Where is Your Company on the Normal Accident Cycle?

摘要

If history has taught us anything, it is that humans, organizations and countries are subject to strong cyclic influences. For example, we see continuous cycles of puritanism/integration, war/peace and short-term strategies/long-term strategies, all with individual time constants. Plantey of evidence also suggests that there are strong cyclic driving forces in safety and safety failure. The corollary to this is that, from a macroscopic viewpoint, we should take great care to assess whether we are in fact in such a cycle, and, more imporotantly, to identify which stage of that cycle we are in. Some stages may be more susceptible to failure than others. For example, one might sketch ut a traditional cycle as shown in Figure 1.