1st Edition
From Safety to Safely Principles and Practice of Systemic Potentials Management
Foreword by Sidney Dekker, Foreword by Andrew Sharman, Part I: The safety legacy, Part II: The complexity conundrum, Part III: The futility of accident investigation, Part IV: Systemic potentials management, Part V: Coda: connecting the dots
Biography
Erik Hollnagel is Scientific Director at the Institute of Resilient Systems+, Seoul, South Korea; Visiting Professorial Fellow, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at Macquarie University, Australia; Visiting Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study at the Technische Universitat München, Germany; and Professor Emeritus at universities in Sweden, France, and Denmark. His work focuses on unified system change and management. Erik is the author of more than 500 publications including articles from recognised journals, conference papers, and reports as well as 28 books, and he is still struggling to make sense of the blooming, buzzing confusion.
"Even deeply-read safety scholars will profitably immerse themselves in this latest book from Professor Hollnagel. Not just scholarly readers, too. Everyone – researchers, business people, safety practitioners for example – will learn from engaging in this splendid book."
Professor Jeffrey Braithwaite, Professor and Director, Australian Institute of Health Innovation, Macquarie University, Australia
"After acronyms and atavism, Erik is now resorting to a clever grammatical twist to inspire the reformation instead. He’s deploying just one letter substitution. And taking us from noun to adverb. From safety to safely. The shift this heralds, however, is not subtle at all. In fact, it’s huge. We’ve been managing safety for its absence. Which, if you think about it (which Erik has done a lot), is not only illogical but profoundly stupid. “Managing the primary process of a system or a company well is after all what provides the basis for productivity and business, regardless of domain and type of activity,” Erik writes. Managing it safely means doing just that, and assuring that you can keep doing it – as long as you learn from what goes well, and why, and then commit to doing ever more of it. Who can disagree with that?"
Professor Sidney Dekker, Griffith University, Australia
"This new book is a profound exploration of the prevailing interpretation of safety, taking us on a captivating journey through the foundations and assumptions underpinning our approach. It's a groundbreaking work which prompts us to reconsider the very essence of safety management."
Professor Dr. Andrew Sharman, Managing Director, RMS Switzerland, Switzerland
