Books by Sidney Dekker

A just culture protects people's honest mistakes from being seen as culpable. But what is an honest mistake, or rather, when is a mistake no longer honest? In this edition, the author revises, enhances and expands his view of just culture, additionally tackling the key issue of how justice is created inside of organizations.

The second edition of a bestseller, Safety Differently: Human Factors for a New Era is a complete update of Ten Questions About Human Error: A New View of Human Factors and System Safety

This latest edition of 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.

The previous edition looked critically at the answers human factors would typically provide and compared/contrasted them with current research and insights at that time. Today, the unrelenting pace of technology change and growth of complexity calls for a different kind of safety thinking. This book explains how to turn safety from a bureaucratic accountability back into an ethical responsibility for those who do our dangerous work; how to embrace the human factor not as a problem to control, but as a solution to harness.

We tend to blame and forget those professionals who cause incidents and accidents, but they are victims too. They are second victims whose experiences of an incident or adverse event can be as traumatic as that of the first victims. This book goes through what we know about trauma, guilt, forgiveness and injustice and how these might be felt by the second victim. It discusses how to conduct investigations of incidents that do not alienate second victims or make them feel even worse. It enters into a conversation on support and resilience and where the responsibilities for creating it may lie.

Explores complexity theory and systems thinking to better understand how complex systems drift into failure. This book develops a vocabulary that allows us to harness complexity and find different ways of managing drift.