synesis: the unification of productivity, quality, safety and reliability

The complexity of today’s large organisations, businesses, and social institutions defeats management approaches based on monolithic thinking. Most industry and service organisations look at their performance either from a single perspective - productivity, quality, safety, etc. - or from different but separate perspectives that reside in organisational silos. Quality is treated separately from safety, which, again, is treated separately from productivity, and so on. While siloed thinking may be convenient in the short term, it fails to recognise that any specific perspective reveals only a part of what goes on. Yet it is essential to have a unified view of how an organisation functions effectively to manage changes and to ensure the organisation excels in what it does.

Synesis represents the mutually dependent set of priorities, perspectives, and practices that an organisation needs to carry out its activities as intended. It shows how to overcome the fragmentation in foci, scope, and time that characterises the dominant change management paradigms. This book is consequently not about productivity or quality or safety or reliability but about all of these together. It is about why it is necessary to think of them as a whole. And it is about how this can be done in practice.

Erik Hollnagel is Senior Professor of Patient Safety at Jönköping University (Sweden) and Visiting Professorial Fellow at Macquarie University (Australia). He has throughout his career worked at universities, research centres, and with industries in many countries and with problems from a variety of domains and industries. Erik is an internationally recognised expert in the fields of safety and complex systems analysis and has helped create the fields of resilience engineering, resilient health care, and Safety-II. He has published widely and is the author/editor of 27 books as well as 500+ papers and book chapters.