Social forces, group think, normalisation of warnings and barrier system integrity

This upcoming summary explored how social factors permeate across organisations, thereby strengthening and weakening operational barriers.

They argue that while technical and operational barriers are pretty definable—valves, interlocks, drop zones—what counts as an ‘organisational barrier’ is more elusive.

They re-analyse Hopkins’ analysis of the Macondo blowout from a barrier perspective.

Hopkins’ implicated several factors in the genesis of the blowout, being:

·        Tunnel vision engineering: where engineers’ eyes “were fixated on one objective: a well design that was cheaper and would enable easier production”.

o  An MoC document was previously designed and it specifically emphasised loss of mud. Loss of mud into sands was specifically emphasised, and hence priming engineers’ of this possibility over other possibilities

·        Decision-making in consensus mode: Here decisions were “made in consensus-mode, effectively made in settings where no one could be held accountable later on”

·        Confirmation bias: Several features contributed to a confirmation bias that the well test would pass.

o  One, these tests rarely fail. Two, engineers had created a decision tree and it didn’t consider that the test would fail. Three, the first draft of the work plan didn’t mention the work plan, and hence wasn’t seen as critical. Four, the well cement job had been declared a “textbook operation”

·        Normalisation of warnings: Here a plausible explanation for the unusual and unexpected change of pressure was rationalised with the ‘bladder effect’ hypothesis. “According to Hopkins, the bladder effect has no credibility in comfortable hindsight.

o  It was the normalization of an unambiguous warning (Hopkins, 2012). The bladder theory provided a needed explanation of the pressure readings”

·        Groupthink: Power gradients within the group were argued to play a factor. “According to Hopkins, the social processes made it “virtually impossible for them to act independently”.

Collectively, while barriers are often thought of as human actions and physical/technical devices with varying degrees of independence, it’s argued that social forces within organisations challenge these assumptions.

They argue that in barrier approaches, we should consider the influence of organisational factors in barrier systems. That is, organisational influences “travels long distances”, like from upstream decisions and resourcing, pressures etc.

Finally they argue that “It is shown how such psychological forces may serve as ‘transmitters’ of organizational principles, strategies and decisions throughout the barrier system. In turn, this may contribute to risk transfer, and dependence between barriers”.

Ref: Størseth, F., Hauge, S., & Tinmannsvik, R. K. (2014). Safety barriers: Organizational potential and forces of psychology. Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries, 31, 50-55.

Study link: https://www.sintef.no/globalassets/project/pds/reports/safety-barriers-organizational-potential-and-forces-of-psychology_2014_journal-of-loss-prevention-in-the-process-industries.pdf

My site with more reviews: https://safety177496371.wordpress.com

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