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Abstract
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Efforts to make the nuclear industry safer are more important than ever in the wake of the Japanese disaster. An enormous amount has been written about how to "create a safety culture," and it usually ends up with a long list of attributes of a culture and very little insight into the fundamental issues that underlie safety in all high hazard industries. I have observed the great energy and effort that goes into this process in my role as a part-time consultant and member of the Advisory Council of INPO.
Carrillo's paper (doi: 10.1016/j.jsr.2011.06.003) is an important addition to this difficult dialogue in highlighting that we may be using the wrong models of how to think about safety in the first place. Her emphasis on complexity theory, sense making, and polarity theory focus us on the two most fundamental problems of safety: (a) We will never be able to predict all the things that can go wrong, that nature will throw at us, that human beings will, in their efforts to do things better, actually make things more complex and, therefore, maybe worse, and; (b) We will never be able to avoid the polarity between absolute safety (at any cost) and competing economic and psychological values. In our own daily behavior we can see how the need to “accomplish things, get to places, do things in a timely and satisfying way, and have fun” tempts us into “risky” behavior, seen most clearly in the way we drive. But we try to avoid what some might call “reckless” behavior, as defined by consensus of others doing the same thing. In high hazard industries recklessness is totally unacceptable but our goal would be to find ways of avoiding even risky behavior so that the public and the employees are kept safe.
Language: en |