• Engineering a Safer World: Systems Thinking Applied to Safety 📚
• by Nancy G. Leveson
• Read: Dec 29, 2023

I was very torn reading this book as it is a lot more slow going than I expected. A lot of the discussions felt very drawn out and like they could’ve been explained with a lot fewer words. That being said especially the early chapters are rich with rethinking incidents and approaches to safety. There’s a lot of good discussion about viewing our complex systems through the lens of systems engineering and getting away from single cause sequential accident models and stopping at human error to declare an incident “solved”. A lot of the book also talks about hazard analysis and setting up process to have analysis be part of designing and maintaining systems. I don’t generally work in safety critical systems on the level of aerospace and chemical plants (anymore). So this part was less interesting to me and I had a bit of hard time getting through it.

Overall I got a lot of interesting inspiration from the book though. And even though I was already familiar with the ideas of emergent behaviour, non-sequential accident models, and learning from complex socio-technical systems, there was still a lot of angles that spurred my interest to go deeper on. And the bibliography of the book to me was a rich source of things I want to read next.