Drift into Failure Quotes

“If we adjudicate an operator’s understanding of an unfolding situation against our own truth, which includes knowledge of hindsight, we may learn little of value about why people saw what they did, and why taking or not taking action made sense to them.”
― Sidney Dekker, Drift into Failure: From Hunting Broken Components to Understanding Complex Systems

“A whole complex system cannot be inspected, only parts or sub-systems can be inspected.”
― Sidney Dekker, Drift into Failure: From Hunting Broken Components to Understanding Complex Systems

“Our technologies have got ahead of our theories. Our theories are still fundamentally reductionist, componential and linear. Our technologies, however, are increasingly complex, emergent and non-linear.”
― Sidney Dekker, Drift into Failure: From Hunting Broken Components to Understanding Complex Systems

“with a shift of natural sciences into systems thinking and complexity, and social sciences and humanities doing the same, it seems that they once again seem to come closer to each other. Not because the social sciences and humanities are becoming “harder” and more quantifiable, but because natural sciences are becoming “softer” with an emphasis on unpredictability, irreducibility, non-linearity, time-irreversibility, adaptivity, self-organization, emergence – the sort of things that may always have been better suited to capture the social order.”
― Sidney Dekker, Drift into Failure: From Hunting Broken Components to Understanding Complex Systems

“Studying and enhancing the “information environment” for decision-making, as Rasmussen and Svedung put it, can be a good place to start.46 This information environment, after all, is where assessments are made, decisions are shaped, in which local rationality is created. It is the place where the social and the technical meet; where risk itself is constructed.”
― Sidney Dekker, Drift into Failure: From Hunting Broken Components to Understanding Complex Systems

“Oh, and what about the nurse? She was fired and charged as a criminal. That’s Newton, too. If there are really bad effects, there must have been really bad causes. A dead patient means a really bad nurse. Much worse than if the patient had survived. So much worse, she’s got to be a criminal. Must be. We can’t escape Newton even in our thinking about one of the most difficult areas of safety: accountability for the consequences of failure.”
― Sidney Dekker, Drift into Failure: From Hunting Broken Components to Understanding Complex Systems

“Arriving at the edge of chaos is a logical endpoint for drift. At the edge of chaos, systems have tuned themselves to the point of maximum capability.”
― Sidney Dekker, Drift into Failure: From Hunting Broken Components to Understanding Complex Systems

“In complex systems, after all, it is very hard to foresee or predict the consequences of presumed causes. So it is not the consequences that we should be afraid of (we might not even foresee them or believe them if we could). Rather, we should be weary of renaming things that negotiate their perceived risk down from what it was before.”
― Sidney Dekker, Drift into Failure: From Hunting Broken Components to Understanding Complex Systems