It is indeed customary to offer the management and executive positions to the most experienced people, i.e. those in the 60–70 age group. However, if all these positions are held by the most experienced people, this considerably limits opportunities for the next generation, in the 50–60 age bracket, to advance to these positions. Although they will be senior in terms of skills, they will not be allowed to access such managerial functions. This situation could lead companies to limit the hiring of young workers and cause the 50–60 generation and the next to leave the organisation or to lose motivation due to the lack of prospects. There is a risk of organisational "sclerosis", which could affect these companies' capacity for innovation.

Moreover, the backgrounds, training, expectations vis-à-vis the company and even the values of the different generations working together can differ. The company must manage this diversity.

### *6.3.3 Offering Rewarding Positions to the Most Experienced*

Japan is experimenting with different ways to offer people rewarding positions without raising their salary or offering senior management positions to the workers with the most experience.

Three types of positions or retraining possibilities are currently being tested for the oldest people:

For the most experienced people to be placed in an on-site trainer or coach position, they must learn new teaching and coaching skills, decisions must be made regarding the practices to be taught, and workstation ergonomics must be adapted.

If they are to be placed in positions as technical experts, they require access to training and continuous professional development in order to regularly update their technical and interpersonal skills. And lastly, positioning these experienced people as independent consultants implies managing their exit from the company and requires them to have the ability to make the shift from manager to consultant and accept this change in status.

### *6.3.4 Ergonomics and Consideration of Human and Organisational Factors*

The concomitance of several generations within a same company requires rethinking workstation ergonomics to adapt to the needs and limitations of each individual. In addition to workstation ergonomics, this mix has an impact on work organisation overall, whether in terms of physical elements such as workspace management since, for example, the most experienced people are attached to having their own office, or in terms of work schedule or even of managing telecommuting or blended working, for example [2].

### **6.4 Discussion**

These elements from Japan should prompt a reflection in France and Europe on the management of long careers and their potential impact on safety.

Three questions arise directly from the reflections and experiments undertaken in Japan on how to design a professional development programme that spans the entire career in order to improve the management of safety and the prevention of major accidents.

Two additional questions should also be considered in order to investigate the impact on safety and are discussed below.

### *6.4.1 Age Limit and Safety*

Given the biological laws of ageing, are there any professions in which a lower age limit should be imposed for the sake of safety?

Indeed, the decline in cognitive and psychomotor performance and the higher risk of incapacity or sudden death (that come with ageing) could lead to a person becoming unsuitable for their role. Some frontline operator professions come to mind, such as airline pilot, nuclear power reactor operator, air traffic controller, train driver or surgeon. The literature on the ageing of airline pilots shows that it is very difficult to determine an age limit, because (1) the effects of ageing differ widely between individuals, and (2) by drawing on their experience, these operators develop compensatory strategies which allow them to perform their tasks very satisfactorily despite a significant decline in cognitive function measured separately from their occupation. Thus, the practical outcome in aviation depends on the economic situation: when there are too many pilots, impairment due to ageing is invoked in order to oblige pilots to retire, whereas when more pilots are needed, the justification mentioned above is invoked to keep anyone whom medical and professional bodies deem still fit to fly [4].

### *6.4.2 Generational Mix and Safety*

What harmonious local and contextual generational mix, what balanced local and contextual age pyramid would enable a better management of the impact of long careers on safety?

Economic considerations are pushing the retirement age upwards, but the established general rule then applies to age pyramids that are possibly very different from one company to the next. Yet, when it comes to safety, what matters within a company is to have a balanced ecosystem with a harmonious intergenerational mix and above all to avoid retiring large numbers of highly experienced employees at a time and then massively replacing them with inexperienced young people without having some kind of process in place for the transmission of empirical knowledge. This type of "mass replacement" may prove more acceptable or even advisable in future, with rapid and frequent technological changes giving youth a growing advantage. However, the knowledge required to manage the safety of increasingly complex systems will not be limited to the most recent technical component. Therefore, a balance must be struck between the interests of productivity and economic performance and those of safety. Moreover, in addition to being specific to each company, the age pyramid also depends on the past and current attractiveness of the particular industry.

