Achieving greater resilience to major events: Organisational learning for safety risk management in complex environments

This report commences (Part 1) with an account of findings and implications from an analysis of 12 major incidents within the petrochemical, nuclear, civil engineering, transport and space exploration sectors. Echoing findings from related foundation work within the University of Bristol Safety Systems Research Centre, the key finding is that these incidents share a number of common organisational and cultural weaknesses. The implications of this leads to the question of how organisations might go about detecting the presence of these and other vulnerabilities, and most pertinently, what steps they might take to address identified vulnerabilities, this being the focus for Parts 2 and 3. Part 2 provides a critical perspective on the use of incident and other safety performance data/evidence to detect organisational and cultural weaknesses of the type identified in Part 1, before moving to the challenging issue of intervention design and delivery. The scope for applying cutting-edge modelling techniques as a potential tool for organisations to desktop prototype the logic of their ideas for intervention is discussed in Part 3.