Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
turn to in order to find leverage for making further progress on safety. So far,
results are individual and organizational acting much riskier than they would
ever desire, or than they would have in retrospect. A sacrifice judgment is
especially difficult because the hindsight view will indicate that the sacrifice
or relaxation may have been unnecessary since ―nothing happened.‖ This
means that it is important to assess how peers and superiors react to such
decisions.
On top of this, real-life decisions rarely meet the norms of rational
decision making. Although decision theory and psychology tend to depict
decisions as explicit and unique acts, the fact of the matter is that decisions
usually are implicit rather than explicit [31]. Decisions also reflect a bounded
rather than an absolute rationality, i.e., rather than trying to find the optimal
solution people settle for that which is good enough in the satiation . Finally,
people may in retrospect revise their decision criteria in order to justify the
chosen alternative (post-decision consolidation; As a result of that, some
consequences of the decisions may be suppressed or neglected.
The goal of the work proposed here is to provide support for sacrifice
decisions—how do we help people make the relaxation/sacrifice judgment
under uncertainty and to recognize when decisions would move the system
closer to safety boundaries? Reconstructing or studying the ―information
environment‖ in which actual decisions are shaped, in which local rationality
is constructed, can help us penetrate processes of organizational self making.
By studying behavior in these situations through actual encounters, case
studies, retrospective event analyses, as well as interviews with relevant
decision makers, the goal is to understand (1) how to get individuals and
organizations to recognize when otherwise implicit tradeoffs are occurring and
(2) how to help individuals and organizations know when and how to re-
balance investments toward safety goals in the face of production or efficiency
pressures. Understanding sacrifice decisions can begin to provide input on
how to develop new forms of feedback on the side effects of changes and
organizational decisions on risk.
1.5.3. Measurement of Organizational Resilience
One part of resilience engineering is work to develop indicators of
resilience to be used as measures to alert management to the need to be
concerned about conflicts between the acute production pressures and the
chronic needs for safety [32]. Helping decision makers detect and monitor the
