Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
organizations must always adjust to the current conditions and because
resources and time are finite such adjustments are always approximate. Indeed,
the theme that leaps out from the findings at both the sharp end and blunt end
of the system is that failure represents breakdowns in adaptations directed at
coping with complexity. Success relates to organizations, groups and
individuals who produce resilient systems which are able recognize and adapt
to change and surprise. The measure of success for groups and organization is
the ability to ―create foresight‖—anticipate the changing shape of risk, before
failures and harm occur.
Success has been ascribed to the ability of organizations, groups and
individuals to anticipate the changing shape of risk before failures and harm
occur. Conversely, failure is seen as the absence, temporary or permanent, of
that ability. It is groups and individuals who are skilful at recognizing the side
effects of changes that can adapt their model of risk and their profile of
countermeasures accordingly. Investigation boards of various large-scale
recent accidents have found that improving safety requires new tools to handle
safety/production tradeoffs and to enhance resilience in the face of variability.
1.5.2. Method
To achieve resilience organizations need support for decisions about
production/safety tradeoffs—how to help organizations decide when to relax
production pressure to reduce risk. We refer to these trade-off decisions as
sacrifice judgments because acute production or efficiency related goals are
temporarily sacrificed, or the pressure to achieve these goals relaxed, in order
to reduce risks of approaching too near safety boundary conditions.
To make risk a proactive part of management decision-making requires
ways to know when to relax the pressure on throughput and efficiency goals,
i.e., making a sacrifice decision how to help organizations decide when to
relax production pressure to reduce risk. New research is needed to understand
this judgment process in organizations. Indications from previous research on
such decisions are that the decision to value production over safety is implicit
and unrecognized. These decisions are sound when set against local judgment
criteria; given the time and budget pressures and short-term incentives that
shape behavior. Given the knowledge, goals, and attention focus of the
decision makers and the nature of the data available to them at the time, it
made sense. It is in these normal, day-to-day processes, where we can find the
seeds of organizational failure and success. And it is these processes we must
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