The Safety Anarchist

After having read Dekker’s Field Guide to Understanding Human Error many years ago I had been loosely following his work through recorded talks and lectures, as well as papers. And since I’ve been thinking more about organizational safety and reading books about it lately, I was curious about some more recent writing by him.

The book touches on some topics from the aforementioned paper, but expands on it a lot. A big focus point is the modeling of safety culture after “authoritarian high modernism” similar to the discussion in James C. Scott’s book “Seeing Like a State:

Authoritarian high modernism believes that every aspect of our lives and work can be improved with rational planning, with better techniques and more science. - p. 35

From there the modeling of all safety culture to follow a standard, be controlled centrally and synoptically legible (i.e. loose all nuance and detail to become “understandable” on the highest level of control) leads to an eroding of safety in favour of compliance and authority.

A suggested path more towards the localized understanding and handling of safety is to take some pages out of the book of anarchism (very distinct from anarchy which the book goes into a lot of detail about). In anarchism as an idea the fostering of communities over centralized control and imposed standards and the organization of communities on a voluntary, cooperative, horizontal basis. Which reminded me a lot - unsurprisingly - of themes in David Woods’ paper “The Strategic Agility Gap”.

Overall a very interesting book and definitely recommended if you work at all with an organizational safety setup.