The Field Guide › Paper

From Safety-I to Safety-II: A White Paper

Hollnagel · Safety & Error · University of Southern Denmark / University of Florida / Macquarie University · 2015 · Open access

The canonical white paper articulating the Safety-I to Safety-II transition. Safety-I defines safety as minimising things that go wrong; Safety-II reframes it as maximising things that go right. Humans are recast from liability to resource. Argues that in complex adaptive systems, performance variability is the source of both failure and success — and safety management must attend to both.

Connected concepts (28)

• Behind Human Error: Cognitive Systems, Computers, and Hindsight (paper)
• How Complex Systems Fail: Being a Short Treatise on the Nature of Failure, How Failure is Evaluated, How Failure is Attributed to Proximate Cause, and the Resulting New Understanding of Patient Safety (paper)
• Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies (paper)
• A Leader's Framework for Decision Making (paper)
• A New Accident Model for Engineering Safer Systems (paper)
• A Surgical Safety Checklist to Reduce Morbidity and Mortality in a Global Population (paper)
• From Titanic to Costa Concordia — a Century of Lessons Not Learned (paper)
• Human Error: Models and Management (paper)
• Resilience and Precarious Success (paper)
• Thinking About Process Safety Indicators (paper)
• Collective Mind in Organizations: Heedful Interrelating on Flight Decks (paper)
• How Effectively Has a Just Culture Been Adopted? A Qualitative Study of Clinicians' and Managers' Attitudes to Clinical Incident Management Within an NHS Hospital Trust (paper)
• Principles of Adaptive Management in Complex Safety-Critical Organizations (paper)
• State of Science: Evolving Perspectives on 'Human Error' (paper)
• Systems Thinking for Safety: Ten Principles. A White Paper — Moving Towards Safety-II (paper)
• The Collapse of Sensemaking in Organizations: The Mann Gulch Disaster (paper)
• The Unintended Consequences of No Blame Ideology for Incident Investigation in the US Construction Industry (paper)
• Variation in Hospital Mortality Associated with Inpatient Surgery (paper)
• Verbal Reports as Data (paper)
• A Tale of Two Safeties (paper)
• Building and Revising Adaptive Capacity Sharing for Technical Incident Response: A Case of Resilience Engineering (paper)
• Dr Richard Cook
• Human Error & PS
• Individual Involvement and Intervention in Quality Improvement Programmes: Using the Andon System (paper)
• Resilience Engineering
• Resilience is a Verb (paper)
• Safety I & Safety II
• WAI vs WAD