Johan Bergström

Dear readers,

Some of you might have noticed that the address for this blog has changed to www.JBSafety.se. The reason behind this is that I have founded my own consultancy firm: JB Safety Education and Consulting AB. The reason behind this is that I wanted to formalize the consultancy activities that I do beside my employment at Lund University, including giving lectures that do not fall within the university job description, developing team training programs, evaluating and improving safety management systems and taking part in accident and incident investigations.

Working directly together with safety critical industries, often with short deadlines, is a nice contrast to the job at the university which offers the time to dig deep, but sometimes without the immediate feedback of the work that you do. I think having the university employment as the main one and then working on the "spare-time" with more short-time consultancy project closely together with industry represen…

Dear readers,

Last week I got a really nice announcement. I have been granted a postdoctoral research project that I applied for in the beginning of the autumn. The funder is the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency (MSB) and the project that I have been granted is an analysis of the discourse of Societal Resilience in at least three different continents (including Europe, Australia and South America). This notion has been a growing one worldwide (e.g. with projects like this one) during the last couple of years and the two questions that I would like to raise are: what is going on here and why?

This takes me in a research path slightly away from research within the traditional Systems Safety-field and towards a more societal-level analysis. An interesting journey for me personally and one which is nicely aligned with other research projects conducted at my department. I hope to be able to conduct this project for around 50 % of my time, for the coming three years, leaving me room for …

Dear readers, I wanted to point you in the direction of two recently published youtube clips featuring Sidney Dekker.

In the first clip Sidney introduces us to the theme of his book from 2011: Drift into failure, where he takes the reader through different ideas of accident causality and argues for a contemporary view in which Complexity Theory is used in order to show how safety critical systems are optimised "at the edge of chaos" where the same mechanisms of performance variability are vital for success, but also important contributors of failure. The argument is that in order to expand our understanding of safety, risk and accidents we must no longer go and search for the broken parts of the system, but look for success mechanisms, interactions and relations between actors. The main idea is not new. That the same organisational mechanisms that make us successful also push us towards safety boundaries have been introduced from the 1980's by theorists such as Turner, …