000 01947nab a2200169 4500
005 20260520003916.0
008 260224s2009 xxu
245 0 0 _aLearning from organizational incidents
_bResilience engineering for high-risk process environments
260 _cmar. 2009
270 _a2009-03-31 ; 2009-03-31
300 _a6 p. ; 90-95
520 _aFor years, safety improvements have been made by evaluating incident reports and analyzing errors and violations. Current developments in safety science, however, challenge the idea that safety can meaningfully be seen as the absence of errors or other negatives. Instead, the question becomes whether a company is aware of positive ways in which people, at all level of the organization, contribute to the management and containment of the risks it actually faces. The question, too, is whether the organization has the adaptive capacity necessary to respond to the changing nature of risk as operations shift and evolve. This article presents the results of a resilience engineering safety audit conducted on a chemical company site. An interdisciplinary team of seven researchers carried out 4 days of field studies and interviews in several plants on this site. This company enjoyed an almost incident-free recent history but turned out to be ill-equiped to handle future risks and many well-known daily problems. Safety was often borrowed from to meet acute production goals. Organizational learning from incidents was fragmented into small organizational or production units without a company-wide learning. We conclude that improving safety performance hinges on an organization's dynamic capacity to reflect on and modify its models of risk as operations and insight into them evolve, for example, as they are embodied in safety procedures and policies.
581 _a1
773 0 _tProcess safety progress
_g28
942 _cARTICULO
999 _c169400
_d169400