Archetypes for organizational safety

A study of the precursors leading to ‘organisational’ accidents in complex industrial settings

“…This focus and sequential modelling can be at the expense of understanding more complex accident aetiology, particular in situations where an accident can be shown to emerge at the system level without any specific 'failures' at lower levels. This behaviour can occur due to the structure of the system itself (Marais et al, 2006;Senge, 1990). While Reason has argued that the actual theory underlying SCM better reflects the complexity of reality than the often replicated visual interpretation of the SCM may suggest (Reason et al, 2006), there is still scope for the approaches which have derived from it to be complemented by systems based tools (Underwood and Waterson, 2013a).…”

“…In a review of whether accidents within the chemical industry are foreseeable, Sonnemans and Körvers (2006) note that precursors date back to Heinrich (1931), but that the term has been extended beyond technical precursors to "organizational precursors" (Perrow, 1984;Reason, 1997;citing Turner, 1978)). Indeed a structure within the system through which variables interact to create a failure at the system level, without any elements individually failing or indicating failure (Marais et al, 2006), can also be described as pathogens which exist within the system. The International Atomic Energy Agency (2008) best practice for Organizational Learning states that the identification of precursors is an important aspect of the process, however many authors have identified a failure within process industries to either recognise accident precursors (Cooke and Rohleder, 2006;Rudolph and Repenning, 2002;Woods and Cook, 2002) or to embed the knowledge of them and ensure the right people know which precursors to look out for (Pasman, 2009).…”

“…It has been used in the analysis of the Chernobyl accident (Salge and Milling, 2006) and in the context of specific issues relating to operational problems and safety case production (Carhart, 2009). By looking at the causal structure and dynamics of events, it has been possible to identify some common cycles of event evolution and these system archetypes (Marais et al, 2006) have begun to be developed in the context of organisational safety.…”

Investigating the potential to simulate hospital-based infection outbreaks using the stamp architecture

“…One potential future avenue of research is to focus on this more specifically. Marais et al [13] for example, outline a set of archetypes for organisational safety alongside descriptions of associated process models for each. One of these archetypes concerns organisational complacency and how this phenomenon arises over time.…”

A System Dynamics View of Safety Management in Small Construction Companies

“…It moves a present state towards a desirable target regardless whether the trend is descending or ascending. Delays represents the time that elapses between cause and effect [25]. Once an initial dynamic hypothesis is developed, a modeler needs to transfer the causal loop diagram into a stock and flow diagram in which the type of variables (i.e., stock or flow), equations between these them, initial conditions are determined.…”