Organizational Silos And System Safety: Exploring How Industry, Society And Regulators Can Work Together

This open access book explores the complex relationship between siloed operations and performance, focussing on high-consequence sectors such as safety-critical industries and healthcare. It asks why silos form and analyses their benefits and disadvantages for social systems: more efficient working and faster development of skills within the working group at the cost of retarded information sharing, misunderstanding and potential threats to safety. Different case studies of practices and organizational innovations that encourage cross-fertilization and cross-sectoral learning are presented. The brief analyses the role of context and adaptation when learning and transferring safety interventions and improvement efforts within and across industry sectors, and studies the common barriers of ‘not invented here’, ‘we are special’, suspicion and poor communication.

The ideas set out in Organizational Silos and System Safety are of interest to research communities in safety science, organizational performance and management, to practitioners and to policy-makers in high-hazard industry sectors. They can help develop cross-sector and cross-level learning and improvement.

Siri Wiig is Professor and Centre Director at SHARE—Centre for Resilience in Healthcare, at the University of Stavanger (UiS), Norway. The SHARE centre is the largest research group in Norway doing research on quality and safety in healthcare. Wiig is Full Professor of Quality and Safety in Healthcare Systems at the Faculty of Health Sciences, UiS. Wiig is Adjunct Professor at Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Norway, Senior Adviser at Stavanger University Hospital, Norway and Honorary Professor at Australian Institute of Health Innovation, Macquarie University, Australia and at the University of Wollongong, Australia. Key research interests are resilience in healthcare, patient safety, quality improvement, safety investigations, user involvement, risk regulation, leadership, and learning in socio-technical systems.

Catherine Calderwood is Professor of Practice in the Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Strathcylde, UK. Calderwood is honorary professor at the University of Stavanger, Norway. Key areas of interest include maternal medicine, obstetric ultrasonography and high-risk pregnancy. She was Chief Medical Officer for Scotland from 2015 to 2020.

Teemu Reiman has more than 25 years of experience from various safety-critical industries both as a researcher and a practitioner. He currently works as Senior Safety Culture Specialist in his own Finnish-based company, Lilikoi, conducting both research and consultancy. Previously, Reiman worked as Safety Culture Manager at a nuclear new build project at Fennovoima and as Senior Scientist at the Finnish technical research centre VTT.