Monitoring Dangers in an Uncertain World

这个项目是关于组织如何收集关于事故的信息并从事故中学习的研究，这些事故在稍有不同的情况下可能会导致事故。组织监控这些潜在危险，以了解如何应对危险，即低概率、高负面后果事件。在这项研究中，比较了医疗设备、核电、航天飞机和航空运输行业中事故监控系统的运行距离。具体地说，这项研究是基于对各种安全信息系统中的关键参与者的采访分析，以及在航空运输业之前的研究中产生的报告。拟议的研究借鉴并力求促进风险管理、信息处理和组织学习的研究。此外，它对风险事件的其他领域的组织管理具有更广泛的影响，例如在全球环境变化下可能变得更加频繁或不可预测的极端天气事件。这些项目的目的是找出限制(或加强)组织收集关于事故(或灾难)的信息并从中学习的能力的因素。重点是三个主要的研究问题：1)安全信息系统的组织如何影响收集的信息量(例如可靠性)和内容(例如有效性)以及组织从近事故信息中学习的能力？2)注意力相关因素在多大程度上影响随时间推移的近事故报告量？3)组织如何从险些发生的事故中吸取教训？针对这些主要研究问题中的每一个都提出了具体的研究问题。为了说明，第一个研究问题包括对近事故的定义和解释的讨论，其中考虑了易损性与健壮性、学习与控制行为以及模糊与明确定义的维度。这项研究将有助于解决这样的政策问题：如果一个组织为了控制行为而收集信息，它是否会减少险些发生事故的报告数量，并增加扭曲潜在危险描述的自利偏见？

This project is a study of how organizations collect information about and learn from near accidents, events which under slightly different circumstances could have resulted in an accident. Organizations monitor these potential dangers to learn how to cope with dangers, i.e., low probability, high negative consequence events. In this research, a comparison is made to how near accident monitoring systems operate in the medical device, nuclear power, space shuttle, and air transportation industries. Specifically, the research is based on an analysis of interviews with key participants in a variety of safety information systems, and reports generated within previous studies in the air transportation industry. The proposed research draws on and seeks to contribute to the study of risk management, information processing, and organizational learning. Additionally, it has broader implications for organizational management of other areas of risky events, such as the extreme weather events that may become more frequent or unpredictable under global environmental change. The purpose of the projects is to identify factors which constrain (or enhance) the organizational capacity to collect information about and learn from near accidents (or near disasters). The focus is on three main research questions: 1) How does the organization of safety information systems affect the volume (e.g., reliability) and contents (e.g., validity) of information collected and the organizational capacity to learn from near accident information? 2) To what extent do attention-related factors affect the volume of near accident reporting over time? and 3) How do organizations learn from near accidents? Specific research questions are developed for each of these main research questions. To illustrate, the first research question includes a discussion of the definition and interpretation of near accidents in which the dimensions of vulnerability vs. robustness, learning vs. controlling behavior, and ambiguous vs. clearly -defined definitions are considered. The research will help address such policy questions as: If an organization collects information for purposes of controlling behavior, does it lessen the amount of near accident reporting and increase the self-interested bias that distorts accounts of potential dangers?