OBJECTIVES/SCOPE: The paper discusses the underlying structures driving the management of risk in different safety cultures as described by the Hudson Safety Culture Ladder. The paper links different causal models employed by organisations to the stages in the ladder and uses a case study to illustrate the fundamental concepts. 

METHODS PROCEDURES, PROCESS: The management of risk within organisations is driven by the underlying causal models that the organisation’s management uses to make sense of how the world works. The paper considers management actions and activities in the light of this. Taking these insights, the paper then maps the concepts onto the safety culture ladder descriptions as contained in the Hearts and Minds Understanding Your Culture framework.
The paper then extends the concepts into novel dimensions to demonstrate the applicability of the findings and methods. 

RESULTS, OBSERVATIONS, CONCLUSIONS: The Hudson Safety Culture Ladder describes four levels of safety culture. Each of these cultures are shown to be the observation of different structural approaches to the risks that the culture is exposed to. These approaches are linked to the breadth and complexity of the risk spaces the organisations operate in.
This means that organisations can tailor their cultures to the operational reality they operate in. This enables efficient allocation of resources.
A simple narrow risk space only requires a culture to be Reactive, using an Unstructured approach to failures to fix problems as they arise.
A broader complicated risk space requires a culture to be Calculative, taking a Structured approach to ensure that learnings from failures are applied across the entire organisation
Complex risk spaces require a Proactive culture that is not only Structured, but also sensitive to the operational context.
A highly dynamic complex risk space requires a Generative culture that is Structured, Operationally Context sensitive, and Internally Context sensitive.
The paper uses these concepts in a case study with a world class aviation engine MRO to help illustrate.
The safety culture of an organisation is not a monolith, but should be considered in the context of the risk spaces it operates in. The concepts in this paper can help fine tune cultural understanding and improvement activities.