Learning from Disasters: A Management Approach

Abstract

Organisations continue to have disasters comparable to those that have already occurred, and it often seems to be for the same or similar reasons. The question is, why? Organisational risks, it can be argued, start and end with people - for it is people who conceptualise, design, construct, operate and maintain the organisational systems which fail so catastrophically on occasions, and which are the subject of this book. Therefore a critique of organisational disasters would not be complete without some reference to the part that human fallibility plays in such events, and the authors have republished this book with the addition of a new chapter designed to make readers aware of some of the social and psychological pathologies that appear to affect the decision-making of both individuals and groups of people. In one sense the book has come full circle. In the first edition it was argued that there are ways in which people could learn from organisational disasters and therefore prevent them from occurring again. The second edition provided a theoretical and empirical risk management framework from within which the original work could be viewed. This last edition attempts, albeit briefly, to address some of the reasons why people fail to learn from disasters in the first place. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)