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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.

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 (paper)
• Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies (paper)
• A New Accident Model for Engineering Safer Systems (paper)
• A Surgical Safety Checklist to Reduce Morbidity and Mortality in a Global Population (paper)
• Normalisation of Deviance (Challenger)
• Principles of Adaptive Management in Complex Safety-Critical Organizations (paper)
• Variation in Hospital Mortality Associated with Inpatient Surgery (paper)
• Safe to Fail