In high reliability organizations, a chain of even the smallest errors can have significant implications. For this reason, these organisations consistently design their processes in such ways that errors are identified early and either quickly amended or actually prevented. This places high demands on technology, organisation, and personnel.
Humans still represent one of the most significant risk factors in those organizations. For this reason, we looked for the specific competencies that make people in security-sensitive environments able to act reliably. Extensive research combined with our special expertise led us to five competencies, the 'Safe Five':
• Situation awareness: maintain an overview and be ready to act at all times
• Conformity to rules: act following guidelines/plans
• Critical attitude: high degree of self-reflection in order not to overlook errors
• Readiness to take a stand: be actively involved to point out dangerous system states
• Capability in an emergency: take targeted action in unfamiliar contexts


Safe Five can be used in a variety of organisations with high security requirements, such as security, protection, and rescue organisations, health organisations, transportation services and traffic control systems, nuclear power plants or the chemical industry.
This model has proven highly effective in personnel selection in practice. Besides, we were able to confirm its effectiveness in the development of the qualification criteria for ship captains and nuclear reactor operators.