Chronic Unease: Not forgetting to be afraid Dr L. Fruhen Industrial Psychology Research Centre

1. Chronic Unease: Not forgetting to be afraidDr L. Fruhen Industrial Psychology Research Centre ESRC Seminar Learning from Incidents

2. Chronic Unease I • The experience of discomfort and concern about the management of risks • A contrast to complacency, resulting from the absence of negative events, leading ‘people [to] forget to be afraid’ (Reason, 1997, p. 39).

3. Chronic Unease II • A concept from the High Reliability Organising (HRO) literature • HROs don’t use trial and error to learn from incidents and accidents • Instead they rely on • Imagination • Vicarious experience • Stories • Simulations Weick, 1987

4. Chronic unease III • Chronic unease has been explicitly associated with managerial impact on organisations (Burns 2002) • Managers can be most at risk of complacency in organisations • They can be removed from the hazardous operations where their decisions will have an effect, giving problems an abstract quality.

5. Senior Managers & Learning from AccidentsAccident Investigations

6. Senior managers and safetyAcademic views – literature reviews They are one of the main drivers of organisational safety (e.g. Flin et a., 2000; Guldenmund, 2000) “The prime theme deemed to be worthy of measurement in relation to a worksite's or organization's safety climate relates to perceptions of management attitudes and behaviours in relation to safety [...] (Flin et al., 2000; p.185). • The underlying psychological characteristics driving managerial influence on safety are not well understood

7. So what is chronic unease in managers? • A state of psychological strain in which an individual experiences discomfort and concern about the control of risks in organisations Fruhen et al., in press a

8. Interview study • How relevant are these components to chronic unease? • What behaviours are associated with the experience of unease? • Sample: Senior managers (n = 27) • Semi-structured interviews • Using critical incident technique (Flanagan, 1954) • Open questions • Content analysis (deductive and inductive, Mayring, 2000), two independent coders (α= 0.86 (95% CILL 0.81 to CIUL 0.90) )

9. Results: the components of unease • Flexible thinking (ƒ = 181 in 25 interviews) • Pessimism (ƒ = 162 in 27 interviews) • Propensity to worry(ƒ = 121 in 26 interviews) • Vigilance (ƒ = 102 in 25 interviews) • Requisite imagination (ƒ = 50 in 23 interviews) • Experience (ƒ = 35 in 16 interviews) • “It is constantly asking but why does it do that? Is that really the design and if it’s really the design why did we accept that for the design?” • “I look at the trend of first aids; I look at the trend of small spills. I combine that with my own observations when I am on site and that’s how I make my assessments, how I think it is going.”

10. Results: the components of unease • Flexible thinking (ƒ = 181 in 25 interviews) • Pessimism (ƒ = 162 in 27 interviews) • Propensity to worry(ƒ = 121 in 26 interviews) • Vigilance (ƒ = 102 in 25 interviews) • Requisite imagination (ƒ = 50 in 23 interviews) • Experience (ƒ = 35 in 16 interviews) • “Frankly one of these high consequence types of events could happen any time during that direction.” • “[You] constantly say no, it’s still not good enough, no, it’s still not good enough.”

11. Results: the components of unease • Flexible thinking (ƒ = 181 in 25 interviews) • Pessimism (ƒ = 162 in 27 interviews) • Propensity to worry(ƒ = 121 in 26 interviews) • Vigilance (ƒ = 102 in 25 interviews) • Requisite imagination (ƒ = 50 in 23 interviews) • Experience (ƒ = 35 in 16 interviews) • “I am constantly worried that someone is going to get hurt.” • “So absolutely very tense, breaking into a sweat like, oh gosh, we need to act on this.”

12. Results: the components of unease • “Chronic unease means for me having that alarm, that radar, having my antennae up every time we do something different which we haven’t done before and really going back to the first principles.” • “Leaders need to listen, hear when people are making comments that might be a little different in what they normally do because they might be trying to tell you something.” • Flexible thinking (ƒ = 181 in 25 interviews) • Pessimism (ƒ = 162 in 27 interviews) • Propensity to worry(ƒ = 121 in 26 interviews) • Vigilance (ƒ = 102 in 25 interviews) • Requisite imagination (ƒ = 50 in 23 interviews) • Experience (ƒ = 35 in 16 interviews)

13. Results: the components of unease “If that gas cloud had ignited, it would have been a huge fireball and what the catastrophic event would have been” “Your nightmare is for someone to be killed.” • Flexible thinking (ƒ = 181 in 25 interviews) • Pessimism (ƒ = 162 in 27 interviews) • Propensity to worry(ƒ = 121 in 26 interviews) • Vigilance (ƒ = 102 in 25 interviews) • Requisite imagination (ƒ = 50 in 23 interviews) • Experience (ƒ = 35 in 16 interviews)

14. Results: the components of unease • Flexible thinking (ƒ = 181 in 25 interviews) • Pessimism (ƒ = 162 in 27 interviews) • Propensity to worry(ƒ = 121 in 26 interviews) • Vigilance (ƒ = 102 in 25 interviews) • Requisite imagination (ƒ = 50 in 23 interviews) • Experience (ƒ = 35 in 16 interviews) • “If you have been involved with a process safety event or there has been a fatality and somebody has been killed, you never have to spend any time convincing those people of the importance of this subject.”

15. Behaviours associated with unease • Demonstrating safety commitment (ƒ = 72) • Showing safety is a priority (ƒ = 24) • Not compromising safety (ƒ = 19) • Spending time on safety (ƒ = 15) • Providing support (ƒ = 14) • Transformational leadership (ƒ = 38) • Intellectual stimulation (ƒ =20) • Inspiring others (ƒ = 18) • Transactional leadership (ƒ = 36) • Management by exception active (ƒ =25) • Contingent reward (ƒ = 11) • Seeking information (ƒ = 49)

16. Summary Fruhen et al., in prep; Fruhen et al., in press

17. Thank you for your attention Feedback, questions, comments? e-mail l.fruhen@abdn.ac.uk