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Drift into Failure
- Narrated by: Sidney Dekker
- Length: 7 hrs and 49 mins
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Do Safety Differently
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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. 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.
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Great book
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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.
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ramblings
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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.
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This has made me think in a completely different way
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A just culture is a culture of trust, learning, and accountability. This third edition 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. 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.
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This audiobook is a practical guide that shows how leaders can build psychological safety in their organizations, creating an environment where employees feel included, fully engaged, and encouraged to contribute their best efforts and ideas. Perhaps, the leader’s most challenging task is to increase intellectual friction while decreasing social friction.
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Great insights but missing parts
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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. 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.
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- Narrated by: Jay Allen, Sidney Dekker, Todd Conklin
- Length: 5 hrs and 6 mins
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
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. 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.
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Great book
- By Mark on 28-05-2022
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The Safety Anarchist
- Relying on Human Expertise and Innovation, Reducing Bureaucracy and Compliance
- By: Sidney Dekker
- Narrated by: Sidney Dekker
- Length: 7 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
ramblings
- By JONATHAN WORKMAN on 07-02-2021
-
The Field Guide to Understanding 'Human Error'
- By: Sidney Dekker
- Narrated by: Sidney Dekker
- Length: 3 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
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.
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This has made me think in a completely different way
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- By: Sidney Dekker
- Narrated by: Sidney Dekker
- Length: 5 hrs and 45 mins
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
A just culture is a culture of trust, learning, and accountability. This third edition 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. 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.
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Just culture delivers
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- Length: 4 hrs and 51 mins
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
This audiobook is a practical guide that shows how leaders can build psychological safety in their organizations, creating an environment where employees feel included, fully engaged, and encouraged to contribute their best efforts and ideas. Perhaps, the leader’s most challenging task is to increase intellectual friction while decreasing social friction.
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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. 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.
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Publisher's 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.
Critic Reviews
"Dekker is a specialist in things going wrong. He is the world's leading thinker on airline safety. He is concerned about drift into failure in hospitals, on oil drilling platforms, in financial services, on NASA missions. But my hope that the book would somehow be about the human condition in a more intimate way was not disappointed." (Australian Library Review)
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Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- MICHAEL COLLINS
- 28-03-2023
Must read for novice and experienced systems thinkers
Great insights in to what contributes to failures small and large in organisations and how understanding complexity and systems gives you the context to influence better outcomes. Real world examples to illustrate how small nudges in the wrong direction can lead to catastrophic outcomes. Halfway through I ordered the paperback as I have a million notes to make in the margins.
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- Petina H.
- 14-08-2021
A must read for anyone trying to improve safety
Very much enjoyed looking at safety with a complexity lens. A must read for anyone who wants real insight into how systems drift towards failure. Excellent compelling stories to illustrate points. Highly recommend
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Overall

- REK
- 15-02-2020
wish I could exchange for another title
Not a good work. I agree with the 2011 review by D. R. Martz now that I have used the text myself.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Saul
- 14-08-2023
Repetitive and generally insightful
I started this book excited to learn about why complex systems fail. While there were some interesting and well-explained case studies (i.e. Alaska 261 crash), the arguments presented in this book are relentlessly repetitive such that the reader has no incentive to finish the book.
The author shrewdly develops arguments against what is framed as Newtonian-Cartesian approaches of reductionist, "down-and-in" thinking for understanding complex systems, but stops short of providing any actionable alternative. It would have been nice to see some specific recommendations of paths forward in the face of rejecting the basis of 300 years of analytical thinking.
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- Alan Bate
- 01-09-2020
Drift into vacuous boredom
First of all, Dekker is an excellent professional. The book is great. Very informative and a thought provoker.
However, he is a TERRIBLE narrator. He mumbles through some sections and I found him robotic. It was painful listening and I couldn't wait for the audiobook to end. I almost switched off a number of times. Were it not for the content I would have.
So many times I found myself having switched into a non listening vacuous state of boredom solely from listening to Dekker talk.
Summary: great writing, very informative, but very poorly narrated.
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3 people found this helpful