Decremental and Incremental Safety Cultures Safety-I and Safety-II Revisited

1. A primer of Safety-I & Safety-II. 2. The apparent ambiguity of safety. 3. The seven biases of safety thinking. 4. The Inevitability of Accidents. 5. The semantic non-sense of safety. 6.The seven stages of safety thinking. 7. Atomistic accident thinking. 8. The Complexity Delusion. 9. Safety pragmatism. 10. Safety solutionism. 11. Improving the ratio of acceptable to unacceptable outcomes. 12. Decremental safety practices. 13. Incremental safety practices. 14. The Resilient Performance Enhancement Toolkit (RPET). 

Biography

Erik Hollnagel is Professor Emeritus at the Department of Regional Health Research, University of Southern Denmark and Chief Consultant at the Centre for Quality, Region of Southern Denmark. He is also Professor Emeritus at University of Jönköping, Sweden, and Visiting Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study of the Technische Universitat München, Germany. He is a renowned expert in the fields of safety science, systems thinking, and human factors and is best known for his pioneering work on resilience engineering and the Functional Resonance Analysis Method (FRAM), a framework for understanding and improving complex systems. He has authored or co-authored over 20 books and numerous research papers.

Prof. Hollnagel has done it again!  

 

Prof. Hollnagel’s newest book, Decremental and Incremental Safety Cultures, not only will change the global safety conversation, but also will help further clarify the journey the safety community is taking over the last 25 years or so.  A not so small part of contemporary safety thinking has been understanding the struggle between making the workplace less dangerous or making the workplace more safe.  Although this description may sound like it is saying the same thing, removing risk and adding capacity are two very different ways to manage high-risk, high-consequence operations.  Decremental and Incremental Safety Cultures seeks to further explain and better define the differences organization must navigate as the world increases in complexity and uncertainty.

 

Prof. Hollnagel does’t waste the readers time in a defense of one idea being better than other. These are very different approaches to understanding and managing safety programs in an actual organization,  He does use this book to build a sense of the movement of these two ideas in their ability to further define safety at both a leadership and organizational level.  

 

Prof. Hollnagel’s timing is near-perfect. His thinking is spot on. He not only allows for the safety community to understand where the community has been, but also helps the safety community to better understand where contemporary safety thinking currently is, and the direction where contemporary safety thinking should be (and seemingly is) heading. 

 

You can’t help but notice as you read his newest thinking that he wants the reader to understand our organizaton’s must use this information to make a difference in how safety and high-risk, high-consequence operations will become safer as opposed to waiting for the next new idea to appear. Every safety program, all new safety ideas, that exists must fit in either removing harm or adding capacity.

 

Prof. Hollnagel is very clear there will be no “Safety Three” entering the discussion as some point in time. Safety is either removing risk (decremental safety) or improving conditions by making work safer (incremental safety) and there is no upcoming third way in the future to potentially use as an reason to explain an organization not getting better safety outcomes. Clearly, Hollnagel is telling us the table has been set with decremental and incremental safety thinking and it is now time for our organization’s to serve up a large helping of improvement.

 

Prof. Hollnagel has a gift for providing a clear and memorable framework for thinking about our safety and reliability efforts in organizations everywhere.

 - Dr. Todd Conklin, Author, Podcaster and Consultant, Santa Fe, NM, USA