Rescuing High-Tech Sectors from Imminent Disaster, Using Isomorphic Lessons & Organisational Learning Strategies as Prerequisite Tools to Manage Safety

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, m itigation of risk, measure performance, investigate incidents and maintain an on-going continuous improvement. However, experts belie ve 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.