Survival-First: The Case Against (and Why It Still Holds)

Every time I talk about Survival-First, the same question surfaces sooner or later: “But what’s wrong with safety the way we do it now?” Or more bluntly: “Isn’t Survival-First just another rebrand?”

Fair questions. If we’re serious about shifting a paradigm, we’d better anticipate the pushback. So let’s lay the cards on the table: what are the strongest arguments against Survival-First? And why, even after hearing them all, I still believe Survival-First is the most honest and effective way forward.

Argument 1: “It’s Too Vague”

Safety has numbers. We can count lost-time incidents, track TRIR, and benchmark against the industry. Survival-First? Sounds more like a philosophy than a program.

The Reality: Numbers aren’t the same as truth. We’ve all seen immaculate safety stats right up until the day a refinery explodes or a ferry capsizes. Lagging indicators lull us into a false sense of security. Survival-First replaces those vanity metrics with leading indicators of adaptability, learning, and recovery. These are tougher to game and far more predictive.

Argument 2: “It Undermines Zero”

Work to Zero. Zero Harm. Zero Accidents. It’s on hard hats, banners, and billboards. If we talk about survival, aren’t we lowering the bar?

The Reality: Zero looks good on a poster, but it creates blind spots. Charles Perrow showed in his Normal Accident Theory that some failures are inevitable in complex, tightly coupled systems. John Downer extended this with “Epistemic Accidents” - disasters born not from carelessness but from the limits of our knowledge. Survival-First doesn’t normalize death; it normalizes preparation. Failure is inevitable, but survival must be non-negotiable.

Argument 3: “It Conflicts with Regulation”

Regulators speak in safety terms. OSHA, ISO-45001, ICAO, all are built around safety management systems. If you start talking survival, won’t you risk non-compliance?

The Reality: Regulations are negotiated compromises, not guarantees. They’re necessary, but as Hollnagel pointed out, work-as-imagined never matches work-as-done. ICAO itself now emphasizes human performance and human-centered design because regulations can’t account for every variable. Survival-First doesn’t replace compliance. It completes it by ensuring compliance doesn’t get confused with capability.

Argument 4: “It Over-Relies on People”

If Survival-First is about resilience and adaptability, aren’t we just pushing responsibility back onto the worker? Isn’t that just behavior-based safety in new clothes?

The Reality: Quite the opposite. Behavior-Based Safety blames individuals for deviations. Survival-First designs for deviation...recognizing that adaptation is inevitable and vital. Hollnagel called it “performance variability”: the adjustments people make every day are what keep systems afloat. Ignoring that reality isn’t safer; it’s negligent.

Argument 5: “It’s Hard to Sell”

Executives love clean shapes and slogans. Heinrich’s pyramid. Zero Harm. Easy to understand, easy to market. “Survival-First” sounds unsettling. Who wants to advertise risk?

The Reality: Yes, it’s uncomfortable. But so is every front-page disaster that exposes the lie of zero. When the Deepwater Horizon exploded, BP was touting stellar safety metrics. When Grenfell Tower burned, the residents’ warnings had been normalized away. Safety slogans are cheap. Survival strategies are earned. The organizations that thrive reputationally are the ones that can show they prepared for survivability, not just compliance.

Argument 6: “It’s Too Radical”

We already have HOP, Safety-II, Resilience Engineering. Isn’t Survival-First just old wine in a new bottle?

The Reality: Survival-First doesn’t discard those advances, it connects them. Safety-II says learn from what goes right. Resilience Engineering says design for variability. HOP says context matters. Survival-First binds them with one unifying principle: safety is subjective, survival is objective. It gives coherence to a field that’s currently fragmented by competing schools of thought.

Argument 7: “It Could Be Misused”

What if bad actors use Survival-First as an excuse? “We can’t eliminate risk, so it’s on you to survive.”

The Reality: That’s a distortion. Survival-First demands shared accountability. It rejects external locus of control because survival requires preparation at every level, boardroom, jobsite, and regulator alike. If leaders try to offload responsibility, that’s not Survival-First. That’s abdication.

So, Is There a Case Against Survival-First?

Yes, but only if you cling to the comfort of illusions. Safety as it’s practiced today is often a mirage: perfect numbers masking brittle systems, slogans papering over drift.

Survival-First is harder. It forces us to accept uncertainty, to design for failure, and to measure capacities instead of counting absences. It’s less about telling ourselves “we are safe” and more about proving we are prepared.

The case against Survival-First boils down to this: it’s different, it’s uncomfortable, and it’s harder to measure. And that’s exactly why it matters.

Because at the sharp end, where lives are on the line, the only thing that counts is whether people can adapt, endure, and return home alive. Safety will follow. It always has.