The Safety Model That No Longer Fits the Work

There’s a quiet structural shift happening across industrial sites today. You don’t see it in dashboards. You don’t hear it in management meetings. But you feel it, every time a contractor team arrives, every time a shutdown starts, every time a supervisor tries to coordinate three companies at once.

It’s the unmistakable tension of a safety model built for a world that no longer exists.

For decades, the industry operated under one fundamental assumption: safety belongs to the employer. One company, one culture, one chain of command, one system of rules and one shared mental model of how work is done.

That assumption shaped every safety framework we use today: permit to work, behavioural safety, process safety, leadership commitment, audit structures, incident analysis, training strategies.

All of them, whether implicitly or explicitly, assume a single-employer environment.

And that’s the problem.

Because modern industrial sites are anything but.

We now run multi-organisational operations with single-organisational systems

Walk any large plant today and you’ll find:

• contractors supervised by subcontractors
• maintenance teams hired through framework agreements
• inspection specialists rotating across multiple sites
• shutdown crews assembled from five or six companies
• temporary labour sourced regionally or internationally
• varying safety cultures colliding on the same job

And in this reality, something fundamental collapses:

The idea that one culture, one competence model, one chain of command, and one “way of working” governs the operation.

Instead, we have a distributed system: multiple employers, multiple micro-cultures, multiple governance logics, different interpretations of “how work should be done.”

Operations have evolved, but governance hasn’t!

What research shows. The old model breaks under distributed responsibility

In the last five years, a new body of academic work has emerged around multi-organisational safety. It uses terms that are still unfamiliar in industry, such as:

• safety entanglement
• inter-organisational drift
• distributed safety intelligence
• collaborative risk emergence
• friction costs in safety coordination

The idea behind these concepts is simple but profound:

When work is performed by multiple organisations together, risk no longer sits inside any single organisation. It “lives” in the interactions between them.

And that is precisely where most industrial safety systems are blind.

Traditional models are brilliant within a closed system, when everyone belongs to the same company, receives the same training, shares the same mental models, and reports to the same leadership. But contractors disrupt all of that!

Why contractor-heavy environments make traditional safety models obsolete

1. Authority becomes fragmented

A supervisor from the host company may give instructions, but the contractor worker still answers, contractually and psychologically,  to another employer. No safety textbook from the 1990s accounts for that.

2. Culture becomes layered, not unified

Every organisation brings its own norms for acceptable risk, escalation behaviour, and communication style.

You don’t manage “safety culture” anymore. You manage culture interfaces.

3. Knowledge flow becomes discontinuous

Information is no longer inherited through years of tenure but re-created daily through transient teams. Knowledge doesn’t reside in people. It resides in handover quality.

4. “Work as imagined” becomes impossible to define

Your procedure may be perfect, but contractors arrive with their own procedures, and subcontractors with yet another. The real work practice emerges from negotiation, not instruction.

5. Accountability becomes diluted

Everyone is responsible. Which, in practice, often means: no one has full visibility.

The uncomfortable truth Safety has become a system-of-systems challenge

This is the part the industry hasn’t fully processed:

We no longer operate safety inside a single organisation. We operate it across a network of organisations, each with:

• different maturity
• different risk appetite
• different training
• different contract pressures
• different capacity for supervision
• different understanding of the plant’s hazards

And the emergent behaviour of that network is what truly determines your safety performance.

Not your internal safety programme. Not your leadership priorities. Not your training matrix.

But the combined behaviours of multiple companies working as one temporary ecosystem.

In other words:

Your safety performance is now the average of everyone else’s systems, not just your own.

So where does this leave industrial leaders?

It leaves you with a challenge that most sites have never formally named:

You are running a complex, multi-organisational workforce with a safety system designed for a single-employer world.

No amount of behavioural programmes, audits, or internal initiatives will fix that structural mismatch.

The new frontier is not “better safety culture.” It’s inter-organisational safety intelligence:

• shared situational awareness
• shared data
• synchronised risk expectations
• unified work models
• transparent contractor ecosystems
• real-time qualification and access control
• coordinated governance instead of parallel governance

Organisations that solve this will outperform the rest, in safety, reliability, cost, and resilience.

Because they’ll be operating with a safety model that actually matches the work.

A question worth sitting with

As the year turns and you look at your safety reports, ask yourself:

Are you measuring the safety of your organisation… or the safety of an ecosystem you don’t fully control?

The answer to that question will define the next decade of industrial risk leadership.