John > John's Quotes

“Not being able to find a cause is profoundly distressing; it creates anxiety because it implies a loss of control. The desire to find a cause is driven by fear.”
― Sidney Dekker, Just Culture: Balancing Safety and Accountability

“Saying what people failed to do has no role in understanding ‘human error.”
― Sidney Dekker, The Field Guide to Understanding 'Human Error'

“There is almost no human action or decision that cannot be made to look flawed and less sensible in the misleading light of hindsight. It is essential that the critic should keep himself constantly aware of that fact.”1”
― Sidney Dekker, The Field Guide to Understanding 'Human Error'

“By treating team members with respect, it puts another nail in the coffin of the Taylorist industrial approach to employee management.”
― Jeff Sussna, Designing Delivery: Rethinking IT in the Digital Service Economy

“All work is knowledge work. The carpenter’s mind is no less animated and engaged than the actuary’s. The architect’s accomplishments depend as much on the body and its senses as the hunter’s do.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us

“Planning and doing are separate parts of the same job; they are not separate jobs. There is no work that can be performed effectively unless it contains elements of both. One”
― Peter F. Drucker, The Practice of Management

“The intention of dialogue is to reach new understanding and, in doing so, to form a totally new basis from which to think and act. In”
― William Isaacs, Dialogue: The Art Of Thinking Together

“In accident investigation, as in most other human endeavours, we fall prey to the What-You-Look-For-Is-What-You-Find or WYLFIWYF principle. This is a simple recognition of the fact that assumptions about what we are going to see (What-You-Look-For), to a large extent will determine what we actually find (What-You-Find). (The principle is furthermore not limited to accident investigation, but applies to human perception and cognition in general.) In accident investigations, the guiding assumptions are sometimes explicit, for instance when they are given as a directive or objective.

Erik Hollnagel. The ETTO Principle: Efficiency-Thoroughness Trade-Off (Kindle Locations 998-1000). Kindle Edition.”
― Erik Hollnagel, The ETTO Principle: Efficiency-Thoroughness Trade-Off

“We are in need of inquiry into the epistemology of practice. What is the kind of knowing in which competent practitioners engage? How is professional knowing like and unlike the kinds of knowledge presented in academic textbooks, scientific papers, and learned journals? In what sense, if any, is there intellectual rigor in professional practice?”
― Donald A. Schön, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action

“If professionals consider one thing “unjust,” it is often this: Split-second operational decisions that get evaluated, turned over, examined, picked apart, and analyzed for months—by people who were not there when the decision was taken, and whose daily work does not even involve such decisions.”
― Sidney Dekker, Just Culture: Balancing Safety and Accountability