The human factor: Pursuing success and averting drift into failure

Dr Dekker takes the learnings he has from his career in the domain physical safety and how it applies to the technical world. He builds on Dave Snowden's work about Complex Adaptive Systems and how to operate safely in that area. He makes the solid point that counting the amount of time since the last error occurs builds a culture of risk secrecy and leads to horrible results.

One key point from this insight rich presentation: "The absence of negatives predicts that a spectacular failure is much more likely to happen". Many companies and groups of people spend a great deal of time and effort on preventing errors and making bad things happen. This does not lead to good things... in fact it tends to lead to a culture where talking about something going wrong is uncomfortable and/or risky.