Acknowledging the Role of Abductive Thinking: A Way Out of Proceduralization for Safety Management and Oversight?

Precursor Resilience in Practice – An Organizational Response to Weak Signals

“…These include acting based on extensive and detailed procedural systems. This is comparable to the role of resilience described in other research on high reliability management and HROs [12,14,[21][22][23]. During the interviews, airline management representatives underscored the importance of a successful merger between best practice with planning and procedures.…”

“…The frequency of these events raised concerns that there may be precursor conditions causing the trends. During interviews, we were informed of how the safety manager and the FDMG had engaged in a process of abductive analysis [22], creating a hypothesis of what could be causing the trends. At three airport's, incident trends were associated with pilots repeatedly adapting their landing approaches to a combination of technological changes and constraints in the airports infrastructure and support systems.…”

Drift, adaptation, resilience and reliability: Toward an empirical clarification

“…At the same time, reliability professionals see their systems in more concrete, real-time perspectives than those design engineers who conceive of systems abstractly through formal analytic models. They are extremely good at pattern recognition and at the formulation and remembering of action scenarios in relation to new operational problems they may confront (Roe and Schulman, 2008;Pettersen, 2013). In this way, they contribute to detecting ''weak signals" concerning changes in conditions of operations that degrade reliability.…”

“…By developing strategies to include in analysis multiple perspectives and experiences that address their systems' range of potential states, and by the careful monitoring of both their internal operations and their environment, high reliability organizations are able to better identify early warnings and take into account uncertainties as part of daily operations (Roe and Schulman, 2008;Pettersen, 2013). Elaborate inter-organizational meetings, as well as communication networks for knowledge sharing are developed in these organizations to provide feedback, critiques and the integration of information across levels, both vertically and horizontally (Weick and Roberts, 1993;Pettersen and Aase, 2008).…”

“…Studies among aircraft maintenance units, for example, have shown that aviation organizations are managing complex technical systems and in many situations people or groups have to be flexible in order to cope with input variability that may arise but still produce sustained and integrated outputs that do not degrade prior safety standards (Pettersen and Aase, 2008;Pettersen, 2013).…”