Grote, Professor of Work and Organizational Psychology, ETH Zürich, Switzerland, presented a paper explaining the need for social science to

be applied within safety management, showing what role it fulfils and how it can facilitate a dialogue between different professional cultures fostering different perspectives and cross-learning.

The role of social science within major hazard environments has been evolving over the past decades as those in the industry have started to realize its importance and potential. It is not only about making people fit the technology, but recognizing the broader role individuals and their social systems can contribute when designing advanced technical systems. The human factors era replaced the technological era in the 1970s. However, it was the introduction of more contemporary management systems in the 1990s that initiated the push for a systemic approach to the complex interaction between social and technological processes. In order to achieve this, openness to different world views and a readiness to challenge basic assumptions of different professional (sub) cultures are required. In this regard, the core issue that a comprehensive management system deals with — how to manage risks rationally — seems to be challenging

given differing human and technological perspectives. Grote explained how a decision deemed rational by a psychologist is not necessarily seen as rational by an engineer, as the rationality guiding each of the professions is driven by different content. How can this be dealt with?

The answer, as well as the main message from Grote, is to develop a culture of interdisciplinary (or transdisciplinary) appreciation, which would permit a more systemic, integrated approach to safety. As an example, Grote referred to the work of the Swiss Federal Nuclear Safety Inspectorate in the area of safety culture, explaining how forums for dialogue are arranged where people from the regulator and operator meet for an open conversation on emergent issues.

The conversation is noted, and the notes are distributed to the parties to ensure that everyone is on the same page. Another example was drawn from Grote’s work with hospitals. It relates to cross-hierarchical groups in the sector, some of whom (for example, senior and resident physicians) have direct power over the colleagues of other colleagues. Grote was able to facilitate cross-learning and provide the appropriate tools and techniques for building trust. It was also deemed important for the ensuing discussions to debrief and learn from some events which do not go well.

The follow-up discussion with the audience triggered a remark on coping with the issue of transparency versus confidentiality between a regulator and an operator. Grote explained that the need for transparency often comes as a demand from the public, based on mistrust, and a demand to be able to see everything in order to be able to determine that things are all right. Therefore, in some cases, the public needs to understand that being too transparent might be counterproductive to safety, as some organizational issues are better dealt with without sharing everything in the open.

L.K. Clewett, Executive Vice President and Chief Nuclear Officer of Bruce Power, presented the leadership actions taken to improve safety culture at Bruce Power and discussed their safety culture assessment approach, which was reviewed in 2012, focusing especially on the identification and prioritization of actions based on the results obtained.

Safety culture activities are structured around a single process: a thorough self-assessment conducted periodically and completed by regular safety culture monitoring panels, monthly and weekly leadership communication on safety culture, and refreshed leadership training around safety culture for first-line managers. The central objective of these activities is to collect feedback from first-line managers and generally engage employees by meeting them in the field.

Regular safety culture monitoring panels are small groups formed by people from performance improvement or corporate safety assessment teams. The teams not only meet with leaders but also review recent events at Bruce Power to obtain inputs from people on the floor as to what actions were taken and what they mean

to the people who are actually doing the work. Clewett described this feedback as insightful and stated that it is used to trend progress between safety culture assessments.

The self-assessment methodology is based on a survey, interviews, focus groups and insights from the monitoring panels over the previous year. In 2013, this process included an independent industry expert in safety culture, as well as three teams of 34 employees conducting interviews. The purpose of the assessment is to obtain input on how employees perceive safety. Safety cannot be rated in absolute terms, therefore the assessment process is designed to include people’s concerns, behaviour patterns and other insights surfacing in the assessment to identify actions to improve nuclear safety.

An oversight committee chaired by the Chief Nuclear Officer with a cross-department team reviews the results. The most commonly raised concerns in the previous survey were: the long term health of the plant, equipment condition, communication gaps between the purpose, value and performance of the corrective action programmes, and a lack of field presence of managers. They were perceived to be too focused on data and not enough on talking with people and understanding what is not working and why.

