Joining those who use LLMs for book reviews - low risk and fact checkable; a new contribution from Eric Hollnagel 'From Safety to Safely' (read that again; from condition to activity)
First a human review; subjectivity, emotion, … and a question - theory into practice.
“
This book is for middle and senior managers, board members, and independent consultants…” I read these words with enthusiasm as I stumbled across Prof Hollnagel’s latest book. In typical Erik fashion, there is the attention-grabbing, play-on-words title: “from safety to safely”. So, as a scientist-practitioner, independent consultant, and applied research, it is no wonder that I was drawn to this new work.
But unfortunately, I was disappointed.
Perhaps in a sign of things to come, I found myself finishing the entire 139 pages within a short 2-hour flight.
Sections were repetitive (e.g., ‘Part II’ and Perrow’s Normal Accident Theory), distracting (e.g., historical tangents, although interesting, served little practical purpose), and unnecessarily esoteric (e.g., terms such as ‘causal consonance’ and ‘visio centum’ only decrease the book’s accessibility to a practitioner audience). Although I could appreciate the intellectualism going on here, my practitioner brain was left clutching at straws and often coming up empty-handed. Adding to my frustration were many copy-editing errors that snuck their way through quality control.
Like the black cat that signified ‘déjà vu’ in The Matrix, Prof. Hollnagel’s recycling of older content had me doing a double-take, fast-forwarding through pages, desperately searching for something new to be gleaned. I powered through a refresher drawn almost exactly from his 2004 book (“From Safety-I to Safety-II”), a chapter on ‘Systemic Potentials Management’ (which is a relabelling of ‘Resilience Potentials’ from his 2018 book: “Safety-II in Practice”), and a reimagined ‘Resilience Analysis Grid’ methodology. Even the concluding Coda chapter, which promised to “connect the dots” read more like a descriptive summary rather than a guided tour of the main argumentation and a final resounding crescendo.
At one point, I found myself disagreeing, which came at p.129, where Prof. Hollnagel drops a short paragraph, entitled ‘Is risk really necessary?’. The central argument is that ‘risk’ corresponds to a ‘Safety-I’ (now relabelled as ‘Zero Accident Vision’) approach and should be replaced with ‘chance’ or ‘possibility’. Isn’t the definition of risk management “identifying, assessing, and mitigating potential negative impacts while also seeking to identify and capitalise on potential opportunities’? Surely the framing of risk as an integration of avoiding harm with approaching opportunities makes it compatible with Safety-I AND Safety-II?
However, the book is well-researched and it did get me thinking:
Is there a helpful analogy between accident causation models and physical sciences models, whereby some models are useful and helpful at different levels of analysis (e.g., the ongoing practical utility of Newton’s laws at a macro, everyday level versus the abstract messiness of quantum theory at a micro level)?- Are accident causation models defined by two dimensions: time (retrospective focus versus prospective focus) and complexity (simplistic versus complex)? Does this help us to classify and use accident causation models more strategically?
- When we deal with complexity as human beings, should we shift from ‘knowing’ (a logical, technical approach) to ‘experiencing’ (a more intuitive, holistic approach)?
Circling back, what concerns me is the growing gap between our thought leaders and practitioners. This book makes lofty promises to improve practice: ‘investigating differently’, ‘assessing the potentials’, among many more… but as a practitioner I unfortunately gained little new insight or useful tools that go beyond what has already been articulated before. Prof Hollnagel has contributed much over his illustrious career, and I have the utmost respect for his writings and insights.
I was left wondering: can we translate safety science theory into practice more effectively? What do you think?
The opinions expressed in this review are entirely subjective and those of the author, Dr Tristan Casey. This book was reviewed with a practitioner lens as per the marketing material, but it may appeal to a more academic audience. You can find the book direct from its publisher here:
https://www.routledge.com/From-Safet...ryLT3QuLiSXLDE
Chat GPT review - focus on the practical
https://chatgpt.com/share/69061ef9-3...b-53ffd80192d3
Note embedded references, and sources list at the end.
Questions:
Ask: What enables us to succeed despite variability? What capacities are under-stress or vulnerable?
… what worked well today, why it worked, and how we can do more of it.
Ask what was supposed to happen, what actually happened, what enabled success, what prevented harm although variation occurred.
"…
experiencing safety opposed to knowing safety"
and for further comparison, the contribution from Grok
https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtMw%3D...1-2d60813e3b0a
(App or 'continue with web')
Again note sources list at the end.