Safety-I and Safety-II: The Past and Future of Safety

Why this matters here

Hollnagel’s Safety-I and Safety-II contrasts managing safety as the absence of failure with managing the presence of capacities that make everyday performance go right under variable conditions. How Serious Systems Learn borrows that orientation for preoccupation with failure as attention discipline—near misses and small anomalies as structural information, not mere inconvenience. Hollnagel reframes safety management; the book asks how reliability is preserved without letting routine success erase sensitivity to emerging risk.