Safety Theater: How the Desire for Perfection Drives Compliance Clutter, Inauthenticity, and Accidents

How is it possible that the desire for a perfectly safe world with perfectly safe workplaces helps generate the opposite? Safety Theater shows how our desire for perfection drives compliance clutter, inauthentic relationships with work-as-done, and new kinds of accidents. Written by the leading global voice on safety innovation today, Safety Theater takes us back to the Enlightenment and its aspiration toward a perfectible world through rationality and science, and explains how, by separating severity from injury rates two centuries later, we now hit our targets but miss the point. This hopeful, forward-looking book is the final volume in a three-part series on the effects of ＂neoliberalism,＂ which promotes the role of the private sector in the economy.

Showcasing a more caring kind of capitalism--where free markets are free in a frame; where horizontal coordination replaces hierarchical control; where shareholders are not the only stakeholders; and where value and prosperity are assessed in terms other than merely economic ones--the book platforms much of what is now known as ＂safety differently,＂ and also allows us to think differently about our capacity to manage complexity (including its possible drift toward failure) and see our fellow human beings as resources for solutions, not as problems to control. Safety Theater introduces the socio-economic success and value system that distinguish Rhineland economies from Anglo ones. It explains how complexity can never be governed through hierarchy and compliance, but necessarily requires trust and horizontal coordination; offers a vision of humanity richer than Anglo-style capitalism can offer; and examines how Rhineland thinking values tripartite consultation (between workers, employers, and government) in ways that can help stem the worst effects of free market policymaking on the compliance clutter and drift into failure, as detailed in the previous two volumes in this trilogy.

Sidney Dekker’s work--from his debut Field Guide to Understanding Human Error in 2001 to his recent Random Noise--always challenges readers to embrace more humane, empowering ways to think about work and its quality and safety. In Safety Theater, Dekker extends his reach once again, writing for all managers, board members, organization leaders, consultants, practitioners, researchers, lecturers, students, and investigators curious to understand the genuine nature of organizational and safety performance.

Sidney Dekker (PhD Ohio State University, USA, 1996) is Professor in the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science, and Director of the Safety Science Innovation Lab at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. Sidney has lived and worked in seven countries across four continents. He coined the terms ’Safety Differently’ and ’Restorative Just Culture’ in the 2010s. An avid piano player and pilot, he has been flying the Boeing 737 for an airline on the side. He is a trained mediator and Chaplain. Sidney is prolific and bestselling author of, most recently: Ten Virtues of a Positive Safety Culture; Random Noise; Stop Blaming; Foundations of Safety Science; The Safety Anarchist; The End of Heaven; Just Culture; Safety Differently; The Field Guide to Understanding ’Human Error’; Second Victim; Drift into Failure; Patient Safety; Compliance Capitalism; and Do Safety Differently. He has co-directed the documentaries ’Safety Differently, ’ 2017; ’Just Culture, ’ 2018, ’The Complexity of Failure, ’ 2018, and ’Doing Safety Differently, ’ 2019. Stanford has ranked Sidney among the world’s top 1% most influential scientists since Newton. More at sidneydekker.com.