Archetypes for organisational safety
Applying Systems thinking to better understand organisational safety
The paper “Archetypes for Organisational Safety” by Karen Marais and Nancy G. Leveson is a thought provoking read that many readers familiar with organisational safety management will be familiar with. In the paper Marais and Leveson propose,
… a framework using system dynamics to model the dynamic behaviour of organisations in accident analysis. Most … accident analysis techniques are event-based and do not adequately capture the dynamic complexity and non-linear interactions that characterize accidents in complex systems… a set of system safety archetypes that model common safety culture flaws in organizations, i.e., the dynamic behaviour of organizations that often leads to accidents.
As accident analysis and investigation tools, the archetypes can be used to develop dynamic models that describe the systemic and organizational factors contributing to the accident. The archetypes help clarify why safety-related decisions do not always result in the desired behaviour, and how independent decisions in different parts of the organisation can combine to impact safety.
… to better understand past accidents and prevent future accidents, we need to look at how systems migrate towards states of increasing risk. Such understanding requires taking a longterm dynamic view of the system, and not just considering the proximate events, i.e., those events immediately preceding the actual loss event. System dynamics modelling is one way to describe dynamic change in systems.
One way to accelerate and focus the modelling process is to start by applying archetypes that describe typical behaviour and flaws in the safety culture that have often been involved in accidents.
The safety culture of an organization can be usefully described in terms of these safety archetypes. In accident analysis the archetypes can be used to identify and highlight change processes and the flawed decision making that allowed the system to migrate towards an accident state.
There are a number of archetypes that the authors go on to describe, a selection of which I have reproduced below. Understanding these archetypes can help you see organisation issues ahead of time as the generic framing can be applied across multiple specific scenarios. I highly recommend digging into these archetypes and the paper in more detail.
A similar generic set of archetypes is proposed by Wolsenholme and Corben in their paper “Towards a Core set of archetypel structures”
Reference — Archetypes for organisational Safety — Karen Marais and Nancy G. Leveson; MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics; Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A. http://sunnyday.mit.edu/papers/iria-marais.pdf
