In professional life, the social features of in-house, installation and end-user sociotechnical systems will be of key interest to an engineer concerned with safety. To avoid disastrous engineering failures, it is important to assess whether such systems operate safely and to ask whether they demonstrate the enthusiasm for open learning from error and the caring attitudes that characterize organizations that will perform well in terms of reliability and safety. Only by taking account of such issues will engineers be able to guard against those human factors that may induce future project failures.