Sidney Dekker - his thoughts on Failure, Blame, and Forgiveness.

Feb 24, 2025

In this engaging conversation, Professor Sidney Dekker, a safety scientist and author, shares his insights on organizational safety and the concept of a 'restorative just culture.' He delves into the detrimental effects of blame in the workplace and advocates for a shift towards understanding systemic errors. Sidney emphasizes the importance of making leaders servant stewards who prioritize frontline workers’ needs and outlines practical steps for fostering a culture of learning and compassion. His vision includes addressing post-COVID occupational violence with innovative, empathetic approaches.

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ANECDOTE

Chance Meeting That Shaped A Career

Sidney Dekker recounts meeting Dave Woods at Ohio State which launched his shift into cognitive systems engineering.
That chance encounter and early mentors shaped his career focus on distributed cognition and safety science.

ANECDOTE

From Postdoc Boredom To Swedish Opportunity

Sidney describes being hired in Sweden to help investigate fighter-jet crashes and join Linköping University.
That role pulled him into applied human factors in high-risk aviation contexts and launched his academic career.

INSIGHT

Failure Brews At The Back End

Dekker argues failures arise from systemic back-end factors, not single frontline acts.
He urges attention to administrative decisions that set people up for success or failure.

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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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