How does ISO 45001 contribute to resilient capacities?
This interesting study used content analysis and expert judgement evaluation to determine whether the 45001 clauses contribute to resilient capacities.
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Extracts:
· “Rather than focusing solely on preventing failures, resilience engineering seeks to understand how organizations adapt to complexity, variability, and uncertainty to ensure successful outcomes”
· “ISO 45001 appears to provide a useful foundation for resilience-oriented safety management, even though resilience is not explicitly identified as a guiding principle of the standard”
· “Expert evaluations revealed that while ISO 45001 moderately covers monitoring, awareness, anticipation, and management commitment, the inclusion of other resilience aspects remains limited”
· “An important finding is that many resilience aspects are represented implicitly rather than explicitly within ISO 45001”
· “However, implicit coverage may also create variability in implementation because organizations may interpret resilience-related requirements differently”
· And being implicit suggests “organizations implementing the standard may already be developing resilience capabilities without formally recognizing them as such”
· But “Previous resilience engineering research has emphasized the importance of making adaptive capabilities **visible** and manageable within organizational processes”
· “ISO 45001 partially supports resilience but requires purposeful modifications to address gaps in resilience aspects such as flexibility, self‐organization, and learning culture”
· “While it focuses more on learning from negative experiences and failures, it could also benefit from considering positive experiences and opportunities for OH&S improvement. ISO 45001 can be more resilient by explicitly including factors related to positive experiences, successes, and OH&S improvement opportunities”
· “the standard does not explicitly endorse a just culture. The leadership and commitment clause could be a place for modification to highlight the key role of a just culture”
· “Several aspects commonly associated with resilient organizations, including self‐organization, distributed responsibility, stakeholder engagement, and adaptive capacity, receive considerably less attention”
· ISO 45001 seems to implicitly support some resilient capacities “primarily through structured management processes and leadership mechanisms rather than through decentralized adaptation and organizational flexibility”
· It also provides limited attention to adaptive capacity and recovery
· “findings also reveal a fundamental tension between traditional safety management approaches and resilience engineering”
· “Although ISO 45001 encourages organizations to address risks and opportunities, most requirements remain oriented toward preventing failures, incidents, and nonconformities”
· “In contrast, resilience engineering advocates a Safety-II perspective that seeks to understand how everyday work succeeds under varying conditions and how organizations adapt to complexity”
· “Greater attention to successful adaptations, operational trade-offs, and positive performance outcomes could strengthen the resilience orientation of ISO 45001 and better align it with contemporary safety management thinking”
· “Organizations seeking to enhance resilience may benefit from supplementing ISO 45001 requirements with initiatives that strengthen adaptive capacity, stakeholder engagement, distributed responsibility, and learning from successful performance”
· “However, the existence of resilience-related requirements within a standard does not necessarily imply that organizations successfully develop or implement resilience capabilities in practice”
Study link: https://doi.org/10.1002/hfm.70053
SafetyInsights.org 