Dr. Sidney Dekker
Professor, pilot, powerful and provocative speaker on Just Culture, Human Performance and Safety Differently


Dr. Sidney Dekker Bio
Sidney Dekker (PhD Ohio State University, USA, 1996) is Professor and Director of the Safety Science Innovation Lab at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, and Professor at the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering at Delft University in the Netherlands. Sidney has lived and worked in seven countries across four continents, is fluent in a number of languages and has won worldwide acclaim for his groundbreaking work in human factors and safety.
Sidney coined the term 'Safety Differently' in 2012, which has since turned into a global movement for change. It encourages organizations to declutter their bureaucracy and set people free to make things go well, and to offer compassion, restoration and learning when they don't. Sidney has given many hundreds of keynote talks all around the world.
An avid piano player and pilot, he has been flying the Boeing 737 for an airline on the side. He is a trained mediator and Chaplain.
Sidney is bestselling author of, most recently: Foundations of Safety Science; The Safety Anarchist; The End of Heaven; Just Culture; Safety Differently; The Field Guide to Understanding ‘Human Error’; Second Victim; Drift into Failure; Patient Safety; Compliance Capitalism, Do Safety Differently and Stop Blaming.
He has co-directed the documentaries ‘Safety Differently,’ 2017; ‘Just Culture,’ 2018, ’The Complexity of Failure,’ 2018, and ‘Doing Safety Differently,' 2019. Stanford has ranked Sidney among the world’s top 1% most influential scientists: his work has over 18,000 citations and an h-index of 59. More at