Conceptualizing and communicating organizational risk dynamics in the thoroughness–efficiency space

Organizations that design and/or operate complex systems have to make trade-offs between multiple, interacting, and sometimes conflicting goals at both the individual and organizational levels. Identifying, communicating, and resolving the conflict or tension between multiple organizational goals is challenging. Furthermore, maintaining an appropriate level of safety in such complex environments is difficult for a number of reasons discussed in this paper. The objective of this paper is to propose a set of related concepts that can help conceptualize organizational risk and help managers to understand the implications of various performance and resource pressures and make appropriate trade-offs between efficiency and thoroughness that maintain system safety. The concepts here introduced include (1) the thoroughness–efficiency space for classifying organizational behavior, and the various resource/performance and regulatory pressures that can displace organizations from one quadrant to another within this space, (2) the thoroughness–efficiency barrier and safety threshold, and (3) the efficiency penalty that organizations should accept, and not trade against organizational thoroughness, in order to maintain safety. Unfortunately, many accidents share a conceptual sameness in the way they occur. That sameness can be related to the dynamics conceptualized in this paper and the violation of the safety threshold. This sameness is the sad story of the Bhopal accident, the Piper Alpha accident, and score of others. Finally, we highlight the importance of a positive safety culture as an essential complement to regulatory pressure in maintaining safety. We illustrate the “slippery slope of thoroughness” along which organizational behavior slides under the influence of performance pressure, and suggest that a positive safety culture can be conceived of as “pulling this slippery slope” up and preventing the violation of the safety threshold.