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Efficient and Effective Learning for Safety from Incidents

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Author

Summary, in English

Learning from incidents is important for improving safety. Many companies spend a great deal of time and money on such learning procedures. The objectives of this paper are to present some early results from a project aimed at revealing weaknesses in the procedures for learning from incidents and to discuss improvements in these procedures, especially in chemical process industries. The empirical base comes from a project assessing organizational learning and the effectiveness of the different steps of the learning cycle for safety and studying relations between safety-specific transformational leadership, safety climate, trust, safety-related behavior and learning from incidents. The results point at common weaknesses in the organizational learning, both in the horizontal learning (geographical spread) and in vertical learning (double-loop learning). Furthermore, the effectiveness in the different steps of the learning cycle is low due to insufficient information in incident reports, very shallow analyses of reports, decisions that focus at solving the problem only at the place where the incident took place, late implementations and weak solutions. Strong correlations with learning from incidents were found for all safety climate variables as well as for safety-related behaviors and trust. The relationships were very strong for trust, safety knowledge, safety participation and safety compliance.

Department/s

Publishing year

2012

Language

English

Pages

3216-3222

Publication/Series

Work: A Journal of Prevention, Assessment & Rehabilitation

Volume

41

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

IOS Press

Topic

  • Social Sciences Interdisciplinary
  • Production Engineering, Human Work Science and Ergonomics

Keywords

  • learning from incidents
  • organizational learning
  • safety leadership
  • safety climate

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 1875-9270