safety i

We dive into the final chapters of the book and analyze Hollnagel’s intent and offer our commentary on his ideas. Though our ideas don’t necessarily jibe with all of Hollnagel’s, we appreciate our time dissecting this seminal book. 

Tune in to hear our thoughts on the final four chapters. Make sure to let us know if you also read the book and your thoughts on the content.

We hope you enjoyed our little end-of-year deep-dive. Have a happy and healthy New Year!

Topics:

• A recap of the chapters we’ve covered thus far.
• Chapter 6
• Dealing with complexity,
• The role of resilience.
• Chapter 7
• Correct and incorrect functions.
• Determining the cause of accidents in complex systems.
• The faulty definition of Safety II.
• The purpose of Safety II.
• Chapter 8
• Recognizing, monitoring, and controlling performance variability. 
• Why Hollnagel criticizes Safety I.
• Methods and techniques.
• Chapter 9
• Hollnagel’s predictions about the creation of Safety III.
• Practical takeaways from the book.

Quotes:

“So you think of Safety I just as it protects against lots of specific things, but it doesn’t protect against generic things that we haven’t specifically protected against.”

“The fact is...we can make some fairly reliable and valid conclusions about what happened leading up to something going wrong.”

“I think all theorists we should take seriously and not literally.”

Resources:

Safety I and Safety II: The Past and Future of Safety Management

Feedback@safetyofwork.com

Picking up where we left off, we begin our discussion with chapter three. Over the course of this episode, we talk about Hollnagel’s definition of Safety I, the myths of safety, and causality (among other things). Tune in for part two of our in-depth look at this important book.

Topics:

Chapter 3.

• Habituation.
• Preoccupation with failure.
• Work as imagined vs. work as actually performed.
• A definition of Safety I.

Chapter 4.

• The four myths of Safety I.
• Causality.
• Misinterpreting Heinrich.
• Human error.

Chapter 5.

• Deconstruction.
• Linear and non-linear systems.
• Cause and effect.
• General takeaways from chapters 3-5.

Quotes:

“...I think this one particular idea of work as imagined/work as done has been thought about a lot in the time since this book was published…”

“What is this measure of successful work? What is this way that we would categorize something as successful, if it’s not, not having accidents?”

“It’s a misinterpretation of Heinrich to apply the ratios.”

“And that sort of criticism of the old to explain the new, I think is never as firm a foundation as clearly explaining what you’re sort of underlying ideas and principles are and then building on top of them.”

Resources:

Safety I and Safety II: The Past and Future of Safety Management

Feedback@safetyofwork.com

For this episode, we are breaking away from the standard formula for this show. We thought it best to split this topic into three episodes, as we don’t want to oversimplify our breakdown of this seminal, two-hundred page book. 

We encourage all of our listeners to follow along and read the book with us. Join us as we dig into this influential book by Erik Hollnagel.

Topics:

• Interpretations of new theories.
• Hollnagel being the direct intellectual descendant of Professor Rasmussen.
• Chapter 1: The Issues.
• The denominator problem.
• The regulator paradox.
• The problems with defining safety.
• Overall thoughts on Chapter 1.
• What to skim and what to read closely.

Quotes:

“Most theories are billed as critiques of other theories. So, any new theory implicitly, and usually, explicitly criticizes a lot of existing stuff. And it’s important to separate those two things out.”

“He says that success and failure are not opposites.”

“It means that every single data point, then, has a lot of uncertainty attached around to it, because they’re such isolated examples, such extraordinary events…”

Resources:

Safety I and Safety II: The Past and Future of Safety Management

Feedback@safetyofwork.com