The DuPont Bradley Curve: How a Popular Safety Model Became a Workplace Myth- and How ICAM Breaks It Wide Open

Introduction: A Sacred Cow in Safety

For decades, the DuPont Bradley Curve has occupied a near-mythical status in workplace health and safety. It is frequently presented in boardrooms, leadership workshops, safety inductions, and consultancy slide decks as a map of cultural maturity. Organisations are told that if they move from Reactive, to Dependent, to Independent, and finally to Interdependent, safety performance will improve, injuries will decline, and “world-class safety” will emerge.

The Curve is neat. It is comforting. It tells leaders that culture can be managed, behaviours can be shaped, and safety can be engineered through the right mix of rules, training, and motivation.

And that is precisely the problem.

In the modern workplace safety space, the Bradley Curve is increasingly controversial- not because it is irrelevant, but because it is misleading. It promises causal relationships that do not exist, simplifies complexity beyond usefulness, and diverts attention away from the real mechanisms that create harm.

When examined through the lens of ICAM (Incident Cause Analysis Method), the Bradley Curve does not merely look incomplete- it is exposed as a mythological narrative that obscures systemic risk, reinforces blame-adjacent thinking, and offers organisations a false sense of control.

What the Bradley Curve Claims to Explain

The DuPont Bradley Curve presents safety culture as a linear maturity model with four stages:

1. Reactive – Safety is addressed after people get hurt. Accidents are seen as inevitable.

2. Dependent – Safety is rule-based. Compliance is enforced through supervision and discipline.

3. Independent – Individuals take personal responsibility for safety.

4. Interdependent – Teams care for one another and collectively manage safety.

The implied messages are powerful:

• Culture progresses in a predictable sequence

• Behaviour change drives safety performance

• Fewer injuries indicate cultural maturity

• “Interdependence” is the pinnacle of safety excellence

On the surface, this sounds reasonable. The Curve borrows language from psychology, organisational development, and human motivation. It offers leaders a roadmap and safety professionals a framework.

But ICAM asks a different question entirely:

Where, in this model, are hazards designed, risks introduced, decisions constrained, and controls degraded?

The answer is confronting: nowhere.

Why the Bradley Curve Became So Popular

The Bradley Curve succeeded not because it was scientifically robust, but because it was organisationally convenient.

1. It Appeals to Leadership Psychology

Leaders like models that:

• Show progress

• Are easy to explain

• Suggest controllability

• Align with performance metrics

The Curve provides a story of improvement without demanding deep systemic change.

2. It Fits Behaviour-Based Safety (BBS)

The Curve reinforces the idea that:

• Unsafe acts cause incidents

• Behaviour modification prevents harm

• Culture can be shaped by observation and feedback

This aligns neatly with traditional safety programs, observation cards, and injury metrics.

3. It Offers a Moral Narrative

Organisations can label themselves:

• “We’re not reactive anymore”

• “Our people take responsibility”

• “We’re interdependent”

This creates identity, not necessarily safety.

4. It Avoids Design Accountability

Most importantly, the Curve allows organisations to talk about people instead of:

• Poor system design

• Production pressure

• Conflicting goals

• Inadequate controls

• Weak leadership decisions

ICAM exists precisely to confront these uncomfortable truths.

The Core Myth: Culture Causes Safety Performance

At the heart of the Bradley Curve is a deeply flawed assumption:

If we improve safety culture, safety outcomes will follow.

ICAM exposes this as reverse causality.

Culture Does Not Create Safety

In ICAM, culture is not a cause. It is an emergent property of:

• Organisational decisions

• Work design

• Resource allocation

• Leadership priorities

• Control effectiveness

People do not behave safely because culture is good. People behave as the system allows, demands, and constrains.

When organisations focus on culture without fixing systems, they are treating smoke instead of fire.

How ICAM Reframes the Question Entirely

ICAM does not ask:

“What stage of safety culture are we at?”

ICAM asks:

“What conditions existed that made this outcome possible?”

Its four causal levels fundamentally undermine the Bradley Curve’s worldview:

1. Absent or Failed Defences

2. Individual / Team Actions

3. Task and Environmental Conditions

4. Organisational Factors

The Bradley Curve fixates almost entirely on Level 2- individual behaviour- while largely ignoring the other three.

