Dr. Robert Long's The Great Safety Delusion is not a traditional safety manual. Far from it. It’s a philosophical provocation, a semiotic critique, and a cultural diagnosis of the Zero Harm ideology in the safety profession.

Long begins by challenging the dominant narrative of zero harm as the ultimate goal of safety management. He argues that this is an ideology that is not only unrealistic but also harmful, as it undermines critical thinking, learning, and the human experience of fallibility.

He sets the theoretical foundation in existentialism, social psychology, and semiotics. He critiques the behaviorist and engineering mindsets prevalent in safety practice and for a more human-centered and meaning-based approach.

"Zero" is presented as a cultural symbol. Long sees it as a textbook case of delusion: a belief clung to despite contradicting reality. To him, zero is perfectionism disguised as care. It’s used to control, deny uncertainty, and erase human vulnerability. Long maps this ideology across the industry, from language to leadership, from policy to practice. In his view, zero becomes a symbol of control, a semiotic anchor that distorts learning and encourages blind compliance. It’s compared to religious fundamentalism, because it can present itself as sacred, it’s often moralized, and enforced through rituals, slogans, and unchallenged beliefs.

In one of the strongest chapters, "The Psychology of Zero", Long describes how the zero ideal sets up a discourse of blame instead of care. "Zero sets up people to fail", he writes, "because life isn't a math problem". Drawing on Kay and King's Radical Uncertainty and Nassim Taleb's Antifragility, Long argues that striving for perfection suppresses adaptability and increases fragility. He claims that the zero mindset can create organizational OCD, which is obsessed with numbers and blind to people. He connects this to shame, dishonesty, and mental harm. Zero becomes not only unreachable, but unethical as well.

In the chapter on language, Long decodes the rhetoric of safety: phrases like zero tolerance or cardinal rules are shown to serve control and silence rather than understanding. He describes how safety has become saturated with manipulated language, suppressing critique and diversity of thought. He explores zero as a Jungian cultural archetype, a myth that has captured the unconscious. Safety rituals, slogans, and visual symbols like pyramids or curves reinforce this collective belief. Safety, Long says, thus has become a secular religion.

Politically, Long sees zero as a tool of power, which justifies surveillance, punishment, and compliance in the name of care. Facial recognition, for instance, is framed as safety technology. He calls this ethical laundering. Zero becomes the fig leaf for control.

Ethically, Long sees zero as a betrayal of care. It denies human fallibility and imposes perfection as a moral imperative. This, he argues, is not ethical leadership—it's moral coercion. The question, "How many injuries do you want?" becomes a manipulative trap. True ethics, Long argues, begin with fallibility, dialogue, and empathy.

In the final chapter, Long offers his alternative: the Social Psychology of Risk (SPoR). SPoR comes with a curriculum, a set of methods, a body of knowledge drawing from linguistics, poetics, theology, and semiotics, and an ethical grounding in care and relational engagement. Dealing with risk becomes a relational, real-time, embodied process. So, according to Long, SPoR adds what traditional safety management often misses: listening, participation, and ethical reflection.

SPoR is built on a phenomenological-existential worldview. Long writes that it treats people as meaning-makers instead of hazards to be controlled. But this less contradictory as it may seem. Within human factors engineering, it is assumed that people will still interpret and improvise, no matter the design. Then we can design feedback loops, conversations, and learning processes that account for that instead of punishing it retroactively.

The book invites safety professionals to think beyond metrics, beyond checklists, beyond the illusion of perfection. Long makes the case that we must humanize safety by accepting risk, embracing dialogue, and starting from care. To quote Long:

"Talking perfection to fallible people is not just silly, it is also dangerous" (page 132).

That said, the book is not without its limits. It’s essentially a collection of blog posts, complete with a LOT of links to material on the internet. Next to this, at times, Long overextends his metaphors. The language is philosophically dense and occasionally (hugely) polemical. Some may find the critique too sweeping. For instance his critique of human factors engineering and just culture. There are few empirical case studies to balance the argument.

Also, some may think the alternative is too dependent on Long's own framework. It’s a consultant’s book after all. While Long critiques the functional delusions of mainstream safety management, organizations survive through what functions, not what is morally superior. If SPoR is to survive and spread, it must either learn how to functionally couple with the economic system, or accept its role as a niche cultural counter-system that perhaps can’t scale without compromise.

Postscript - How does Zero Harm operate in organizations?

I do agree with Long when it comes to the omnipresense of zero harm. Here’s an idea of how it operates in organizations, built on Niklas Luhmann’s Sociology of Risk (1991).

Organizations deal with complexity by closing communication around decision-making. They see risk as a product of decisions. By choosing a particular course of action, organizations implicitly choose the associated risks. In this light, Zero Harm acts as a way to regulate which decisions are thinkable or legitimate. Once a goal of zero is set, it structures further communication. Not reaching zero must be explained, justified. Or even concealed.

Generalizations like efficiency, growth, or compliance are used by organizations to maintain internal coherence and legitimacy. Zero Harm functions as such a generalization. It’s a stabilizing fiction that simplifies internal decision-making and presents a moral front to the environment (e.g., regulators, shareholders and the public). Zero offers a beacon of control and rationality in domains characterized by uncertainty. Conversations are steered toward implementation and away from questioning the premise. Once risks materialize, the focus moves from system-produced risk to individual blame. If zero harm is possible, then harm must be due to failure instead of complexity. This suppresses systemic learning and promotes defensive postures like metric manipulation or scapegoating.

The insistence on Zero Harm hides the fact that organizations produce risks through their own structures. Zero Harm allows the organization to externalize responsibility for harm. It masks how organizational routines (e.g., production pressure, under-resourcing, normalization of deviance) generate unsafe conditions. Thus, Zero becomes a deflective frame instead of a protective one, since it hides the systemic nature of risk by presenting safety as an external goal that individuals can comply with or fail.

Sources:

Long, R. (2023), The Great Safety Delusion, Kambah: Scotoma Press.

Luhmann, N. (1991), Soziologie des Risikos, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.