TITLE:
Rescuing High-Tech Sectors from Imminent Disaster, Using Isomorphic Lessons & Organisational Learning Strategies as Prerequisite Tools to Manage Safety
AUTHORS:
Agha Ibiam, Wayne Harrop
KEYWORDS:
Isomorphic, Organisation, Learning, Risk, Hazard, Nuclear
JOURNAL NAME:
Engineering,
Vol.15 No.10,
October
24,
2023
ABSTRACT: Within high-risk industries, efficient management of
safety is an important element of organisational efforts to reduce accidents.
Most organisations such as nuclear, aviation and oil and gas sectors have a
safety management system (SMS) which provides sequence of organisational
procedure to identify hazards, mitigation of
risk, measure performance, investigate incidents and maintain an on-going
continuous improvement. However, experts believe that when such complex
organisations complement safety management system with isomorphic lessons and
organisational learning strategies to manage safety, there will be a high
propensity to aggressively reduce risk and save cost. Undoubtedly, learning
from accidents/incidents is one of many ways to manage safely in any given
organisation. As a result, this paper is intended to ascertain if organisations
use isomorphic lessons and organisational learning as strong feature of
organisation’s practice capable of promoting stronger safety culture; and if
lessons learned from other high-risk sectors can help inform risk-based
decisions in organisations. Risk experts and by extension the nuclear sector,
could have learned from past accident such as the Three Mile Island of 1979 and
employ lessons learned to forestall future occurrences. Primary data was gathered
via online, and
research population are health and safety professionals from aviation, nuclear,
and the oil and gas sectors. The sample size recruited are aviation (n = 59,
25%); nuclear (n = 124, 54%); and oil and gas (n = 49, 21%). Statistical
Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) software was used to analyse 232
responses used for this paper.