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IAEA Building |
The
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) recently conducted a four-day
workshop* on leadership and safety culture (SC). “The primary objective of the workshop [was]
to provide an international forum for senior managers to share their experience
and learn more about how safety culture and leadership can be continuously
improved.” (Opening, Haage) We don’t have all the information that was
shared at the workshop but we can review the workshop facilitators’
presentations. The facilitators were
John Carroll, an MIT professor who is well-known in the nuclear SC field; Liv
Cardell, Swedish management consultant; Stanley Deetz, professor at the
University of Colorado; Michael Meier, Regulatory Affairs VP at Southern
Nuclear OpCo; and Monica Haage, IAEA SC specialist and the workshop
leader. Their presentations follow in
the approximate order they were made at the workshop, based on the published
agenda.
Shared Space, Haage
The major
point is how individual performance is shaped by experience in the social work
space shared with others, e.g., conversations, meetings, teams, etc. Haage described the desirable characteristics
of such “shared space” including trust, decrease of power dynamics, respect, openness,
freedom to express oneself without fear of recrimination, and dialogue instead
of argumentation.
The goal is
to tap into the knowledge, experience and insight in the organization, and to
build shared understandings that support safe behaviors and good performance. In a visual of an iceberg, shared
understanding is at the bottom, topped by values, which underlie attitudes, and
visible behavior is above the waterline.
Leadership for Safety, Carroll and Haage
Haage
covered the basics from various IAEA documents: “management” is a function and
“leadership” is a relation to influence others and create shared understanding. Safety leadership has to be demonstrated by
managers at all levels. There is a
lengthy list of issues, challenges and apparent paradoxes that face nuclear
managers.
Carroll
covered the need for leaders who have a correct view of safety (in contrast to,
e.g., BP’s focus on personal safety rather than systemic issues) and can
develop committed employees who go beyond mere compliance with requirements. He provided an interesting observation that culture
is only one perspective (mental model) of an organization; alternative
perspectives include strategic design (which views the organization as a machine)
and political (which focuses on contests to set priorities and obtain resources). He mentioned the Sloan management model
(sensemaking, visioning, relating and implementing). Carroll reviewed the Millstone imbroglio of
the 1990s including his involvement, situational factors and the ultimate resolution
then used this as a workshop exercise to identify root causes and develop actionable
fixes. He showed how to perform a
stakeholder assessment to identify who is likely to lead, follow, oppose or
simply bystand when an organization faces a significant challenge.
Management for Safety, Haage
This
presentation had an intro similar to Leadership
followed by a few slides on management. Basically,
the management system is the administrative structure and associated functions
(plan, organize, direct, control) that measures and ensures progress toward
established safety goals within rules and available resources and does not
allow safety to be trumped by other requirements or demands.
Concept of Culture, Deetz
Culture is
of interest to managers because it supports the hope for invisible control with
less resistance and greater commitment. Culture
is a perspective, a systemic way to look at values, practices, etc. and a tacit
part of all choices. Culture is seen as
something to be influenced rather than controlled. Cultural change can be attempted but the
results to not always work out as planned.
The iceberg metaphor highlights the importance of interpretation when it
comes to culture, since what we can observe is only a small part and we must
infer the rest.
Culture for Safety, Meier
This is a
primer on SC definition, major attributes and organizational tactics for
establishing, maintaining and improving SC.
One key attribute is that safety is integrated into rewards and
recognitions. Meier observed that
centralization ensures compliance while decentralization [may] help to mitigate
accident conditions.
Systemic Approach to Safety, Haage
A systemic
approach describes the interaction between human, technical and organizational
(HTO) factors. Haage noted that the
usual approach to safety analysis is to decompose the system; this tends to
overemphasize technical factors. A systemic
approach focuses on the dynamics of the HTO interactions to help evaluate their
ability to produce safety outcomes. She
listed findings and recommendations from SC researchers, including HRO
characteristics, and the hindsight bias vs. the indeterminacy of looking ahead
(from Hollnagel).
Being Systemic, Deetz
This short
presentation lists the SC Challenges faced by workshop participants as
presented by groups in the workshop. The
16-item list would look familiar to any American nuclear manager; most of you
would probably say it’s incomplete.
Cultural Work in Practice, Cardell
Cardell’s
approach to improving performance starts by separating the hard structural
attributes from the softer cultural ones.
An organization tries to improve structure and culture to yield organizational
learning. Exaggerating the differences
between structure and culture raises consciousness and achieves balance between
the two aspects.
Culture
comes from processes between people; meetings are the cradle of culture (this
suggests the shared space concept). Tools
to develop culture include dialogue, questioning, storytelling, involving,
co-creating, pictures, coaching and systemic mapping. Cardell
suggested large group dialogs with members from all organizational elements. This is followed by a cookbook of suggestions
(tools) for improving cultural processes and attributes.
Our Perspective
It’s hard
to avoid being snarky when dealing with IAEA.
They aim their products at the lowest common denominator of experience
and they don’t want to offend anyone. As
a result, there is seldom anything novel or even interesting in their
materials. This workshop is no
exception.
The presentations
ranged from the simplistic to the impossibly complicated. There was scant reference to applicable
lessons from other industries (which subtly reinforces the whole “we’re unique”
and “it can’t happen here” mindset) or contemporary ideas about how
socio-technical systems operate. The
strategic issue nuclear organizations face is goal conflict: safety vs
production vs cost. This is mentioned in
the laundry lists of issues but did not get the emphasis it deserves. Similar for decision making and resource
allocation. The primary mechanism by
which a strong SC identifies and permanently fixes its problems (the CAP) was
not mentioned at all. And for all the
talk about a systemic approach, there was no mention of actual system dynamics
(feedback loops, time delays, multi-directional flows) and how the multiple
interactions between structure and culture might actually work.
Bottom
line: There was some “there” there but nothing new. I suggest you flip through the Carroll and
Cardell presentations for any tidbits you can use to spice up or flesh
out your own work.
A
Compendium was sent to the attendees before the workshop. It contained facilitator biographies and some
background information on SC. It included a paper by Prof. Deetz on SC change
as a rearticulation of relationships among concepts. It is an attempt to get at a deeper
understanding of how culture fits and interacts with individuals’ sense of
identity and meaning. You may not agree
with his thesis but the paper is much more sophisticated than the materials
shared during the workshop.
* IAEA Training Workshop on Leadership and
Safety Culture for Senior Managers, Nov. 18-21, 2014, Vienna. The presentations are available here. We are grateful to Madalina Tronea for
publicizing this material. Dr. Tronea is
the founder and moderator of the LinkedIn Nuclear Safety Culture forum.
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