Do Safety Differently

by Sidney Dekker, Todd E Conklin

Doing Safety Differently

“It takes a long time to turn around an aircraft carrier.”

It is hard to change almost a lifetime of your organization’s thinking about safety in the traditional way and it is really difficult to change your organization’s history of bureaucracy that continues to reinforce the traditional safety definitions and metrics our organizations have used for many years. Let’s face it, change even for the better is hard to do. The answer for why this change takes so long can be found in the difficulty of making big changes to our organizations, organizations don’t want to change, organizations want to stay the same even if the same is no longer effective.

Over the last several years a new way to think about the safety of work has found its way into many organizations around the world. This new way to think about safety is leading to some important improvements in how work is being done and every organization wants to improve their safety performance. This new way to think about safety is exciting and effective and organizations have great desire and motivation to improve safety performance.

All the components for a big change are in place and ready, so why is this change to this new way of thinking not happening at lightning speed in organizations everywhere? Change even for the better is hard to do and organizations seem to want to be told what they should actually do to create this successful change?

These are the questions that the book Doing Safety Differently strives to answer.

What are the chances Sidney Dekker and Todd Conklin would collaborate on a new book? The chances are 100%. These two authors, scholars, practitioners, and organizational members have combined their time and skill in addressing six topic areas that are vital to successful safety change.

Here is what Doing Safety Differently
Doing Safety Differently is a discussion between two friends on what they have learned by watching organizations around the world change the way they do work. Doing Safety differently is an applied discussion, a practical discussion, that will cause the reader to think about the strategies and tactics they will need to ensure the best possible scenario for successful Doing Safety Differently .

209 pages, Paperback

Published February 6, 2022

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

[Nick Sampson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some really interesting and engaging points.

I don't take everything they say at face value though. At one point they seem to be arguing that the swiss cheese mental model (layers of protection) is outdated for some reason (couldn't discern why exactly) and then later seem to be making a strong case FOR it when they argue that 'root cause' can be a very misleading term because things happen for very complex reasons. They also don't seem to address the fact that contractors are different than permanent employees, and you can't realistically treat hundreds of strangers as if they are thoughtful, caring people--some of them aren't!

However, some small criticisms aside, I liked a ton of what they were saying. The point that we can't just immediately blame short-cuts and work-arounds for safety incidents considering that EVERYONE does short-cuts and work-arounds constantly was a good point that challenged me and will have me re-thinking some of my own positions, among many others.

[Camal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Do Safety Differently not only redefines safety as a capacity rather than the absence of errors but also emphasizes autonomy, echoing themes from Pink's Drive. Nevertheless, the book's structure can occasionally be perplexing, with intriguing questions losing their way in rephrasing.

Still, "Do Safety Differently" earns a solid 4-star rating due to its transformative potential. I'm excited to experiment with these concepts in the real world. Safety has never looked this innovative!

[Emanuele Gemelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read plenty of books of both authors so this does not provide that much more insight; however is a fun read for me, at least. I am actually preparing an upcoming workshop on Safety II (or Safety Differently) implementation and I am supposed to prepare a list of resources for “ambassadors teams” to read in preparation to it. This book is simple enough to understand for a non specialist, but maybe it’s to be considered an intro if one want to delve into the matter more.

[Julie Barbosa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book! It gives concrete information to communicate why it's important to look at your compliance processes. Let those closest to the work design the improvements.

[Molly Field · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lots of interesting topics and suggestions/perspectives I found insightful but the typos throughout and formatting was distracting

[Meghan Lyons]

Read this book as part of a corporate safety revamp. The concepts in the book are solid, but there was a ton of repetition. The formatting was also a bit distracting.

[matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good read for safety professional

Good read for safety professional on how to bring learning teams or convince leadership to change. Definitely recommend reading this book.