Sidney Dekker has narrated 5 audiobooks on Listento.it by 1 author, with an average listener rating of 4.8★ across 29 ratings. The most-rated is The Field Guide to Understanding 'Human Error'.
The Field Guide to Understanding 'Human Error'
Summary
When faced with a human error problem, you may be tempted to ask "Why didn't these people watch out better?" Or, "How can I get my people more engaged in safety?" You might think you can solve your safety problems by telling your people to be more careful, by reprimanding the miscreants, by issuing a new rule or procedure and demanding compliance. These are all expressions of "The Bad Apple Theory" where you believe your system is basically safe if it were not for those unreliable people in it. Building on its successful predecessors, the third edition of The Field Guide to Understanding 'Human Error' will show a new way of dealing with a perceived "human error" problem in your organization. It will help you trace how your organization juggles inherent trade-offs between safety and other pressures and expectations, suggesting that you are not the custodian of an already safe system. It will encourage you to start looking more closely at the performance that others may still call "human error", allowing you to discover how your people create safety through practice, at all levels of your organization, mostly successfully, under the pressure of resource constraints and multiple conflicting goals. The Field Guide to Understanding 'Human Error' will help you understand how to move beyond "human error"; how to understand accidents; how to do better investigations; how to understand and improve your safety work. You will be invited to think creatively and differently about the safety issues you and your organization face. In each, you will find possibilities for a new language, for different concepts, and for new leverage points to influence your own thinking and practice, as well as that of your colleagues and organization. If you are faced with a human error problem, abandon the fallacy of a quick fix. Listen to this audio.
©2014 Sidney Dekker (P)2018 Sidney Dekker
Drift into Failure
Summary
What does the collapse of sub-prime lending have in common with a broken jackscrew in an airliner’s tailplane? Or the oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico with the burn-up of Space Shuttle Columbia? These were systems that drifted into failure. While pursuing success in a dynamic, complex environment with limited resources and multiple goal conflicts, a succession of small, everyday decisions eventually produced breakdowns on a massive scale. We have trouble grasping the complexity and normality that gives rise to such large events. We hunt for broken parts, fixable properties, people we can hold accountable. Our analyses of complex system breakdowns remain depressingly linear, depressingly componential - imprisoned in the space of ideas once defined by Newton and Descartes. The growth of complexity in society has outpaced our understanding of how complex systems work and fail. Our technologies have gotten ahead of our theories. We are able to build things - deep-sea oil rigs, jackscrews, collateralized debt obligations - whose properties we understand in isolation. But in competitive, regulated societies, their connections proliferate, their interactions and interdependencies multiply, their complexities mushroom. This book explores complexity theory and systems thinking to understand better how complex systems drift into failure. It studies sensitive dependence on initial conditions, unruly technology, tipping points, diversity - and finds that failure emerges opportunistically, non-randomly, from the very webs of relationships that breed success and that are supposed to protect organizations from disaster. It develops a vocabulary that allows us to harness complexity and find new ways of managing drift.
©2012 Sidney Dekker (P)2018 Sidney Dekker
Just Culture
Summary
A just culture is a culture of trust, learning, and accountability. It is particularly important when an incident has occurred or when something has gone wrong. How do you respond to the people involved? What do you do to minimize the negative impact and maximize learning? This third edition of Sidney Dekker's extremely successful Just Culture offers new material on restorative justice and ideas about why your people may be breaking rules. Supported by extensive case material, you will learn about safety reporting and honest disclosure, retributive just culture, and the criminalization of human error. Some suspect a just culture means letting people off the hook. Yet they believe they need to remain able to hold people accountable for undesirable performance. In this new edition, Dekker asks you to look at accountability in different ways. One is by asking which rule was broken, who did it, whether that behavior crossed some line, and what the appropriate consequences should be. In this retributive sense, an account is something you get people to pay or settle. But who will draw that line? And is the process fair? Other ways to approach accountability after an incident is to ask who was hurt; to ask what their needs are; and to explore whose obligation it is to meet those needs. People involved in causing the incident may well want to participate in meeting those needs. In this restorative sense, an account is something you get people to tell and others to listen to. If you learn to look at accountability in different ways, your impact on restoring trust, learning, and a sense of humanity in your organization could be enormous.
©2017 Taylor & Francis Group LLC (P)2018 Sidney Dekker
The Safety Anarchist
Summary
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. Bureaucracy and compliance now seem less about managing the safety of workers, and more about managing the liability of the people they work for. At the same time, progress on safety has slowed. Many incident and injury rates have flatlined. Worse, excellent safety performance on low-consequence events tends to increase the risk of fatalities and disasters. We make workers do a lot that does nothing to improve their success locally. And paradoxically, the 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 come from. It is time for Safety Anarchists: 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.
©2018 Sidney Dekker (P)2018 Sidney Dekker
The End of Heaven
Summary
In this deeply personal audiobook, Sidney Dekker narrates his own experiences with disaster and suffering, and in the process, he examines a largely unexplored dilemma. Our scientific age has equipped us ever better to explain why things go wrong. But this increasing sophistication actually makes it harder to explain why we suffer. Accidents and disasters have become technical problems without inherent purpose. When told of a disaster, we easily feel lost in the steely emptiness of technical languages of engineering or medicine. Or in our drive to pinpoint the source of suffering, we succumb to the hunt for a scapegoat, possibly inflicting even greater suffering on others around us. How can we satisfactorily deal with suffering when the disaster that caused it is no more than the dispassionate sum of utterly mundane, imperfect human decisions and technical failures? Broad in its historical sweep and ambition, The End of Heaven is as rich as it is moving.
©2017 Sidney Dekker (P)2017 Sidney Dekker