Organizational Silos and System Safety

This open access book explores the complex relationship between siloed operations and performance, focussing on high-consequence sectors such as safety-critical industries and healthcare. It asks why silos form and analyses their benefits and disadvantages for social systems: more efficient working and faster development of skills within the working group at the cost of retarded information sharing, misunderstanding and potential threats to safety. Different case studies of practices and organizational innovations that encourage cross-fertilization and cross-sectoral learning are presented. The brief analyses the role of context and adaptation when learning and transferring safety interventions and improvement efforts within and across industry sectors, and studies the common barriers of ‘not invented here’, ‘we are special’, suspicion and poor communication.

The ideas set out in Organizational Silos and System Safety are of interest to research communities in safety science, organizational performance and management, to practitioners and to policy-makers in high-hazard industry sectors. They can help develop cross-sector and cross-level learning and improvement.