Safety concepts through a memetic lens
Busch, Curșeu and Neessen ask why some safety concepts spread while others do not, and explore the question through memetics, a Darwinian theory of cultural evolution, treating memes as a metaphor and the exercise as a thought experiment. Their case is the accident triangle, traced as cycles of replication, variation and selection: from Heinrich's papers of the late 1920s and his 1:29:300 ratio, through the iconic triangle of 1941, Lateiner's iceberg and Bird's 1:10:30:600, into Behaviour Based Safety, the Serious Injuries and Fatalities movement and new view critique. The triangle has many of the traits of a successful meme: visual, memorable, relatively simple, flexible in interpretation, positive in message, and promoted by someone who could be regarded as a safety celebrity. Its many mutations, misreadings included, have helped it survive. The image often travels without Heinrich's instructions for its use, and most triangles discussed today are no longer Heinrich's or Bird's but someone else's, while scholars and practitioners rarely specify which version they use or critique.
Attention to memes may help a new concept succeed: they point to the relatively meme-heavy HOP movement, with its five principles and 4Ds, while Safety-II, Safety Differently and Resilience Engineering, lacking the catchy packaging, appear to have a more limited following, though not for that reason alone. On dislodging concepts, they argue that critique alone is ineffective: at least initially, every critical mention is another replication. Citations of Heinrich's book rose sharply after Manuele's critique of 2011, which they treat as a crude but reasonable approximation of replication while noting other reasons for the rise. For a meme, there is no such thing as bad publicity. Supplementing critique with an explanation of useful approaches, or replacing the meme with a similar one, might work better. The limits are stated: memetics is contested; documents give little access to why authors selected or changed the triangle; historical sources are limited, with more still in archives, and the early literature studied is American only; and the approach cannot judge whether a concept is useful, or why particular people adopt it. The paper does not mention psychological safety. Its companion review (Busch et al., 2026) names it, with safety culture and just culture, as a recent case of management fashion influencing safety concepts, and that is where this lens meets it.
Save this paper to a bibliography, keep notes on it, and export citations. Create a free account →