I’ve recently published an article on the application of systems thinking concepts in accident analysis. The article is published in Safety Science available via ScienceDirect. The paper includes a discussion on the Bellevue fire in Western Australia.
Anyone interested in the article can contact me via y.goh @ curtin.edu.au (remove the spaces adjacent to “@”)
James Reason (Managing the Risks of Organizational Accidents) argues that an informed culture is a safety culture. Reason feels that an informed culture is one where the management is fully informed on the system that they are managing. However is it possible for managers to be fully informed of the hazards and status of the system?
One basic ingredient for this to be possible is for the organisations to have a well-designed safety knowledge management system that captures safety-related information, and codify them so that they can be retrieved when necessary. Once retrieved it is then important for these past information to be adapted by the users for application… this process can be modelled based on the case-based reasoning process, which basically emulate how humans recall past experiences and reuse them in new situations.
I did some work in this area, but only at preliminary prototype stage. We developed a conceptual framework that enables incident cases and past risk assessment to be reused during new risk assessment. Hopefully there will be opportunities to implement them in actual situations.
For those interested see this book for an introduction to case-based reasoning: Applying Case-Based Reasoning: Techniques for Enterprise Systems (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Artificial Intelligence)
I’m extremely keen to apply learning organisation concepts in developing positive safety culture in workplaces. Recently presented a paper on this… email me (y.goh@curtin.edu.au) if anyone’s interested!
