The management of safety has undergone a number of radical changes in the past 100 years. The most important paradigm shifts occurred through the work of Heinrich, followed by the advent of the safety systems era and, more recently, the behavioural safety approaches that have become increasingly popular around the world. Each of these approaches' to safety has left an indelible mark on the way we target safety improvements, helping decide which interventions are deployed and how they will be measured. They have also resulted in a number of myths' about safety management, each of which will be discussed, analysed and challenged in this paper. This paper highlights the complex problem of complacency', that has arisen out of the increased levels of regulation and consequent perceived protection that workers enjoy in the work place. It also looks at a phenomenon called accident migration' which results from a superficial treatment of accidents with changes to rules and procedures. The most recent approach to safety is generally known as behaviour-based safety, which flowed from the human sciences and quality management era. This approach has had a dramatic impact on the way safety is managed around the world, but still falls short in a number of key aspects, most notably the area of risk awareness and risk understanding. Many workplace accidents occur simply because the risk is unidentified, underestimated, not understood or ignored. This paper proposes a new direction for safety, called competency-based safety. It is based on cognitive psychology aimed at combating the consequence of modern protection. A case study is presented detailing the deployment of this approach throughout Placer Dome._x000D_
FORMAL CITATION:Pitzer, C, 2005. The new management of risk - competency-based safety, in Proceedings Ninth Underground Operators' Conference 2005, pp 395-400 (The Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy: Melbourne).