The “Transparency for Safety” Triangle: Developing a Smart Transparency Framework to Achieve a Safety Learning Community

Transparency about health and safety risks is a complex societal, moral, ethical and political concept. Full transparency does not come natural for any of the key stakeholder groups: organizations, authorities and the people. If safety information is not sufficiently shared between them, people and the environment can be harmed. The authors explored the literature on transparency in sharing health and safety information. The findings show that such transparency as a subject is abundant in the literature but the exchange of information is far from complete in practice. Health and safety information is shared both via internal flows within each stakeholder group and via external flows between them. All three main stakeholders in pursuit of true safety for their own reasons, building trust via sharing of health and safety information, require improvement in transparency and a safety information broker between them. This constitutes a smart transparency and information exchange framework. The authors recommend developing a transparency standard, to study cyber-socio-technical systems safety and to include currently underutilized experiential knowledge available from the general public in the societal discourse. The authors propose a societal domain extension to a holistic safety culture model in support of a learning safety community.