Proactivité et réactivité: deux orientations pour concevoir des dispositifs visant le développement de la sécurité industrielle par la formation

Abstract

In a world exposed to uncertainty and upsets, the development of organizational resilience is often proposed to improve performance. Intended as a complement – but also sometimes as a counterpoint – to management approaches based on anticipation and preparedness, resilience-based approaches aim to improve the ability of professionals to react in an opportune manner to extraordinary and unexpected situations. Despite increasing interest for this change in paradigm, few concrete case studies have been documented. The work presented in this document explores the possibilities offered by new training modalities, for and using resilience, which aim to improve the ability of professionals to produce safety in work situations. The work is part of a research project called FOResilience, led by Simon Flandin and Germain Poizat at the University of Geneva, which was partially funded by the FonCSI. Three characteristics of the authors’ approach are worth emphasizing: - They adopt a broad definition of “training”, which includes professional development activities and organizational interventions, with a particular interest for methods that differ from classical classroom-based training, such as crisis exercises, discussion forums, coaching, and collective analysis of work situations. - They are more interested in activities and methods that develop professionals’ ability to interpret ambiguous situations and to act and cooperate in unexpected or critical situations, than in activities that promote a quasi-mechanical execution of a procedure or deployment of a pre-established plan. - They see safety as resulting as much from the daily work activities that develop professionals’ ability to act in appropriate ways in a constantly evolving context, as from the initial safe system design and careful implementation of operating procedures that cover all possible situations. Two families of training/intervention methods are analyzed: - Methods that develop proactivity in routine situations, the daily activities that create conditions which are favourable to safe operations. These include different forms of discussion between professionals that aim to improve the shared understanding of goal conflicts, of the decisions and compromises made, the difficulties encountered (such as procedures that are inappropriate in certain situations) and improvement opportunities. - Methods that encourage reactivity in extraordinary or critical situations and the ability to bounce back after a critical organizational upset. These include various simulation-based methods, such as crisis exercises, though designed to improve the ability of professionals to make sense of and react in appropriate ways to unexpected events, rather than the classical objective of exercises to check correct execution of a predefined plan.