Following this, three main focus areas were identified: improving equipment health, improving first-line managers’ communication through visual management boards, and improving the organization’s corrective action programmes and learning ability. Actions have been led by cross-functional teams involving top performers across the organization, with sponsorship from senior leaders. According to Clewett, results have been very positive: the error rate was reduced by 50% (a record for power generation in 2015), safety awareness was improved and better communication was observed involving all staff.

Finally, Clewett identified several different key lessons and success factors, including, having site-wide actions, establishing sponsorships from key leaders, and focussing actions and communication on the top three issues. These factors contributed to the success of acting upon the safety culture assessment results, which led to improved safety and commercial performance.

M.A. Habib, Chief Executive of Pakistan Nuclear Regulatory Authority (PNRA), presented PNRA’s activities to assess and improve safety culture. Habib focused especially on their safety culture self-assessment and the subsequent improvement activities implemented with the support of the IAEA.

Habib described the importance of safety culture for PNRA in fulfilling its vision and mission: to create a relationship of trust and transparency in the regulation of nuclear safety in order to protect people and the environment from the harmful effects of ionizing radiation in a manner that gains the confidence of all stakeholders. PNRA regards safety culture as a model for communication at the national level for licensees and other stakeholders, and at the international

level for other regulatory bodies. In order to improve safety culture within PNRA, but also in the industry, PNRA identified a need for dialogue sessions to develop a common understanding of safety culture between stakeholders, and a need for safety culture self-assessments, not only by the licensees but also by the regulatory body.

PNRA developed its safety culture self-assessment programme with the support of the IAEA Technical Cooperation programme. Following an IAEA led safety culture workshop for senior management, a multidisciplinary safety culture self-assessment team was selected to receive training on the IAEA safety culture self-assessment methodology as well as on the regulatory oversight of safety culture. In order to avoid ‘group think’ and ensure a diversity of perspectives, the team consisted of representatives from all parts of the organization. Prior to launching the assessment, PNRA implemented an awareness campaign and related communication activities to facilitate involvement, participation and feedback from all staff throughout the assessment.

The first step of the assessment involved the collection of data through a variety of methods (observations, interviews, document analysis, surveys and focus groups) and led to the identification of 1900 items related to culture. PNRA performed a descriptive analysis of these items using a systemic approach based on tools such as bubble diagrams. From this, cultural themes were identified, and the basic assumptions driving behaviour and norms were explored.

Cultural themes highlighted through the analysis were grouped together to form overarching themes. Additionally, some of the cultural themes that were not as prominent, but had high safety significance, were also considered as overarching themes.

The second step of the assessment was to perform a normative analysis by reviewing these higher order themes against characteristics and attributes of safety culture specified in international standards such as IAEA Safety Standards Series No. GS-G-3.5, The Management System for Nuclear Installations.¹ These characteristics and attributes were used as a framework to evaluate the strengths (e.g. organizational progression, friendly working environment) and weaknesses (e.g. fear of reporting) in PNRA.

The assessment triggered improvement activities and related communications to raise awareness of the organization’s strengths and weaknesses. The structure of core regulatory processes was reviewed to improve their effectiveness by incorporating the concept of safety culture. Moreover, dialogue sessions carried out during the implementation of safety culture

1 INTERNATIONAL ATOMIC ENERGY AGENCY, The Management System for Nuclear Installations, IAEA Safety Standards Series No. GS-G-3.5, IAEA, Vienna (2009).

self-assessment tools helped promote a shared understanding of safety culture within PNRA.

Habib concluded that the safety culture self-assessment started a learning journey within PNRA. It helped in understanding the linkage between beliefs, basic assumptions about actions and attitudes, and improved safety culture.

Y. Hah, Head of the Division of Human Aspects of Nuclear Safety of