Managing for the Unexpected: A Cultural Perspective

摘要

Current safety science emphasizes that safety is more than absence of accidents or incidents. Safety emerges from the organization's capability of managing and carrying out its activities under expected and unexpected varying conditions (Hollnagel et al., 2011). Safety is constantly created in and by the functioning of a complex socio-technical system. Safety management approaches have traditionally relied on precise identification of risks, their elimination or reduction, and on the development of countermeasures and mechanisms for mitigating their potential consequences. It is possible to state that traditional safety approaches are mainly concerned with proactively managing for the expected (e.g. risks elimination following their identification) and reactively managing the unexpected (e.g. mitigation strategies for limiting damages to society and environment in case what planned and expected fails).