# Guardrails & Failure

*Tom Geraghty · Safety & Human Error, Complexity & Systems*

Examines guardrails — structural mechanisms that make failure safe to encounter — as complements to psychological safety rather than substitutes. Argues that not everything is safe to fail, and that well-designed guardrails reduce the stakes of speaking up by containing consequences.

- **This page:** https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/psychological-safety-84-guardrails-and-failure/
- **Read the full article on psychsafety.com:** https://psychsafety.com/psychological-safety-84-guardrails-and-failure/
- **Interactive map:** https://explore.psychsafety.com/?node=guardrails-failure

## Connected concepts (8)

- [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](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/cook-1998.md) (paper)
- [Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/perrow-1984.md) (paper)
- [A New Accident Model for Engineering Safer Systems](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/leveson-2004.md) (paper)
- [A Surgical Safety Checklist to Reduce Morbidity and Mortality in a Global Population](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/haynes-et-al-2009.md) (paper)
- [Normalisation of Deviance (Challenger)](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/normalisation-of-deviance.md)
- [Principles of Adaptive Management in Complex Safety-Critical Organizations](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/reiman-et-al-2015.md) (paper)
- [Variation in Hospital Mortality Associated with Inpatient Surgery](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/ghaferi-birkmeyer-dimick-2009.md) (paper)
- [Safe to Fail](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/safe-to-fail.md)