Safety is the capacity to succeed under varying conditions, not merely the absence of failure.
Hollnagel's argument that studying only failures misses how work usually succeeds — through adjustment and improvisation that no procedure specifies. It reframes safety as capacity rather than absence.
In practice
- A control room handles four unusual events in a shift and files no report on any of them, because nothing went wrong.
- A ward that meets its targets does so because staff quietly work around four broken processes, and the incident report records none of it.
- Subject
- Risk & Reliability
- Essay
- How accidents actually happen