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Informed culture = Safety culture

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)

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This entry was posted on Monday, January 12th, 2009 at 8:42 pm and is filed under Incidents, OSH Management, Risk Assessment, Safety Culture, learning organisation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Informed culture = Safety culture”

  1. safetyn8 says:
    28 February, 2009 at 1:20 am

    I agree case-based reasoning would be a great way to develop a safety protocol and build a knowledge base. I don’t think this would be referral database for use in the heat of the moment. More effectively it could be used to identify say the top say 3 – 5 incident scenarios where a contingency plan needs to be known, trained, broadcast throughout the company and utilized. I think a comprehensive plan for all relative incidents is probably good from a legal perspective.

    SafetyN8
    http://store.pksafety.net/aboutus.html

  2. Yang Miang says:
    28 February, 2009 at 5:09 pm

    Thanks for the comment. I believe case-based reasoning (CBR) system has lots of potential in improving risk assessment and contingency planning in organisations. I have seen quite a few safety document management systems in the market, but they are not very strong in ensuring proper knowledge management.

    SafetyN8 has an interesting blog on safety and health products. Do you have any operations in Australia or Asia? Are you guys into knowledge management?

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