Carl Rollenhagen

Resilience in Everyday Operations A Framework for Analyzing Adaptations in High-Risk Work

Managing complexity and uncertainty in high-risk sociotechnical systems requires people to continuously adapt. Designing resilient systems that support adaptive behavior requires a deepened understanding of the context in which adaptations take place, of conditions and enablers to implement these adaptations, and of their effects on the overall system. Also, it requires a focus on how people actually perform, not how they are presumed to perform according to textbook situations. In this paper, a framework to analyze adaptive behavior in everyday situations in which systems are working near the margins of safety is presented. Further, the variety space diagram has been developed as a means to illustrate how system variability, disturbances, and constraints affect work performance. The examples that underlie the framework and the diagram are derived from nine focus groups with representatives working with safety-related issues in different work domains, including health care, nuclear power, transportation, and emergency services.

Human and organizational biases affecting the management of safety

Management of safety is always based on underlying models or theories of organization, human behavior and system safety. The aim of the article is to review and describe a set of potential biases in these models and theories. We will outline human and organizational biases that have an effect on the management of safety in four thematic areas: beliefs about human behavior, beliefs about organizations, beliefs about information and safety models. At worst, biases in these areas can lead to an approach where people are treated as isolated and independent actors who make (bad) decisions in a social vacuum and who pose a threat to safety. Such an approach aims at building barriers and constraints to human behavior and neglects the measures aiming at providing prerequisites and organizational conditions for people to work effectively. This reductionist view of safety management can also lead to too drastic a strong separation of so-called human factors from technical issues, undermining the holistic view of system safety. Human behavior needs to be understood in the context of people attempting (together) to make sense of themselves and their environment, and act based on perpetually incomplete information while relying on social conventions, affordances provided by the environment and the available cognitive heuristics. In addition, a move toward a positive view of the human contribution to safety is needed. Systemic safety management requires an increased understanding of various normal organizational phenomena – in this paper discussed from the point of view of biases – coupled with a systemic safety culture that encourages and endorses a holistic view of the workings and challenges of the socio-technical system in question.

Strategies for dealing with resistance to recommendations from accident investigations

Accident investigation reports usually lead to a set of recommendations for change. These recommendations are, however, sometimes resisted for reasons such as various aspects of ethics and power. When accident investigators are aware of this, they use several strategies to overcome the resistance. This paper describes strategies for dealing with four different types of resistance to change. The strategies were derived from qualitative analysis of 25 interviews with Swedish accident investigators from seven application domains. The main contribution of the paper is a better understanding of effective strategies for achieving change associated with accident investigation.

Competing values, tensions and trade-offs in management of nuclear power plants

The specific goal of the study is to look how tensions, competing values and trade-offs manifest in the management of nuclear power plants. Second goal is to inspect how existing frameworks, such as Competing Values Framework, can be used to model the tensions. Empirical data consists of thirty interviews that were conducted as part of a NKS study on safety culture in the Nordic nuclear branch. Eight trade-offs are identified based on a grounded theory based analysis of the interview data. The competing values and potential tensions involved in the trade-offs are discussed.

Learning organizations for nuclear safety

Organizational learning (OL) is a crucial component of operational excellence in nuclear power plants. OL relies on performance assessments, change management and continuous improvements. OL has become increasingly important for the nuclear industry in its adaptation to changes in the political and economic environment, work force, technology in plants, and organizations of the nuclear utilities. A danger in this process is that even minor problems may trigger a chain of events in which the risk of deteriorated safety and/or diminishing trust in the safety standards of the particular nuclear power plant becomes possible. The paper describes a project that considers demands placed on the nuclear power plant management in order to create methods and tools to approach them. The involvement of nuclear power plants in the project provides a unique possibility for interactions between research and practice to benchmark approaches to safety management in different cultures and in stages of change. To ensure the maximum benefit for the participating nuclear power plants, results are tested and adapted continuously in the project.

Handbook of Safety Principles

Safety principles are paramount to addressing structured handling of safety concerns in all technological systems. This handbook captures and discusses the multitude of safety principles in a practical and applicable manner. It is organized by five overarching categories of safety principles: Safety Reserves; Information and Control; Demonstrability; Optimization; and Organizational Principles and Practices. With a focus on the structured treatment of a large number of safety principles relevant to all related fields, each chapter defines the principle in question and discusses its application as well as how it relates to other principles and terms. This treatment includes the history, the underlying theory, and the limitations and criticism of the principle. Several chapters also problematize and critically discuss the very concept of a safety principle. The book treats issues such as: What are safety principles and what roles do they have? What kinds of safety principles are there? When, if ever, should rules and principles be disobeyed? How do safety principles relate to the law; what is the status of principles in different domains? The book also features:

Challenges, dilemmas, and quality criteria for safety reviews

Five generic dilemmas shared by most safety reviews are identified, namely the complexity dilemma, the specialisation dilemma, the criteria dilemma, the independence dilemma and the ethical dilemma. These dilemmas are not always made sufficiently transparent, which may lead to a too optimistic view of what can be achieved by safety reviews. A two-dimensional characterisation of safety reviews is suggested; the dimensions are the degree of independence and the scope of the review. In conclusion ten quality criteria are proposed that can be used to cope with the dilemmas of conducting safety reviews.

Safety Culture and Safety Quality

Although much used, the concept of safety culture is associated with many meanings. In this chapter, it is argued that there are reasons to define safety culture in terms of values and competence related to safety, and to differentiate safety culture from what is here called “safety quality”. It is argued that safety culture should be perceived as a relative construct in terms of how the value of safety relates to the manifold of other values simultaneously strived for. Safety culture is discussed in the context of value research (individual and organizational values) and safety quality is discussed in the context of human reliability analysis. Implications for safety management and assessment of safety culture and safety quality are discussed.