that safety is the purpose.

Risk is a condition of human existence, safety is not.


May be reprinted with attribution to Mark C. Carroll (c)2003