Erik Hollnagel: 7 books

Accident investigation and risk assessment have for decades focused on the human factor, particularly 'human error'. Countless books and papers have been written about how to identify, classify, eliminate, prevent and compensate for it. This bias towards the study of performance failures, leads to...

Resilience engineering has consistently argued that safety is more than the absence of failures. Since the first book was published in 2006, several book chapters and papers have demonstrated the advantage in going behind 'human error' and beyond the failure concept, just as a number of serious accidents...

Preparation and Restoration is the second volume of Resilience Engineering Perspectives within the Ashgate Studies in Resilience Engineering series. In four sections, it broadens participation of the field to include policy and organization studies, and articulates aspects of resilience beyond initial...

Safety-I is defined as the freedom from unacceptable harm. The purpose of traditional safety management is therefore to find ways to ensure this ‘freedom’. But as socio-technical systems steadily have become larger and less tractable, this has become harder to do. Resilience engineering pointed...

Safety has traditionally been defined as a condition where the number of adverse outcomes was as low as possible (Safety-I). From a Safety-I perspective, the purpose of safety management is to make sure that the number of accidents and incidents is kept as low as possible, or as low as is reasonably...

Accidents are preventable, but only if they are correctly described and understood. Since the mid-1980s accidents have come to be seen as the consequence of complex interactions rather than simple threads of causes and effects. Yet progress in accident models has not been matched by advances in methods....

Health care is everywhere under tremendous pressure with regard to efficiency, safety, and economic viability - to say nothing of having to meet various political agendas - and has responded by eagerly adopting techniques that have been useful in other industries, such as quality management, lean...