The Field Guide › Paper
Reiman, Rollenhagen, Pietikäinen and Heikkilä treat safety in high-hazard organisations as an emergent property of a complex adaptive system, and draw out what that implies for how such organisations should be managed. Their argument runs against the dominant compliance paradigm, in which safety is pursued by decomposing work into procedures, specifying the correct behaviour in advance, and enforcing conformance from the centre. That approach, they contend, is well suited to the ordered parts of the work but actively counterproductive for the complex parts, where the situations that threaten safety are precisely the ones no procedure anticipated, and where over-reliance on compliance erodes the adaptive capacity that keeps a system safe when the unexpected arrives. In its place they set out principles of adaptive management: supporting the local adaptive capacity of people at the sharp end, balancing standardisation against the freedom to adjust, attending to the whole system rather than optimising parts, and treating the organisation as something to be continually sensed and steered rather than fixed and controlled. For a corpus about psychological safety this sits squarely in the Safety-II and Human and Organisational Performance tradition: adaptive capacity is exercised by people, and people only exercise it, adjust openly and report the gaps between work-as-imagined and work-as-done, when it is safe to do so. Its limits are those of a principles paper in a specialised safety-science literature: it argues the case at the level of orientation, and leaves the hard specifics of balancing compliance against adaptation to the reader's own context. (Text drawn from the 2015 Safety Science paper, 71, pp. 80-92.)