Academic career and moving into safety work

Sharon Todd chats to Professor Sidney Dekker about his experience in organisational psychology and his thoughts on incidents, blame and forgiveness. 

Sidney takes us on a roller-coaster ride; as he discusses error as a consequence of other factors, encourages us to set others up for success and challenges organisations to choreograph significant change into their responses to failure. 

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, which have since turned into global movements for change. They encourage organisations to declutter their bureaucracy and enhance the capacities in people and processes peopleOne his most recent pa make things go well—and to offer compassion, restoration and learning when they don’t. Many today will recognise Sidney’s ideas and concepts in for example ‘HOP,’ ‘Learning Teams,’ the ‘New View,’ and more. 

An avid piano player and pilot who learned to fly at age 14, he has been flying the Boeing 737 for an airline on the side. 

He is a trained mediator and Crisis 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,’ ‘Just Culture,’ ’The Complexity of Failure,’ and ‘Doing Safety Differently.’ 

His work has well over 20,700 citations and an h-index of 64. 

Stanford has ranked Sidney among the world’s top 1% most influential scientists since Newton. More at sidneydekker.com

Here is one of Sidney's most recent papers, https://www.sciedupress.com/journal/index.php/jha/article/view/26274

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