The Safety Anarchist: Relying on human expertise and innovation, reducing bureaucracy and compliance

by Sidney Dekker

Work has never been as safe as it seems today. Safety has also never been as bureaucratized as it is today. Over the past two decades, the number of safety rules and statutes has exploded, and organizations themselves are creating ever more internal compliance requirements. At the same time, progress on safety has slowed to a crawl. Many incident- and injury rates have flatlined. Worse, excellent safety performance on low-consequence events tends to increase the risk of fatalities and disasters. Bureaucracy and compliance now seem less about managing the safety of the workers we are responsible for, and more about managing the liability of the people they work for. We make workers do a lot that does nothing to improve their success locally. Paradoxically, such tightening of safety bureaucracy robs us of exactly the source of human insight, creativity and resilience that can tell us how success is actually created, and where the next accident may well happen.



It is time for Safety people who trust people more than process, who rely on horizontally coordinating experiences and innovations, who push back against petty rules and coercive compliance, and who help recover the dignity and expertise of human work.

Genres: Management, Business, Audiobook

241 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 19, 2017

About the author

Sidney W. A. Dekker (born 1969, "near Amsterdam"),is a Professor at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, where he founded the Safety Science Innovation Lab. He is also Honorary Professor of Psychology at the University of Queensland.

Previously, Dekker was Professor of human factors and system safety at Lund University in Sweden,where he founded the Leonardo da Vinci Laboratory for Complexity and Systems Thinking, and flew as First Officer on Boeing 737s for Sterling and later Cimber Airlines out of Copenhagen. Dekker is a high-profile scholar and is known for his work in the fields of human factors and safety.

Reviews

[rixx · Rating 1 out of 5]

You’d think that this book would be catnip for me: The premise (compliance and security theatre has grown way too much, rules like that are good at preventing some accidents but not others, give people some agency and watch how they’ll make much better decisions!) is solid, after all. You’d think.

I ended up not finishing this book, because I have limited time on this planet and don’t need to spend it being angry at this guy’s tone. It’s just so know-it-all, talking down to the presumably stupid reader (Chapter 5 is just explaining Goodheart’s Law. Chapter 9 out of 10 is “lays out the difference between anarchy and anarchism”), and so extremely impressed with itself.

Chapter 2 is about "who has the right to rule / make these rules". Chapter 1 opens "this is not a political book". Angery noises.

[Emanuele Gemelli · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not the strongest of Sidney Dekker’s book. This book fits into his series about the effects of neo liberalism on the conditions of the workers from a safety perspective; on this respect this book is very political, in the highest meaning of this word can reach. It’s a political decision to set policy and cascade them, it’s a political decision to allow companies to outsource to places with lower and lower standards, where the people at the sharp end have less and less power to really negotiate safer working conditions. It’s a political decision to shift the responsibility of safe execution to the people with less actual power; in a sense, the current system is already decentralizing something: the blame

[Vesa Linja-Aho · Rating 5 out of 5]

Positively different safety management book from one of the top experts on the subject in the world.

In some organizations, the safety management has become too bureaucratic and – in some cases even something which can be called religious (and ridiculous). The workers usually know best how the job is done and their expertise should be respected.

[Selena Scola · Rating 5 out of 5]

If one studies compliance or if one is interested in emerging technologies, one may enjoy this book.

[Philip · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wish the whole book had been more like the last two chapters with focus on solutions and what you can practically do to change the system.

[Robbie Walsh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Decent but some of the examples were recycled from previous books

[Nishant · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dekker is persuasive in arguing in favor of relying on human expertise and innovation while reducing bureaucracy and compliance. In doing the former, the empowerment of frontline workers to act and adapt is crucial for improving safety outcomes. Particularly in the context of road safety, Dekker effectively highlights the importance of acknowledging the inherent fallibility of humans and the necessity for systems that accommodate human error.

Many of us are aware of these principles, yet the current institutional arrangements and the fear of disrupting the status quo pose challenges to advancing a decentralized governance of transport safety.