It is hard to change almost a lifetime of your organization’s thinking about safety in the traditional way and it is really difficult to change your organization’s history of bureaucracy that continues to reinforce the traditional safety definitions and metrics our organizations have used for many years. Let’s face it, change even for the better is hard to do. Doing Safety Differently is a discussion between two friends on what they have learned by watching organizations around the world change the way they do work.

Time-pressed professionals looking for practical guidance to shape their current or future safety programs should use this book. Pre-Accident Investigations: An Introduction to Organizational Safety helps to identify complex potential incidents before they take place. Based around the New View of human error, it offers established human performance theory in a highly practical context.

Building on its successful predecessors, the third edition of The Field Guide to Understanding 'Human Error' will show a new way of dealing with a perceived "human error" problem in your organization. It will help you trace how your organization juggles inherent trade-offs between safety and other pressures and expectations, suggesting that you are not the custodian of an already safe system. It will encourage you to start looking more closely at the performance that others may still call "human error", allowing you to discover how your people create safety through practice, at all levels of your organization, mostly successfully, under the pressure of resource constraints and multiple conflicting goals.  

Work has never been as safe as it seems today. Safety has also never been as bureaucratized as it is today. Over the past two decades, the number of safety rules and statutes has exploded, and organizations themselves are creating ever more internal compliance requirements. Bureaucracy and compliance now seem less about managing the safety of workers, and more about managing the liability of the people they work for. At the same time, progress on safety has slowed. Many incident and injury rates have flatlined. Worse, excellent safety performance on low-consequence events tends to increase the risk of fatalities and disasters.

Sometimes bad accidents happen. When a fatal accident happens, your organization will find itself at a terrible crossroads. The choices your organization must make will set the course for the eventual recovery from this horrible event. The need to understand and explain how the awful event happened is paramount to bouncing forward to a better and more stable future. How you investigate this event is connected to whether your organization wants to blame and punish or learn and improve.

A just culture is a culture of trust, learning, and accountability. This third edition offers new material on restorative justice and ideas about why your people may be breaking rules. Supported by extensive case material, you will learn about safety reporting and honest disclosure, retributive just culture, and the criminalization of human error. If you learn to look at accountability in different ways, your impact on restoring trust, learning, and a sense of humanity in your organization could be enormous.

What does the collapse of sub-prime lending have in common with a broken jackscrew in an airliner’s tailplane? These were systems that drifted into failure. While pursuing success in a dynamic, complex environment with limited resources and multiple goal conflicts, a succession of small, everyday decisions eventually produced breakdowns on a massive scale. The growth of complexity in society has outpaced our understanding of how complex systems work and fail. This book explores complexity theory and systems thinking to understand better how complex systems drift into failure.

Do you want to make a difference? There are many ways someone in a leadership role can have a positive impact on the lives of their employees. Perhaps there is no leadership responsibility more profound than creating a sustainable, injury-free workplace. This audiobook is a collection of leadership concepts, thoughts, words, and actions that (when strategically implemented) can move your organization toward a better safety future.

In PeopleWork, author and safety management consultant Kevin Burns presents a people-centered system for the management of the safety program in the workplace. He lays out the practical, how-to steps that frontline supervisors and safety people can master. This promotes a relationship-based culture focused on mentoring, coaching, and inspiring teams. It is an approach that improves employee productivity and allows everyone to achieve their personal goals and the goals of their company. With PeopleWork, you can raise workplace safety to a level where it actually works. 

This audiobook is a practical guide that shows how leaders can build psychological safety in their organizations, creating an environment where employees feel included, fully engaged, and encouraged to contribute their best efforts and ideas. Perhaps, the leader’s most challenging task is to increase intellectual friction while decreasing social friction.