9/19/2023 0 Comments Drift city jp error![]() ![]() ![]() Our focus is Rasmussen’s ( 1997) theory of migration towards the boundary of acceptable performance, in which normal changes in daily work conditions give rise to frequent modifications in strategies and activities. To extend our understanding of organizational drift, in this paper we examine an existing theory, formalizing it to assess how well the theory accounts for the phenomena the theorist aimed to explain. Defenses gradually erode in the face of production pressure, so the dynamic over time is a drift towards failure. For example, analyses of the predecessors of the Columbia disaster reveal the erosion of technical requirements and safety procedures in the decade leading up to the disaster (Farjoun 2005 Woods 2005). Consequently, organizations find it challenging to maintain a focus on safety and to continue to adhere to safety standards for extended periods of time, particularly in the absence of safety breaches that provide powerful reminders of the riskiness of the organization’s activity. Reliability is “invisible” so there is “nothing to pay attention to” (Weick 1987). Efforts to improve productivity often yield immediate, tangible, and visible gains with a high degree of certainty, whereas efforts to maintain safety generate feedback that presents as ambiguous, intermittent, and often delayed and uncertain (Farjoun 2005). Organizational pressures for productivity exert influence on day-to-day behavior and can lead to a gradual erosion of safety standards, moving the organization closer to the boundary of safety failure. Safety failure cycles and organizational drift into failure are well-documented modes of behavior theorized to result from such competing priorities (Dekker 2016 Rasmussen 1997 Reason 1997). The interplay of competing organizational priorities is a central theme in the study of a variety of organizational phenomena (Cyert and March 1963 Nelson and Winter 1982). In this paper, we use a system dynamics model based on a conceptual model originally proposed by the influential safety scientist Jens Rasmussen to explore the dynamics of a safety system subject to pressures for performance improvement. Analyses of safety breaches as witnessed in tragic examples such the space shuttles Challenger and Columbia (Starbuck and Farjoun 2005 Vaughan 1996), petroleum industry disasters at Texas City and Deepwater Horizon (Hopkins 2008, 2018), nuclear power accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl (Perrow 1984), and coal mining explosions at Massey’s Upper Big Branch mine and at New Zealand’s Pike River mine (Galuska 2012) call our attention to the devastating consequences that can result when objectives for safe operations yield to pressures to achieve other goals such as deadlines and budgets. ![]() The influence on organizational performance of various organizational or individual objectives that are not entirely aligned is a common theme that appears in many streams of the scholarly and practitioner literature. ![]()
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