Organizational learning activities in high-hazard industries: The logics underlying self-analysis

Organizational learning takes place through activities performed by individ uals, groups, and organizations as they gather and digest information, imag ine and plan new actions, and implement change. I examine the learning prac tices of companies in two industries - nuclear power plants and chemical pr ocess plants - that must manage safety as a major component of operations, and therefore must learn from precursors and near-misses rather than exclus ively by trial-and-error. Specifically, I analyse the linked assumptions or logics underlying incident reviews, root cause analysis teams, and self-an alysis programmes. These loses arise from occupational and hierarchical gro ups that work on different problems in different ways - for example, antici pation and resilience, fixing and learning, concrete and abstract. In organ izations with fragmentary, myopic and disparate understandings of how the w ork is accomplished, there ape likely to be more failures to learn from ope rating experience, recurrent problems, and cyclical crises. Enhanced learni ng requires ways to broaden and bring together disparate logics.