Thought Leaders

Erik Hollnagel was born in Copenhagen, Denmark. He holds an M.Sc. in psychology from the University of Copenhagen, and a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Aarhus (Denmark).

Erik Hollnagel is presently Senior Professor of Patient Safety at the University of Jönköping, Sweden. Erik is also Adjunct Professor at Central Queensland University (Australia), Visiting Professorial Fellow, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at Macquarie University (Australia), and Visiting Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study of the Technische Universitat München (Germany). He is a Professor Emeritus at the Department of Computer and Information Science (IDA) at Linköping University in Sweden, University of Southern Denmark, Mines Paristech (former full name was École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris) in France, and an honorary professor at Macquarie University in Sydney Australia.

Erik Hollnagel is an internationally recognized specialist in the fields of resilience engineering, system safety, human reliability analysis, cognitive systems engineering, and intelligent man-machine systems. He is the author of more than 500 publications including twenty-eight books, articles from recognized journals, conference papers, and reports.

Dr. David Woods founded Resilience Engineering as an approach to safety in complex systems in 2000-2003 as part of the response to several NASA accidents.

David is currently professor at the Ohio State University in Dept. of Integrated Systems Engineering with pioneering research on the interaction between humans and technology in risk critical activities for almost 40 years. His books on safety and resilience engineering include Resilience Engineering: Concepts and Precepts (2006), Behind Human Error (2010), and Resilience Engineering in Practice (2011).

He is one of the founders Adaptive Capacity Labs, a resilience engineering consultancy.

Sidney Dekker was born near Amsterdam in the Netherlands. He studied psychology at the University of Nijmegen and Leiden University and earned his PhD in Cognitive Systems Engineering from The Ohio State University in 1996. Since then, he has gained worldwide acclaim for his work on human error and safety. Sidney is currently Professor in the School of Communication, Humanities and Social Sciences at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. Previously at Lund University in Sweden, he founded the Leonardo da Vinci Laboratory for Complexity and Systems Thinking and also learned to fly the Boeing 737NG. He worked as part-time airline pilot for a company out of Copenhagen, Denmark. Sidney has lived and worked in seven countries and speaks several languages.

Todd Conklin has spent 27 years as a Senior Advisor for Organizational and Safety Culture at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Dr. Conklin has honed his craft in Human Performance at Los Alamos and through his interactions as an international speaker and thought leader in the realm of Operational learning. Conklin holds a Ph.D. in organizational behavior from the University of New Mexico. Conklin has authored several bestselling books, including The 5 Principles of Human Performance, Pre-Accident Investigations, and Pre-Accident Investigations: Better Questions. He speaks all over the world to executives, groups, and work teams who are interested in better understanding the relationship between the workers in the field and the organization’s systems, processes, and programs. Conklin hosts the award-winning Pre-Accident Investigation Podcast.

Conklin lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico and thinks that Human Performance is the most meaningful work he has ever had the opportunity to live and teach.

Dr. Richard Cook was a research scientist, physician, and pioneer in Resilience Engineering for safety in complex risk-critical worlds, and author of the seminal paper “How Complex Systems Fail” (video) as well as Behind Human Error (2010). Richard was a research scientist in the Department of Integrated Systems Engineering at the Ohio State University and emeritus professor of healthcare systems safety at Sweden’s KTH.

He was one of the founders of Adaptive Capacity Labs, a resilience engineering consultancy.