Safety Differently 2nd Edition

Its time to end the notion of safety and move on to resilience.

One to have on the shelf, a little hard to read but contains some gems.

This is an important book about the current state of safety science. It's dense, but highly rewarding. Thoughtful. Provocative. Not for the general reader, but I predict will become required reading for any senior safety professional and advanced university courses.Dekker places safety science fully into context, and brings together several strands of theory into a troubling conclusion that safety rates are leveling off, and that what got us here will not move safety forward much more. He illustrates our place in the broad philosophy of science, and then illustrates progress (or not) with relevant recent examples. Not all will agree with his conclusions, but to disagree with them forces us to think about safety at a deep level and answer fundamental questions. Covers complicated vs. complex systems, procedural drift, normal accidents, violations, zero accident goals, myth-making, error, high reliability organizations, resilience, and an outstanding discussion of situational awareness as the modern meaningless name for human error.Real pluses include up to date examples (such as the Asiana B777 SFO crash), fully referenced, fully indexed, and a well-structured layout with each chapter starting with key points and ending with review questions. The book is not for the general reader, and for a full appreciation really requires a prior understanding of previous seminal ideas from authors such as Reason, Perrow, Wundt, Descartes and Kuhn. It will make a perfect book for a university capstone course on safety science that pulls together important concepts and tries to look forward to where the next advances will come from. Certainly the most interesting book I've read this year. I hope this review was useful to you.

Sydney Dekker is one of the preeminent names in the patient safety literature and one of very few that the serious student needs to read all of their works (James Reason also makes the short list). This book is actually an update of Ten Questions About Human Error: A New View of Human Factors and System Safety, arguably one of his finer works. I'm not sure you need to read this if you read the first edition, but if you're interested in patient safety and haven't read it, this is recommended without reservations. It is well-organized, articulate, and concisely written. The study questions at the end of each chapter are provocative and helpful. If you're interested in patient safety, this is a must read.

Sidney Dekker is a longtime leader and lecturer in safety and human factors. This book presents the history of human factors and safety, along with his ideas about how human factors should figure into safety and related topics. He wants to see safety treated as an ethical commitment and responsibility to and for the people who take on dangerous work, rather than a bit of bureaucratic checkoff. He wants industry and the rest of us to see humans and their capabilities and deficiencies as a resource or solution, not a problem.If your interest is in accidents and accident avoidance, there are plenty of anecdotes here - plus material on how to alleviate the strains systems put on human capabilities. If you just want a textbook that covers human factors for engineers, this is an uncommonly interesting one.You can tell it is a textbook because some of the language is on the academic side, and because each section ends with study questions. BUT these questions are genuinely thought-provoking, which is a rarity in textbooks.Recommended for those who can deal with interesting material in an academic format. Not recommended for those looking for sensationalism and the creepy thrills that can come from reading about doomed airliners and their doomed crew and passengers.

This 2nd edition explodes all of Sidney Dekker's ideas about how to understand human error, in light of aviation accident and incident investigation. Perhaps of greatest importance is his insistence that any future advancement in system safety must recognize the difference between human error and human consequence. Whether you're a student or instructor, Sidney lays out his ideas as if you're in his classroom. Having listened to Sidney speak at breakout sessions at conferences, his winning way of enthusiastically delivering material is captured in the structure and fabric of this wonderful text. I intend on using this book in my human factors course at the University of Oklahoma.