More than the "usability" of older workers, what should be worked on is the attractiveness, the distribution and maintaining employability across the entire age pyramid. This would imply managing retirement ages differently according not only to the occupation, the harshness of its working conditions and its relationship to risk, but also according to the company, the age pyramids, etc.

### **References**

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

# **Chapter 7 Senior Mentoring, Skills Transfer Subject to Conditions**

**Tania Navarro Rodríguez and Alexandre Largier**

**Abstract** The purpose of this chapter is to highlight the main findings of French language studies on senior mentoring. It shows in particular that mentoring is a protean system which can be defined and fashioned by the way it is exercised, by the type of activity that it involves and by the context in which the mentoring practices take place.

**Keywords** Mentoring · Skill transfer · Seniors

### **7.1 Introduction**

Although much debated, the involvement of seniors in mentoring has aroused the interest of manufacturers, the government and researchers in France for several years, as demonstrated by the "Masingue" government report published in 2009 on senior mentoring, the consideration given to this issue in risk industries, in particular the nuclear industry, as well as the numerous publications dedicated to this subject in the human and social sciences (sociology, education sciences, management sciences, etc.). All these players seem to share the same concern: mentoring, and in particular senior mentoring, is considered to be the most appropriate solution to solve the problem of skill transfer.

Recent French language studies have analysed how seniors develop transverse mentoring skills [4]. Other studies have explored how to enhance company mentoring, demonstrating in particular that mentoring is "partner-based teaching, which commits the company collectively" [5]. Lastly, some studies have focused on the deployment of mentoring [6], placing the emphasis on certain limitations in the implementation of senior mentoring.

This document puts in perspective some data drawn from French language literature dedicated to senior mentoring. We will try to identify certain questions that

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07805-7\_7

T. N. Rodríguez (B) · A. Largier

IRSN, Fontenay-aux-Roses, France

e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
© The Author(s) 2022

H. Laroche et al. (eds.), *Managing Future Challenges for Safety*, SpringerBriefs in Safety Management,

need to be answered concerning the implementation of senior mentoring. Although mentoring can be defined

as a teaching approach based on a guided work situation [and a] professional socialization instrument. [5, p. 24]

it nevertheless remains a protean system. It seems useful to investigate the way it is exercised, the type of activity and the context in which the mentoring practices take place.

### **7.2 Mentoring, Numerous Forms and Varied Contexts**

Mentoring may aim to reproduce practices or anticipate changes [8]. The extent to which company mentoring is formalised also contributes to the definition and organisation of mentoring: implementation or not of training for the mentors to prepare them for their roles; implementation or not of means, times and places giving mentors the opportunity to examine their practices. According to B. Masingue, there are numerous types of mentoring: traditional mentoring, cross-mentoring, reverse mentoring, expert mentoring, hierarchical mentoring. All these types can be organised in different ways: tandem or collective; fixed or rotating; organised around a team whose members act as mentors on a segment of their activity, or performed by employees working full-time as mentors. Similarly, mentoring can be organised for a given group of jobs or on a cross-company basis. Lastly, the company context must also be considered: depending on its stability and the need to adapt rapidly, mentoring will be more or less appropriate [7].

Some informal mentoring practices have existed for many years, and the skills transmitted on this occasion may extend far beyond the purely technical aspect of the activity. Representations of the profession, the management, the organisation may also be transmitted, as well as local values and standards, etc., which may sometimes conflict with other company messages. In some configurations, the implementation of "institutional" mentoring may destabilise existing practices which have stood the test of time, in particular as regards safety, with for example the transmission of prudence know-how [2].

