A Never-Ending Story.
Trapping Safety into Rules: How Desirable or Avoidable is Proceduralization?
Bieder, Corrine; Bourrier, Mathilde (editors). Farnham, Surrey, England and Burlington, Vermont, U.S: Ashgate, 2013. 300 pp. Figures, tables, references, index. Trapping Safety into Rules— there is a title as provocative as you are likely to see this year in books aimed at aviation safety professionals.
The book itself is a study and no light "read", fact. The article from Flight Safety is thought provoking and worthy of some consideration in context with our regulatory reform rhinoceros. The BRB are going to have a whip around; see if we can't send a Christmas copy (or two) to the warren, perhaps in the vainglorious hope that the shelf-ware can compete with canapés, champagne and annoying cabin crew on those long, first class flights to exotic destinations.
Any way – the article is badly formatted so I have cherry picked some random paragraphs as an appetitive.
The editors think so. Bieder and Bourrier say that proceduralization of safety is part of a general trend toward “the bureaucratization of everyday life. … Even commonplace consumption or simple emotions are rationalized and subject to prescribed procedures, notably at the workplace. In addition, the dangerous link between bureaucratization and administrative evil has also long been established. The key role played by technical rationality in this irresistible and sometimes dangerous push always combines scientific method and procedures. Therefore, it requires us to stay alert and vigilant in front of constant re-engagement towards more rules and regulations.”1
Personnel do not have infinite attention capacity. Under a regime of excessive proceduralization, they must devote an increasing amount of their attention to keeping up with and following rules and regulations. The corollary is that some time and energy must be debited from attention to the real-world working environment.
Trapping Safety into Rules is a collection of chapters examining various aspects of the theme. Part I is “Where Do We Stand on the Bureaucratic Path Towards Safety?” Part II is about “Contrasting Approaches to Safety Rules.” Part III includes chapters under the heading “Practical Attempts to Reach Beyond Proceduralization,” and Part IV is “Standing Back to Move Forward.”
Several of the book’s chapters suggest that the actual effects of procedures at the “sharp end” must be studied as carefully as their abstract validity. In “Working to Rule, or Working Safely,” Andrew Hale and David Borys say, “Rules and procedures are seen as essential to allocate responsibility and to define and guide behaviour in complex and often conflicting environments and processes. Behind this logical, rational obviousness lies another ‘truth’ about the reality of safety rules and their use.”
They cite a study of Dutch railway workers’ attitudes to safety rules: “Only 3 percent of workers surveyed used the rules book often, and almost 50 percent never; 47 percent found them not always realistic, 29 percent thought they were used only to point the finger of blame, 95 percent thought that, if you kept to the rules, the work could never be completed in time, 79 percent that there were too many rules, 70 percent that they were too complicated and 77 percent that they were sometimes contradictory.”
The authors present two contrasting models of safety rules.
Model 1, popular among those with an engineering background or way of thinking, “sees rules as the embodiment of the one best way to carry out activities, covering all contingencies. They are to be devised by experts to guard against the errors of fallible human operators, who are seen as more limited in their competence and experience, or in the time necessary to work out that one best way.”
Model 2, derived more from sociology and psychology, perceives rules as “behaviour emerging from experience with activities by those carrying them out. They are seen as local and situated in the specific activity, in contrast with the written rules, which are seen as generic, necessarily abstracted from the detailed situation.”
Hale and Borys discuss many studies of both models of rulemaking. Each model has researchers who take a stand basically for or against them; other researchers advocate a balanced position.
The authors themselves conclude, “The review of the two models and their development and use has resulted in the definition of a broad set of concerns and dilemmas. The picture that emerges is of a gap between the reality of work and its routines and the abstraction of the written rules that are supposed to guide safe behaviour. We have described contrasting perceptions of deviations from those written rules, either as violations to be stamped out or as inevitable and sometimes necessary adaptations to local circumstances to be used and reinforced. …
“Model 1 is more transparent and explicit than the tacit knowledge and emerging set of routines characterized by model 2. This makes it more suitable for trainers, assessors and improvers, but at the cost of creating a gap between work as imagined in the rule set and work as carried out in practice. … Rules may be imposed from above, but they must be at least modified from below to meet the diversity of reality. …
“Model 2 fits best with complex, high-uncertainty, high-risk domains with great variety and need for improvisation. However, in these activities, there is scope for making guidance and protocols more explicit, usable and used, by specifying them as process rules rather than action rules.”
There's also a good article on
Crosswind landing, worth the half cup of coffee it takes to read. Thanks Flight Safety.