This is not an oversight. It is a structural flaw.

Behaviour Is Not the Problem- It Is the Symptom

One of ICAM’s most powerful contributions is its explicit rejection of behavioural causation as a root cause.

Under ICAM:

• Behaviour is contextually rational

• Actions make sense to the person at the time

• Deviations often indicate system strain, not recklessness

The Bradley Curve, by contrast:

• Moralises behaviour (“taking responsibility”)

• Encourages peer monitoring (“being your brother’s keeper”)

• Frames injury as a failure of commitment

This leads to:

• Blame displacement

• Under-reporting

• Superficial fixes

• Cultural theatre

ICAM breaks this illusion by showing that people adapt to flawed systems to get work done.

The Linear Progression Fallacy

The Bradley Curve assumes organisations move forward through stages.

ICAM shows reality is:

• Non-linear

• Dynamic

• Context-dependent

• Variable across departments and tasks

An organisation can:

• Be “interdependent” in safety meetings

• Be brutally reactive during production surges

• Have world-class procedures and broken equipment

• Celebrate zero injuries while narrowly avoiding catastrophe

ICAM investigations repeatedly reveal:

The same organisation exhibits multiple “cultures” depending on where, when, and under what pressure work occurs.

The Curve cannot account for this. ICAM explains it.

Injury Rates Are Not Proof of Safety

The Bradley Curve implicitly ties maturity to declining injury statistics.

ICAM exposes why this is dangerously misleading.

Low injury rates often coexist with:

• High hazard exposure

• Control degradation

• Normalised deviance

• Latent system failures

ICAM distinguishes between:

• Outcome absence (no injury occurred)

• Risk presence (serious harm was entirely possible)

The Bradley Curve celebrates outcomes. ICAM investigates potential.

This is why organisations sitting proudly at the “interdependent” end of the Curve still experience:

• Fatalities

• Catastrophic process failures

• Royal Commissions

• Public inquiries

The Ethical Problem: Blame Without Saying “Blame”

The Bradley Curve rarely uses the word blame. But its logic quietly enforces it.

When safety depends on:

• Personal responsibility

• Peer accountability

• Cultural maturity

Then incidents imply:

• Someone didn’t care enough

• Someone wasn’t committed

• Someone failed the culture

ICAM explicitly removes this moral framing.

Instead, it asks:

• What made this action reasonable?

• What information was available?

• What pressures existed?

• What controls failed silently?

This shift is not semantic. It is ethical.

Leadership Comfort vs Organisational Learning

The Bradley Curve is popular because it is comfortable for leaders.

ICAM is uncomfortable because it:

• Exposes leadership trade-offs

• Reveals resource decisions

• Highlights goal conflicts

• Surfaces tolerated risk

The Curve allows leaders to say:

“We just need to get people to care more.”

ICAM forces leaders to ask:

“What did we design, allow, or prioritise that made this inevitable?”

Only one of these produces learning.

Why ICAM “Breaks the Curve Wide Open”

ICAM does not simply offer an alternative model. It invalidates the premise of the Bradley Curve by demonstrating that:

• Culture does not precede safety- systems do

• Behaviour is not causal- context is

• Maturity is not linear- risk is dynamic

• Injuries are not indicators- defences are

• Care is not enough- design matters

When organisations adopt ICAM seriously, they often discover that:

• Their “interdependent culture” coexists with fragile controls

• Their “personal responsibility” rhetoric hides system failure

• Their “zero harm” narrative suppresses reporting

• Their “world-class safety” is statistically lucky

This is not an attack on intention. It is a correction of understanding.

Moving Beyond Safety Myths

The Bradley Curve is not evil. But it is outdated, incomplete, and often harmful when taken literally.

ICAM represents a shift from:

• Culture to conditions

• Blame to learning

• Behaviour to systems

• Outcomes to defences

The future of workplace safety does not lie in:

• Chasing cultural stages

• Policing behaviour

• Worshipping injury metrics

It lies in:

• Designing safer systems

• Understanding work as done

• Learning from weak signals

• Holding organisations accountable for risk creation

The Bradley Curve tells a good story. ICAM tells the truth.

And in modern safety, truth is what prevents harm.