Most modern organizations have some safety policies and procedures, and these exists to keep us safe from harm. If life was simple, safety promotion would be a simple technical challenge, aiming for total safety would make total sense. But life isn't that simple and total safety is actually total nonsense. Unless of course we adopt a much more flexible, more intelligent positive concept of safety. If we see it as part of well-being and not just as protection from harm. You see people want to live well not just to be safe from risks and our organizations exist to promote well being. Safety only therefore makes sense if it helps us fulfill that function. Safety measures can harm us by over protecting us or by increasing one risk while reducing another. For our own good, we all need to learn how to take some risks and how to live comfortably with acceptable levels of danger. Some of us like more levels of danger than other people do. So in settings where we're catering for lots of different people, compromises are going to be needed. We need to use a social well-being lens to check whether our safety measures are good for both our personal well-being and for overall social quality. When people think of the risks that safety measures address, they tend to think of possible physical harms from accidents or long-term exposure to stresses and toxins. However, it's not just our bodies that are at risk, our minds and our relationships matter to and our bodies, our minds, and our societies need to be active. We need to be challenged in lots of ways in order to flourish over the longer term. This entails optimizing risks rather than minimizing risks. A key example of this would be footwear. You might not know this, but heels were invented originally as a safety measure to stop the boot from slipping through the stripe when you're horse riding. This style was then adapted by pedestrians even if they weren't going horse-riding, and it greatly reduce people's movement, it became a liability, a source of a multitude of postural problems. Even in the modern era, running shoe manufacturers have made the mistake of over protecting runners from impact and this has resulted in poor and weak feets and then poor posture. Similarly, with psychological and sociological aspects of safety, there are always going to be trade-offs. Public safety measures will help us if they gave us the confidence that we need to interact freely with our environment. But they'll hurt us in the longer run if they make us more fearful. If they make us more frustrated or disconnected from our surroundings or if the makers bored or socially isolated. We're lucky enough to live in a world that is far happier and far safer than at any period since humanity came into being. Accidents rates, communicable diseases, violence, abuse, these have all nosedived compared to all previous eras. Premature mortality is a tiny fraction of what it was. In most respects, our social environments, our physical environments, are 100s of times more trustworthy than those that our ancestors inhabitant. But we also live in a uniquely safety conscious era. The safer our lives become ironically, the more obsessed we seem to become with safety. The reduction of public fear in modern societies doesn't seem to have kept pace with the actual increases in safety. So in modern societies we tend to be disproportionately scared of the many things that are of minimal threat to us. Ironically, precautionary measures designed to make us safer also make us more vulnerable to fear. So the resulting therapy culture may actually make us weaker in the long run. So if we don't fully appreciate and celebrate the freedoms that safety gives us, we won't becomes intelligent users of positive safety.