Safety-II in Practice

“A truly original world-class thinker, Hollnagel’s work should be heeded by every safety and health professional. It’s hard going at times, as he profoundly challenges the traditional ways in which we understand and manage safety. But he does offer a new vision that is potentially very valuable to practitioners. In particular, Safety II could help us to revolutionise how we view accident and incident data (and the use we make of this information) and position ourselves as risk managers, not just as safety and health specialists.

This approach could also give us powerful new leverage with directors and senior leaders – by changing the agenda from how we can meet the minutiae of safety and health law to how we can best work together to ensure our organisations survive and thrive.”

Paul Smith MA CFIOSH, IOSH Magazine and former Health & Safety Executive inspector

Erik Hollnagel (Ph.D., psychology) is Professor at the Department of Regional Health Research, University of Southern Denmark and Chief Consultant at the Centre for Quality, Region of Southern Denmark. Erik is also Adjunct Professor, Central Queensland University, Australia, Visiting Professorial Fellow, Macquarie University, Australia, Visiting Fellow, Institute for Advanced Study, Technische Universität München (Germany), and Professor Emeritus at École des Mines de Paris (France) and the University of Linköping (Sweden). Since 1971 he has worked at universities, research centres, and industries in several countries and with problems from many domains, including nuclear power generation, aerospace and aviation, air traffic management, software engineering, healthcare, and land-based traffic. His professional interests include industrial safety, human factors, resilience engineering, systems theory, and functional modelling. He has published more than 350 papers and authored or edited 20 books.