Nancy Leveson's _Engineering a Safer World_ (available for free here:
https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/2908/Engineering-a-Safer-W...) is required reading, in my opinion. It talks about applying systems theory to reducing industrial accidents, using various case studies such as the Bhopal gas tragedy, which maps automatically to reducing outage severity and incident severity for tech workers.
The key insight it applies is that root-cause analysis to fix and improve situations is limited because choice of root-cause is somewhat arbitrary - it really depends on where you stop probing further. Engineers should not rely on root-cause analysis to identify failures in _the system_, only on failures of components. Nancy proposes alternative techniques instead to identify and improve broken systems.
The detail, quality and depth of her treatment makes it immediately practical and useful. My one complaint is that it is a bit long, and not all of it is easily condensed into short treatments - but I guess verbosity is the tradeoff for quality?
