Do Safety Differently (Unabridged‪)‬

Doing safety differently.

It takes a long time to turn around an aircraft carrier.

It is hard to change almost a lifetime of your organization’s thinking about safety in the traditional way and it is really difficult to change your organization’s history of bureaucracy that continues to reinforce the traditional safety definitions and metrics our organizations have used for many years. Let’s face it, change even for the better is hard to do. The answer for why this change takes so long can be found in the difficulty of making big changes to our organizations, organizations don’t want to change, organizations want to stay the same even if the same is no longer effective.

Over the last several years a new way to think about the safety of work has found its way into many organizations around the world. This new way to think about safety is leading to some important improvements in how work is being done and every organization wants to improve their safety performance. This new way to think about safety is exciting and effective and organizations have great desire and motivation to improve safety performance.

All the components for a big change are in place and ready, so why is this change to this new way of thinking not happening at lightning speed in organizations everywhere? Change even for the better is hard to do and organizations seem to want to be told what they should actually do to create this successful change?

These are the questions that the book Doing Safety Differently strives to answer.

What are the chances Sidney Dekker and Todd Conklin would collaborate on a new book? The chances are 100 percent. These two authors, scholars, practitioners, and organizational members have combined their time and skill in addressing six topic areas that are vital to successful safety change.

Here is what Doing Safety Differently offers:


Safety: From outcome to capacity
When the work done is not as you imagined: Do learning teams
When things go wrong: Do investigations differently
When there is too much compliance: Declutter your safety bureaucracy
When your safety people are dejected: Empower them differently
When you need to help your leaders succeed


Doing Safety Differently is a discussion between two friends on what they have learned by watching organizations around the world change the way they do work. Doing Safety Differently is an applied discussion, a practical discussion, that will cause the reader to think about the strategies and tactics they will need to ensure the best possible scenario for successful "doing safety differently".