The Safety Anarchist ─ Relying on Human Expertise and Innovation, Reducing Bureaucracy and Compliance

Work has never been as safe as it seems today. Safety has also never been as bureaucratized as it is today. Over the past two decades, the number of safety rules and statutes has exploded, and organizations themselves are creating ever more internal compliance requirements. Bureaucracy and compliance now seem less about managing the safety of workers, and more about managing the liability of the people they work for. At the same time, progress on safety has slowed. Many incident- and injury rates have flatlined. Worse, excellent safety performance on low-consequence events tends to increase the risk of fatalities and disasters. We make workers do a lot that does nothing to improve their success locally. And paradoxically, the tightening of safety bureaucracy robs us of exactly the source of human insight, creativity and resilience that can tell us how success is actually created, and where the next accident may well come from.

It is time for Safety Anarchists: people who trust people more than process, who rely on horizontally coordinating experiences and innovations, who push back against petty rules and coercive compliance, and who help recover the dignity and expertise of human work.

Sidney Dekker (PhD, The Ohio State University, 1996) is currently Professor at Griffith University in Brisbane, where he runs the Safety Science Innovation Lab. More at sidneydekker.com