I know safety professionals who see their role from a “power and control” perspective as opposed to a “consultative” perspective. As long as safety is viewed as something someone else does, as a litany of rules and procedures that must be followed and policed, or as having power over and control of others, safety will continue to suffer from lack of employee input and isolation from the management mainstream, as it has for the past 40 years.
One of the key principles of systems thinking is the idea that the “whole is greater than the sum of the parts.” This concept is referred to as emergence. When the parts of a system come together and interact with each other, something else emerges from this interaction that is not present in any one of the parts themselves.