Safety professionals are translators between systems: external ones that consist of regulators, public expectations, corporate leadership and the internal one with its operators, front-line realities, and practical constraints.

Organisations maintain their sense of stability by filtering and stabilising communication. What lies at the boundary is the gap between how the environment perceives things and how the organisation understands itself.

Organisations often react defensively to boundary actors who bring in uncomfortable insights from the outside. Even when they claim to value learning, their immunological systems resist anything that threatens internal coherence. When safety professionals raise issues that challenge the organisation’s assumptions (“we are safe,” “our systems work”), they risk being seen as troublemakers rather than protectors.

Officially, organisations encourage open communication and learning from experience. But in practice, those at the boundaries are often subtly discouraged from sharing inconvenient truths; precisely because their input threatens the established narrative. Safety professionals are told to “speak up,” yet when they do, their messages can be sanitised, delayed, or ignored.

Luhmann proposed creating structures that allow people to ask strange questions without fear; a climate where tentative, informal communication can test the receptive temperature before information becomes official. For safety professionals, this suggests that effective boundary management depends on the freedom to ask those “strange questions” and to share tentative observations without triggering defensiveness or punishment.

Ref.

Luhmann, N. (1976). Funktionen und Folgen formaler Organisation. Dritte Auflage. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot.