Engineering

Safety in Sociotechnical Systems

How safety emerges from the interaction of people, technology, and organizations — from foundational theory through resilience engineering, safety culture, and practical investigation methods.

14 modules

Sociotechnical Foundations

Why the system is the unit of analysis — and what that means for engineers

Systems Thinking and Dynamics

Why your production system behaves the way it does — and where to push to change it

Safety I: The Traditional View

How the dominant paradigm defines safety as the absence of accidents — and why that matters

Normal Accidents Theory

Why catastrophic failures are built into the systems we build

High Reliability Organizations

How some organizations operating dangerous, complex systems achieve remarkably few catastrophic failures — and what that takes

Safety II and Resilience Engineering

From preventing failure to enabling success

Safety Culture and Climate

From surface perceptions to deep organizational values — and how to tell the difference

Psychological Safety and Team Learning

Why the willingness to speak up is a system property, not a personality trait

Human Factors and Frontline Work

Why the gap between procedure and practice is a feature, not a flaw

STAMP and Systems-Theoretic Analysis

Safety as a control problem — and what that means for how you design, analyze, and investigate

Investigation and Learning Methods

How organizations examine incidents — and what determines whether they learn anything from them

Organizational Design for Safety

How structure shapes your capacity to detect, absorb, and respond to failure

Building Psychological Safety in Teams

From understanding to action: the mechanisms that suppress voice and the practices that restore it

Capstone: Integrating Safety Approaches

From frameworks to judgment — building a coherent safety practice across culture, process, and organizational design

How this plan was made

Each plan on learnings is built by a hand-crafted agentic pipeline: research agents gather primary sources, a claim reviewer verifies facts against them, and a sequencer orders modules for how people actually learn. The curation — topic selection, framing, editorial standards — is Nicolas's. The research and writing is AI-assembled.