Sidney Dekker

In this book, Sidney Dekker calls for a different view of safety thinking. Instead of treating people as problems to be solved or focusing on how things go wrong, we need to harness people’s creativity and resilience and focus on how things go right. My favourite sections dealt with the implications of automation or driverless cars — automation is not just about replacing humans with computers. Automation creates new ways of working for the humans and changes what they do. This is a much more “academic” book than The Field Guide to Understanding ‘Human Error’, which is more accessible to a general audience, and consequently it took me over a year to finish Safety Differently. I already want to read it again to reinforce what I’ve learned. This is definitely more of a book for the hardcore safety nerd.… (meer)

There’s a reason that “human error” is in quotation marks in the title of this book. “Human error” is only an error in hindsight; if you’re investigating an accident, you have the luxury of knowing the outcome and what the people involved did “wrong”. Talking about “human error” comes from an assumption that a system is inherently safe and that it’s pesky humans that make it unsafe with their not following procedures and losing situational awareness and becoming complacent (whatever THAT means). But this is not how reality works. People don’t show up at work intending to have an accident. They work in messy, complicated systems, sometimes with workarounds to get the job done.

So human error, blaming, and finding what went wrong is the “old view” of safety. In this book, Sidney Dekker explains the “new view” of safety, one that has as its basis the idea that people don’t come to work to do a bad job, that we need to see the accident scenario from the point of view of the participants (who did not know how their day was going to turn out), to figure out why they did what they did, and to examine the operating context in which they are working. Not only that, but also examining how resilient a system is: after all, things go right more often than they go wrong. What makes a system resilient, and can you use that information to prevent future accidents? Dekker explains these concepts clearly and with humour, and draws on actual accident investigation reports to illustrate his points.

The only reason this isn’t a full five stars is that I found some of the formatting weird (why were some passages made to look like block quotes if they weren’t direct quotes from another publication?). But the content is what really matters here, and it’s very well done. Endnotes at the end of each chapter, and the whole last chapter is a list of further reading, with explanations of why they are useful books to read—I love when authors do that with a “further reading” list.

Recommended if you are interested in accident investigation, safety, or why people do what they do.… (meer)

The book is about how punishing a single person for an unintended loss of life does not help the system (healthcare, air traffic, etc) keep similar incidents from happening again and is inappropriate because that single person is 1) part of a larger system 2) probably trying to be safe 3) also traumatized by inflicting injury unintentionally. The other main idea is that people tend to make judgements based on the outcome rather than on the situations and actions that they are actually supposed to be judging.

These two points are good and the many, many examples used to make the points are captivating, but I felt like the book spent too much time trying to convince the reader of these two points and not enough time helping the reader put in place alternative systems to actually support a more just and accountable culture at their organization. Everything in the book probably could have been edited down to an essay, perhaps a single chapter in a book about workplace culture that has other chapters drawn from edited down versions of other long winded books making 2-3 points over hundreds of pages.… (meer)