Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
risk potential of changes to daily practices is a necessary prerequisite to
institute corrective action. This research aims to refine our current ideas about
performance variability monitoring (which of course requires that some kind
of model of the performance variability is available or meaningful for that
context). As with the emerging discipline of Resilience Engineering, this in
turn requires that system safety (and risk) are viewed in a new light, i.e., from
a systemic point of view rather than a causal model. In this way the system
model provides an account for how accidents (incidents, etc.) can seemingly
emerge in a situation, rather than result from cause-effect chains (dominos
falling). Systemic accident models currently under development begin to show
what one should monitor for, e.g., the possibility of undesired resonance,
loosening of system constraints or erosion and losses of control among
hierarchical organizational layers.
Such monitoring measures could provide data into models of the
sacrificing decision. How can we move toward, and test new possible leading
indicators that could reflect an organization's resilience? Common themes that
collectively indicate organizational success in handling safety/production
tradeoffs include: Management commitment, reporting culture, learning
culture, preparedness/anticipation, flexibility, and finally opacity. Performance
variability monitoring as it has also been called, is particularly important in the
case of the trade-offs made to accommodate lasting pressures. In such cases
the possible negative consequences may either be missed due to limited
foresight
or
explained
away
because
current
needs
usually
have
a
disproportionate influence on decisions.[33]
These previous findings (and the leading indictor sets for each) could for
example be transformed into a series of trade-off dimensions that capture
sources of organizational resilience. These dimensions can serve as an initial
basis for the study and analysis of sacrificing decisions that is proposed here.
The validity and usefulness of such dimensions can be tested once again
through retrospective event analyses, case studies, interviews with relevant
decision makers, actual empirical encounters with safety-critical decision
making, as well as theory development. This can help us examine how general
organizational characteristics (e.g. the dimensions above, but also others)
express themselves in decision processes that affect day to day management of
projects. This, indeed, has been identified previously as a key gap to bridge:
how do macro-structural forces of scarcity and competition translate into local
managerial or operational mandates to favor one decision alternative over
another-thereby possibly amplifying the organization's exposure to risk? This
