How can we shape our safety destiny-building capability and taking the pulse

How do we shape our safety destiny? It is within the limits or our own making, that is, our capability. But, how do we know it is on the right track? In other words, how do we take the pulse? These questions set the context and scope of the research in which a number of key issues related to capability building and evaluation were addressed. In recent years, the approach of capability development has been widely researched by economists, organizational psychologists and management theorists. Unfortunately, because of its complex nature, the assessment of capability in professional context has not been properly addressed in the literature. The problem is two-fold. First, is criticality, or more accurately the lack of understanding about what capabilities are critical to our future success. The second one is concerned with the evaluative aspects of capability development. Using safety management as a study platform, this research introduced a contingency model of “strategic capability development” (SCD) as a plausible alternative to some of the well-established approaches. To address the evaluation issues, an innovative method for assessing capability maturity was constructed. The key variables were based on people’s pro-activeness and their self-efficacy beliefs. Through meta-analysis, a set of critical capabilities or indicators was identified and used as the key variables for designing the survey instrument, the Safety Management Efficacy Scale (SMES). These variables included goal-setting, risk management, safety training, risk communication, and operation/administration capabilities. Hypotheses regarding the interactive effects of each of these critical capabilities were then derived and tested. The results suggest that a high degree of coherency among the key variables does exit. There is a positive and significant association between critical capabilities and goal-setting capability. The positive effects of risk management capability on safety pro-activeness are strong. In regards to how goal-setting capability influences pro-activeness, no conclusion can be drawn. Having taking the pulse, the capability maturity profile of the safety profession is examined. The proposed SCD framework and SMES instrument together provide a point of departure for conducting similar research, including but not limited to human resources development, people capability maturity assessment, training/curriculum development, and performance evaluation