Managing Safety in Complexity: Making 'Working Safely' Possible Between Systems That Speak Different Codes

by Martijn Flinterman

Why do well-intentioned safety programs sometimes miss the mark? Why do accidents still occur, even when procedures are followed? And why do organisations often struggle to learn from failure?

This thought-provoking book introduces the groundbreaking insights of sociologist Niklas Luhmann to the field of Health, Safety, and Environment (HSE) management. Instead of focusing only on checklists, compliance, or behavior-based safety, it invites readers to consider how risk and safety are influenced by communication, meaning-making, and social structures.

Written for HSE professionals, safety leaders, risk managers, and reflective practitioners in general, this is not a typical 'how-to manage safety' manual. It is a fresh sociological perspective for understanding complexity, uncertainty, and adaptation in high-risk environments. Drawing on systems theory, organisational sociology, and real-world experience, the book opens up new ways of thinking about familiar challenges.

Whether you're curious about systems thinking or looking to enrich your approach to risk and safety, this first volume in the Risk + Safety / Sociology series offers insight, challenge, and space to rethink what it means to manage safety in complexity.

159 pages, Paperback

Published September 16, 2025

Reviews

[Emanuele Gemelli · Rating 5 out of 5]

Book recommended to me by Alessandro Baseggio of Safety Differently Italy (if you are an Italian safety professional, you should definitively give his site a look); Flintermann, a sociologist working on the safety field, introduced his view of the work of Nikolas Luhmann on complex systems, and complexity in general, applied to the field of safety. The book is very well structured and written, providing cases and examples, where the ideas of the German sociologist are explained in a understandable way (Luhmann wrote prevalently in German and not in an easy way, as well. It reminds me Buber…). For me, what it stands out is the concept of how the various stakeholders use their own codes to interpret complex reality. In a complex system, those codes allow people to simplify untreatable systems. In the world of safety, above all when considering the new(est) safety paradigms of the 21st century’s second decade (I had dubbed this “Social Safety Science” in a workshop with Sidney Dekker, Robert J. de Boer, Alessandro Baseggio and plenty others), this is a very useful concept and reminder that, if us, safety professionals, want to pursue new ways to approach safety, we need to be quite aware that the code used by all the stakeholders may be different; therefore it become exceptionally important we take that into consideration, when we try to push for those changes. It might be well that a degree of what Sidney Dekker has called “Safety Theater” (or similarly “Safety Work” defined by Rae and Provan) will be still necessary for a while, until those codes will change, if they ever will..