Human & Organizational Factors
Topic outline
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Humans are strange “machines” whose errors cause many disasters, but whose actions prevent many more. Safety and risk are themselves relative and subjective human concepts, and not universal attributes as proposed by Physics for example. Understanding the human factors is therefore essential to improving safety and ensuring safety.
Humans are not just isolated individuals. They make decisions and act within an organisation, whether it is small one, like a team, or huge one, like an international company, an industrial sector or a country. Furthermore, the organisation itself is an entity that drives many decisions. The organisational context of these decisions and actions influences the effectiveness and efficiency of safety. Understanding organisational factors is the second objective of this module.
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ELSE (European Leadership for Safety Education) is a European project leading the development of the first two units of this module: “Management and leadership for safety: Key concepts” and “Management and leadership for safety: Key challenges”. The team is made up of 13 contributors (academics and industrial experts) from 3 countries that offer you their conceptual background and expertise in operational practices. Although the industrial sector of application here is nuclear, the concepts and practices presented are applicable to all industrial sectors.
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