Does worker adaptation create safer work?
This explored how offshore workers undertake microprojects via bricolage, improvising temporary solutions from available resources when original designs (WAI) don’t meet their needs (WAD).
Shared under open access licence.
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Extracts:
• Offshore work is “exacerbated by the complexity of operations, resulting from coordination with other teams and the occurrence of exceptional events in a confined space”
• “Safety management … requires a paradigm that recognizes the strategic importance of “work-as-done” … without reducing safety to mere compliance with regulations”
• Focus on compliance can create an “illusion of control” which operators believe that strict adherence to rules and procedures guarantees safety”
• For “…Dekker, this approach can infantilize workers, depriving them of the autonomy needed to judge complex situations”
• “Real work always differs from what is prescribed. Even well-designed protocols … have limitations in anticipating the contingencies of practice”
• Workers often “finish the design of imperfect technologies, applying tacit knowledge and local adaptations to fill gaps not anticipated by engineers”
• Microprojects are “situated design that emerges in operational contexts marked by high uncertainty and the impossibility of fully planning tasks in advance”
• Bricolage is “characterized by the use of experience and skills … to select, combine, and transform a set of limited and previously available resources to solve complex problems”
• “Abraçado et al. identify two phases of bricolage …: one prior to action, to conceive and construct the technical system, and another during implementation, to correct the system and adapt to unforeseen circumstances”
Results
• These results “indicate the limitations of the organizational safety approach, which is based on the illusion of control through excessive formalization and strict compliance with regulations”
• Safety in “highly complex environments does not result from the elimination of variability, but from the system’s ability to absorb it through “normal work” or [WAD]
• “Operators create ephemeral systems, temporarily transforming the environment using the available resources”
• Safety then is a “continuous and adaptive process of construction, in which operators’ ability to devise on-the-spot solutions … is central to safety and operational efficiency”
• “[F]ormal design contributes to safety, provided that it serves as a support for real activity”
Overall they say:
• “If the organization restricts this initiative through excessive controls, it may compromise health and increase the risk of accidents”
• The company must “grant autonomy to operators and provide resources to foster their capacity for action, recognizing the legitimacy of bricolage in the process of building safety”
#safetyii #hop #newview #safetydifferently #resilienceengineering #wad
