Managing projects correctly remains the key to rail safety
Paul Bigland’s account of the
1879 Tay Bridge disaster ( RAIL
914) is a timely warning for today’s overseers of railway infrastructure projects.
No single root cause, as Gareth Dennis reminds us. Instead, an inevitable drift towards the bridge’s complete collapse. At the time, no one joined up the dots or foresaw the consequences of the project’s dysfunctional management regime.
History should feature more in modern management education and be supported by case studies of this high quality, because the problem has not gone away.
It was not until the 1970s that construction collapses and other disasters began to be explained more as social and organisational phenomena, rather than as unfortunate incidents stemming from flawed engineering.
When, in 1978, Professor Barry Turner of Middlesex University published his ground-breaking book (an account of his researches into disastrous and costly incidents), he demonstrated convincingly the importance of organisational life in the incubation of what used to be called ‘accidents’.
Turner, an engineer turned social scientist, became an international pioneer, providing for the first time a theoretical basis for studying the true origins of many types of calamitous disaster.
He concluded that the risk of ‘system failure’, and hence the risk of a disastrous outcome, is inevitably high when individuals and organisations are brought together on a temporary basis; when the task they face is complex, ill-defined and prolonged; where regulations and procedures (if they exist at all) can be ill-suited to the situation, and where there are serious difficulties with information and communications.
The underlying reasons for the disasters, he concluded, were failures of foresight and the inability of management to understand what was actually going on.
After every disaster there are calls for lessons to be learned and new technology to ‘solve the problem’. But Turner said that although people might learn lessons, organisations find it difficult. Instead they turn to the easier option of new technology, and little is said about the need to deal with blind spots in their management’s decision-making.
Today’s managers are constantly urged to undertake thorough risk assessments, but who risk assesses the risk assessors? It’s no surprise that the risk in management systems is an unpopular field of research.