SafetyInsights.org

In 1987, a fire ripped through The King’s Cross St Pancras tube station and killing 31 people. The fire started under a wooden escalator, probably ignited by a discarded burning match and fuelled initially by a build-up of grease and fibrous materials. One thing I found interesting is the observation from the investigation (see image… Continue reading Mini-post: “Smoulder!” … evacuate now

This explored the role of humility in adopting error management principles among auditors. This is a pretty dense paper with 3 study protocols, so I’ve had to skip significant portions of the paper. Two key error management principles were covered: EMO (error management orientation) and EPO (error prevention orientation). EMO is a positive attitude towards… Continue reading Who Adopts An Error Management Orientation – Discovering The Role Of Humility

This meta-analysis evaluated research on the impacts of destructive leadership on organisational, individual, job-related outcomes; highlighting the strength of the correlations. 57 studies (out of 200+ identified) met inclusion requirements. Way too much to cover, so just a few points. First, they give a background on destructive leadership. Prevalence of destructive leader behaviours have been… Continue reading How bad are the effects of bad leaders – A meta-analysis of destructive leadership and its outcomes

ABSTRACT Designers can contribute to enhancing the safety of construction work by considering how their decisions impact on both the physical environment in which construction workers operate and the means and methods they use. To do so, however, designers require knowledge about safety hazards on site and the opportunity to examine their designs early in… Continue reading Safety by design: dialogues between designers and builders using virtual reality

This is an interesting article from Catherine Tinsley, Robin Dillon & Peter Madsen. I’ve posted a heap of their research. Their work strongly flies in the face of conventional wisdom of tracking near misses. That is, rather than near misses being clear warning signs in advance of major events just waiting to be found and… Continue reading Mini-post: Near misses & disaster

This study used qualitative methods (surveys, interviews) in a number of healthcare and aviation settings to understand how organisational reforms, policies etc. influence efficiency/safety trade-offs in local practices. In providing context on why this is an important facet to understand, it’s been argued that “it is impossible to prioritize both safety and performance goals and… Continue reading Safety First!? Organizational Efficiency Trends and their Influence on Safety

This studied how subtle linguistic wording in accident descriptions influences the allocation of blame and punishment. Researchers manipulated wording in the accidents into either: agentive or nonagentive verbs. For example, he ripped the costume (agentive) versus the costume ripped (nonagentive) or she toppled the candle (agentive) versus the candle toppled (nonagentive). Some previous research was… Continue reading Subtle linguistic cues influence perceived blame and financial liability

ABSTRACT This paper reports on a study of practices used to learn from incidents with the aim of improving safety performance in a Scandinavian refinery. Data for the study was collected during five months of fieldwork at the refinery and interviews with 70 refinery employees. In this paper, we examine how managers, engineers and operators… Continue reading Learning from incidents: Practices at a Scandinavian refinery

I found these comments pretty interesting from Robert Bea (a professor emeritus in engineering who studied a lot of complex systems and disasters). They argue that traditional risk estimations underestimated the actual consequences of major failures by a factor of 100 or more. He discusses the area of sociotechnical systems (complex infrastructure systems, CIS, in… Continue reading Mini-post: Sociotechnical risk estimations

For those that haven’t read the NASA Columbia space shuttle accident reports, it has some great discussions around organisational factors in modern, complex environments. One element relates to the communication of safety-critical information (images below from chapter 7 of the CAIB report, pg.191). According to Edward Tufte, the PowerPoint slides prepared to report on the… Continue reading Mini-post: Communicating danger