In his analysis of company mentoring operating modes, [8] demonstrates that this function is often poorly formalised, the mentor's activities not being precisely defined. In this case, it often consists of informal actions obeying a training logic in a work situation. According to this author, mentoring practices cover several broad types of activity, in particular: induction of new hires aiming to integrate them into a project and to give a presentation of the company entities; explanation of the work and day-to-day follow-up; assessment of the results, which is often poorly formalised (spontaneous assessment). For all these reasons, evaluating the effects of mentoring proves difficult [3].

### **7.3 Seniors, All Mentors**

The assumption that seniors are the best placed and the most able to act as mentors has been questioned by the Masingue report:

The idea that mentors would obviously be seniors and that seniors are automatically good mentors must be seriously put into perspective in view of the facts. It would even represent a "false truth". [7, p. 5]

Firstly, acting as a mentor is not purely a matter of possessing high technical skills. The mentor must also possess basic teaching skills and must be willing to be a mentor. Transmission does not simply consist in "pouring" a skill into a container—the mentee. Mentoring is a teaching–learning relationship which, to be effective, feeds on discussions, questioning and professional arguments [1]. The mentoring activity therefore involves listening, reformulation, stimulation and reflection regarding the role-play conditions.

In addition, the mentoring activity also affects the mentor. Mentoring cannot just be considered as a simple one-way transfer of skills from the mentor to the mentee. This practice has a retroactive effect on mentors. These effects of mentorship on the mentors themselves are generally not perceived by organisations. The practices may be explained by reflection–action situations at work: development of the ability to consider and analyse situations and practices (transverse skill transferable to other situations) and development of a critical eye on oneself, one's practices and one's own ability to act by taking a detached look at the action (meta-skill: ability to look at one's own skills and means of action). Wittorski indicates that mentoring may lead the mentor to produce a critical distancing approach [8, p. 22].

This is because this attitude promotes a reflexive position and because the new hire is also a source of enrichment for the mentor. For these two reasons, mentors may have to change their practices, positions and representations, a situation which may be badly received when not chosen freely.

In addition, in some activities, seniors are not necessarily the best placed to perform mentoring activities. This is especially true in activities where knowledge quickly becomes obsolete, for example sales activities where the products change rapidly, and activities in which the technical devices used are being constantly upgraded. This may also be the case of highly arduous activities in which the community (and the organisation) may choose to "preserve" the seniors by keeping them away from the field and by assigning them administrative, preparation or site monitoring tasks, for example.

Lastly, in some organisations with rapid job turnover, a senior in the company, even with extensive general experience, may be a relative newcomer to their job. And to think that a senior is familiar with the field just because they worked in it 20 years ago may prove dangerous since, frequently, everything has moved on since then.

### **References**

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

# **Chapter 8 Airbus Global Workforce Forecast (GWF)**

# **Meet the Future Competence Challenge**

### **Béatrice Pons, Jean-Hugues Rodriguez, and Florence Reuzeau**

**Abstract** This chapter is a brief overview of the Global Workforce Forecast (GWF), a document made public by Airbus presenting the results of a large study launched by the group in 2018. The aim of the GWF is to provide every employee, every reader with relevant information and data to be prepared for the 2019–2029 competence challenge the company will face by 2030.

**Keywords** Human resources · Competencies · Industry 4.0 · Demography · Megatrends

### **8.1 Introduction**

Understanding fast transitions (digitalisation, Industry 4.0, carbon neutral, COVID-19) and their transformations to come in different disciplines is key to be prepared for competence challenges. Our competence strategy resulting from successive iterations helps to anticipate declining activities, emerging jobs and competences.

The Global Workforce Forecast (GWF) document examines the main asset of the company, its human capital. It presents how to secure continuous positive growth and support Airbus' transition towards a new worldwide Industry 4.0 and becoming a new technology company. This document is structured into five main chapters: megatrends, demography, competence strategy, resource development levers and practices and the evolution of resource development levers.

