Safety-II in Practice

Chapter 4The resilience potentials

The purpose of managing work is to ensure that acceptable outcomes occur with the intended frequency, speed and reliability – which also means that the number of unacceptable outcomes is kept to a practical minimum, if not completely prevented. This can only be done if there is a reasonably correct understanding of how an organisation functions and how people perform at work – of what determines Work-as-Done. The understanding is the necessary basis for efforts to make some outcomes – the desirable ones – more likely and others – the undesirable ones – less likely.

As argued in Chapter 3, human and organisational performance depends on many different things that cannot reasonably be collapsed into a single ...