Table Of ContentTHE SAFETY ANARCHIST
Work has never been as safe as it seems today. Safety has also never been as
bureaucratized as it is today. Over the past two decades, the number of safety
rules and statutes has exploded, and organizations themselves are creating ever
more internal compliance requirements. Bureaucracy and compliance now seem
less about managing the safety of workers, and more about managing the liability
of the people they work for. At the same time, progress on safety has slowed.
Many incident-and injury rates have flatlined. Worse, excellent safety
performance on low-consequence events tends to increase the risk of fatalities
and disasters. We make workers do a lot that does nothing to improve their
success locally. And paradoxically, the tightening of safety bureaucracy robs us
of exactly the source of human insight, creativity and resilience that can tell us
how success is actually created, and where the next accident may well come
from.
It is time for Safety Anarchists: people who trust people more than process, who
rely on horizontally coordinating experiences and innovations, who push back
against petty rules and coercive compliance, and who help recover the dignity
and expertise of human work.
Sidney Dekker (PhD, The Ohio State University, 1996) is currently Professor at
Griffith University in Brisbane, where he runs the Safety Science Innovation Lab.
More at sidneydekker.com
‘Having been a safety professional for 28 years I am absolutely appalled at this
man’s attitude towards the safety profession. My work colleagues and I could not
believe it when he referred to health and safety professionals as ‘Safety Nazi’s’
and HR as ‘Human Remains.’ Does this man honestly believe that 250 years after
the industrial revolution safety professionals have made little or no difference to
reducing the risk of injury in workplaces . . . what a disgrace!! And then he goes
on to say that if a worker gets killed at work he must have been a good worker, is
he serious? I was absolutely gobsmacked at his comment. What a waste of
money. Let’s hope he never returns to our State.’
‘Best work on health and safety I have ever seen. Thoroughly researched, real-
life examples and common sense. Dekker avoids all the usual garbage and
bureaucratese that is so counterproductive to safety, and which completely
bedevils the safety profession and regulators.’
— Audience responses to Safety Anarchist lecture, 2016
The Safety Anarchist
Relying on Human Expertise and Innovation,
Reducing Bureaucracy and Compliance
SIDNEY DEKKER
First published 2018
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business ©
2018 Sidney Dekker
The right of Sidney Dekker to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
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Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent
to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-
Publication Data Names: Dekker, Sidney, author.
Title: The safety anarchist : relying on human expertise and innovation, reducing
bureaucracy and compliance / Sidney Dekker.
Description: First Edition. | New York : Routledge, 2018. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017020759 | ISBN 9781138300446 (hardback) | ISBN
9781138300460 (pbk.) | ISBN 9780203733455 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Industrial
safety—Management.
Classification: LCC T55 .D42 2018 | DDC 658.4/08—dc23
Classification: LCC T55 .D42 2018 | DDC 658.4/08—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017020759
ISBN: 978-1-13830044-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-13830046-0 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-20373345-5 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Safety is an endless guerilla war.
—James Reason, The Human Contribution
War helps preserve the special mental atmosphere that a
hierarchical society needs.
—George Orwell, 1984
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
1 A case for change
2 We know what’s best for you
3 Authoritarian high modernism
4 The safety bureaucracy
5 What gets measured, gets manipulated
6 The infantilization of us
7 A new religion
8 A non-deterministic world
9 Anarchy versus anarchism
10 Ways out
References
Index
Preface
I grew up in the 1970s. On many free days, my brother, sister and I left the house
in the morning and would circle back to it only when necessary – often not
before nightfall. We roamed the neighborhood, spontaneously meeting up with
kids like us, being wowed by the older kids’ mopeds, getting into and out of
trouble, playing ball, encountering and creating and solving problems ‘in the
field’ as we went along. We hardly ever told our parents where exactly we went,
or how far we would wander. There was no way to contact them other than
running a long way back home. My parents had a cowbell on a handle (an
incongruous gift from an uncle, but it came in handy). They used to dangle out of
a house window, ringing it loudly when it was dinner time, as we kids were
typically nowhere within voice range. That was on days off. On other days, we
rode bikes to school and to sports and to piano lessons by ourselves, crossing
busy roads, probably busting the rules as we went. And we weren’t alone. The
average pre-teen free-range radius around the house was more than 2 kilometers
during that time. And even movements outside that range were not yet
constantly accompanied, ‘helicoptered,’ monitored, chauffeured or cell-phone
chaperoned. Today, the range of unaccompanied children is less than 200 meters
from the house. And in many cases, it may be 20 meters, or even less: the
confines of a teenage bedroom.
Later, I became an academic, writing a bunch of books that dealt with risk:
books about human error, safety-critical worlds, system failure. I practiced what I
preached, learning to fly the Boeing 737, flying part-time for an airline out of
Copenhagen. Then I moved to flying unlimited aerobatics on sailplanes. I learned
the value of procedures and rules, of policies and compliance and regulations. But
often I wondered about them, too. I wondered about having to hold a handrail
when going up or down stairs (or being fired if you didn’t), or ensuring that
coffee was carried in a cup with a lid on it (or get written up if it wasn’t). These
rules seemed petty, nanny-ish, patronizing, infantilizing. Yet these were the rules
that – like at many other worksites – were in place on Deepwater Horizon on the
eve of the worst oil disaster ever: the Macondo Well blowout, resulting in 11
deaths, numerous injuries and the biggest oil spill in the history of humanity.
Never in history has work seemed so safe. Never in history has safety also
been so bureaucratized. Over the past 20 years, many countries have seen a
doubling, or even tripling, of the amount of safety bureaucracy and compliance
requirements. And yet their safety outcomes haven’t improved much at all,
particularly not their serious injury or fatality rates, or their proportion of process
safety disasters. If we do more of the same – ever more minute compliance
demands, more counting and tabulating of low-consequence incidents and
injuries, more checklists, procedures and creation of paper trails – we will
probably just get more of the same. In fact, it seems that more bureaucracy and
compliance are less about managing the safety of the people we once felt
responsible for, than they are about managing the liability of the people they
work for. Today, we make people do a lot of work that solves someone else’s
problems, but that does nothing to improve how work is done locally. In fact, it
might well get in the way of doing work locally – and in the way of doing it
efficiently or safely. These sorts of interventions are not going to get anybody
much safer.
For sure, bureaucratic initiatives from the last century – regulation,
standardization, centralized control – can take credit for a lot of the progress on
safety we’ve made. Interventions by the state, and by individual organizations,
have taken us away from the shocking conditions of the early industrial age. We
had to organize, to standardize, to come together and push back on unnecessary
and unacceptable risk. We had to solve problems collectively; we had to turn to
the possibility of coercion by a state or other stakeholders to make it happen.
Today, a steady rate of accidents, fatalities and disasters in many industries show
that we still have a lot further to go. Bureaucracy and compliance may well have
taken us as far as they can in a number of those industries. In the meantime, we
have produced a situation where a sizable chunk of national income is eaten up
by bureaucratic clutter and compliance activities – surveillance, risk assessing,
reporting, auditing, rule-writing, policing, inspecting and much more. It exacts a