B. Pons (B) · J.-H. Rodriguez · F. Reuzeau Airbus, Toulouse, France e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
### **8.2 Involve Everyone in the Transformation of the Company**

It then appears obvious that each individual would need to take part in this transition by taking one's development into one's own hands with the support of the organisations. One way to facilitate this was the creation of a document providing all elements allowing "my" capability to project "myself" in future of "my" company in terms of skills.

The ambition of the Global Workforce Forecast is to provide all employees with relevant data, information and analysis to better understand, anticipate and prepare the evolution of our company competencies. Employees worldwide are actors of this opportunity and are encouraged to engage their own relevant development actions such as learning, mobility and knowledge management.

The purpose of this study launched in 2018 is to give a robust and consistent frame of reference to every reader in order to:

### **8.3 Deep and Fast Transformation: A Shared Concern**

In 2019, Airbus decided to make this document public as all information provided could help institutions, universities, any talent worldwide and our supply chain employees and leaders to better understand our transitions and associated skills forecast. It was also considered as an opportunity to engage in exchanges with other stakeholders working on the subject, such as the World Economic Forum Future of Work, the EU Commission's Pact for Skills and other committees.

Our world is facing an ever-increasing pace of global change and has been labelled as volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA). This world brings a high number of challenges and opportunities to our company: a competitive environment in a globalised and financially driven economy, a permanent increase in customer expectations, reputational challenges, the need for Airbus to deal with innovation mostly because of the COVID-19 crisis, the need to become carbon neutral, the digital transformation and the development of Industry 4.0, generational gaps and demographical changes considering that 50,000 employees will leave the company in the next 10 years and 80% of our staff will be generations Y, Z in 2027.

1 Human Resource.

These fast-approaching transformations are conveying risks and challenges, but bring great opportunities if well anticipated and prepared with the full engagement of the whole organisation and all employees.

It is our company's responsibility to put in place appropriate means and levers helping managers and employees to adapt our main asset, "human capital", and make the most of it for a successful future with a positive growth mind-set.

Megatrends are transformative, global forces that shape the future world with their far-reaching influences on business, societies, economies, cultures and personal lives. Megatrends impact all regions of the world and all actors and organisations over a large time scale. We have selected six megatrends: economic globalisation, resource scarcity and climate change, global governance, demographics and social evolution, innovation and technologies, new consumption patterns.

### **8.4 The Airbus Competence Strategy: A Full Engagement with International Organisations**

The Airbus competence strategy is a company approach which aims to support the business strategy implementation in a five year time frame and to accompany the five Airbus business drivers: boost our existing core business, be a digital aerospace champion, be a responsible company, be the global company of choice, shape the future of flight.

Consequently, the competence strategy objectives are to:

The Global Workforce Forecast helps also to understand the different HR tools and levers available to support skills development and knowledge sharing. A chapter is also dedicated to the improvement of those tools and levers. Leaders and employees should be more comfortable in engaging their collective and individual skills developments.

Analysis, realisation and communication of the Global Workforce Forecast open the door to different initiatives and communities worldwide:

### **8.5 Conclusion**

There is a clear ambition and willingness from many top leaders and specialists to find collective solutions in support of massive and scalable upskilling and reskilling challenges to respond to the impending fast transitions worldwide. The new technologies and the improved understanding of neuroscience open the door to very innovative approaches allowing new perspectives for easier responses to this challenge. Communication and open collaboration are key to engaging proper transitions with all stakeholders in education, industry (large and small companies), authorities, social partners and people.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

# **Chapter 9 Rethinking Competencies in Hazardous Industries**

# **Case Study of the Nuclear Sector in France**

### **Alexandre Largier**

**Abstract** Nuclear safety depends largely on the competence and competencies of the employees in the sector. While this is not a new subject, numerous current and future changes once again bring into question these competencies and their management. In recent years, a number of studies have demonstrated the limitations of the managerial approach to competencies, in particular their failure to take into account the collective dimension of said competencies and the contextual aspects of their implementation. In our opinion, competencies must be considered in terms of the work activity so that they are not restricted to a systematised formalism, and their management must be tackled within the organised framework in which they are deployed.

