Close Calls

Drawing on extensive and detailed fieldwork within airlines-an industry that pioneered near-miss analysis- this book develops a clear set of practical implications and theoretical propositions regarding how all organizations can learn from 'near-miss' events and better manage risk and resilience.

“Carl Macrae’s Close Calls: Managing Risk and Resilience in Airline Flight Safety is an intimate account of this learning process, broadly framed in relation to the ‘High Reliability Organisations’ literature. … Macrae’s collated insights constitute an important window into what it means to be working at the frontiers of organisational safety. … Through his work, safety scholars and risk managers of all types stand to learn from aviation’s battle-hardened practices.” (John Downer, LSE Review of Books, blogs.lse.ac.uk, May, 2017)

Close Calls is an extremely important book because it grounds the elusive concepts of reliability, resilience, risk, and sensemaking in the detailed specific practices of airline flight safety investigators. This may sound like an exotic population to study, but it is the brilliance of this volume to go deep into the interpretive work of people who make a living doing what you and I try to do everyday - make sense of ambiguous and unexpected events. Macrae has made the invisible visible and in doing so, has created a beautifully written book that is required reading for any gathering of people who want to learn more about the specifics of risk, safety, inquiry, and performance improvement.

Karl E. Weick, Rensis Likert Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Organizational Behaviour and Psychology, University of Michigan, USA, and co-author of "Managing the Unexpected"

This book offers one of the best discussions of the nature of organisational safety I have ever read. Iconfidently predict that it will have a major impact upon the way safety professionals and academics think and do research.

James Reason, Professor Emeritus, University of Manchester, UK, and author of "Managing the Risks of Organisational Accidents" and "The Human Contribution"

Close Calls is a superb piece of work, both as a landmark summary of the field of safety and as a collection of important new insights. It is full of subtle, deep and intellectually challenging ideas that are extremely instructive. This book needs days of study not soundbites of attention, and will particularly benefit those working in healthcare safety, where many of these important ideas need to be deeply embedded.

Don Berwick, President Emeritus and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), USA

The aviation industry is legendary for its reporting culture and for the way it learns from incidents. Close Calls describes in rich detail how this works. The book willbe of enormous value to all industries that aspire to the aviation safety culture. As an added bonus, it is beautifully written and a delight to read.

Andrew Hopkins, Professor Emeritus, Australian National University, Australia, and author of "Dangerous Decisions" and "Safety, Culture and Risk"

Carl Macrae is a social psychologist, Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Patient Safety and Service Quality at Imperial College London, UK, and a Health Foundation Improvement Science Fellow.