Safety Organised Criticality

Tom Geraghty · Safety & Human Error, Complexity & Systems, Ecological Thinking

Introduces Self-Organised Criticality (SOC) and applies it to organisational failure. Argues that small, local interactions accumulate over time — like dry fuel in a forest — until an invisible threshold is crossed and a seemingly small event triggers disproportionate collapse.

Neighbours (15)

• 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)
• Early-warning signals for critical transitions (paper)
• Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems (paper)
• The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts and Terms (paper)
• Complexity
• Experimental Evidence for Tipping Points in Social Convention (paper)
• Organisms as Ecosystem Engineers (paper)
• The Collapse of Sensemaking in Organizations: The Mann Gulch Disaster (paper)
• The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms (paper)
• The Theory of Island Biogeography (paper)
• Adaptive Cycle
• An Introduction to Niche Construction Theory (paper)
• Normal Accidents