The Australian Institute of Health & Safety invites you to attend the 2020 Dr. Eric Wigglesworth AM Memorial Lecture on Tuesday 26 May at Rivers Edge to hear Andrew Hopkins present his lecture: How Structure creates culture
Organisations sometimes set out to create cultures of safety using the hearts and minds approach, that is, running workshops for employees encouraging them to think differently about safety.
In contrast, the claim here is that key to developing a culture of safety is having the right organisational structure. This means ensuring that the people with special responsibility for safety are sufficiently senior and sufficiently powerful to be able to discharge their responsibilities effectively. This is illustrated using the Columbia space shuttle accident. The lecture includes a case study of BP, looking at its organisational structure before and after the Deepwater Horizon accident.
The lecture concludes with some remarks about how even the best structures can be undermined by corporate incentives payments that focus on production, profit and cost reduction.