**Keywords** Competencies · Nuclear sector · Work activities

### **9.1 Introduction: Why Study Competencies in the Nuclear Industry?**

French nuclear facilities are ageing, which raises new technical issues regarding the use or replacement of certain items of equipment, as well as the decommissioning work that can be expected. At the same time, the development of complex technologies—from digital twins to the use of artificial intelligence to identify probable failures, as well as the design of small modular reactors (SMRs)—reveals the critical importance of competence and competencies.

Meanwhile, the retirement of numerous workers in the nuclear sector in Europe and more especially in France, in addition to the poor opinion that younger generations have of the nuclear industry, raises questions regarding the development, and even the upkeep, of knowledge capital in the sector. This point is not new, as it was

© The Author(s) 2022

A. Largier (B)

IRSN, Fontenay-aux-Roses, France e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
H. Laroche et al. (eds.), *Managing Future Challenges for Safety*, SpringerBriefs in Safety Management, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07805-7\_9

raised in the early 2000s by Mr. El Baradei,1 Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) from 1997 to 2009.

The way in which competencies in the nuclear industry are taken into account is related to the way in which people are integrated in socio-technical systems. This connection has evolved with the history of the sector and as a result of major nuclear accidents. It was after the accident at the Three Mile Island (TMI) power plant on 28 March 1979 that questions inherent to the training of operating staff came to be seen as being of major importance [11]. More recently, the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant in Japan on 11 March 2011 can be considered as a new factor in the way competencies are taken into account in the nuclear industry. The earthquake and the tsunami that followed seriously affected the nuclear facilities as well as their environment. Consequently, providing support to the power plant agents proved complicated and, to a large extent, they had to cope on their own with a "beyond design" situation far exceeding the realm of what the plant was designed to withstand. Analysts at the time pointed out the importance of the resilience and competencies required to cope with unexpected events [12]. This accident raised questions, firstly, around the implementation of the competence and competencies of nuclear players in "extreme situations" [7] and, secondly, around the competencies of players not specifically belonging to the nuclear sector, but who are nevertheless stakeholders in crisis management (politicians, emergency services, medical staff, etc.).

Questions concerning the training and competencies of personnel working in the field of safety and radiation protection, therefore, fall within the scope of a long-term process marked by critical events. The subject of competence and competencies is not new, but has evolved further to these events and the questions they raised. They have led nuclear operators to define and deploy a set of systems to identify competency requirements in the short and medium terms, then evaluate, acquire and maintain said competencies.

However, this managerial approach to competencies has its limitations. In this document, we will attempt to describe them and to present an approach aimed at surpassing them.

### **9.2 Limitations of Managerial Approach to Competencies**

In France, Strategic Workforce Planning (SWP) is built into the labour code: since 2005, all companies with more than 300 employees must renegotiate the SWP every three years. These companies, supported by management science researchers, have thus conducted long-term studies on the creation and deployment of a managerial approach to competencies.

While one undeniable advantage in taking these competencies into account has been the "production and renewal of numerous HRM (Human Resources Management) tools" [2, p. 40], the use of this concept has also led to studies on the work

1 Speech by Mohamed El Baradei, during the IAEA general assembly in 2002.

itself and on workers (as opposed to qualifications focusing on workstations) and to more emphasis being placed on the role played by the work environment and its various components as contributing to the acquisition and mobilisation of such competencies. These two advantages—the development of a managerial approach to competencies and the work itself being taken into account—form the "competencies paradox". On the one hand, there is a move to standardise these competencies, and on the other hand, the assertion of a singularity that the systems struggle to encapsulate.

Most definitions of competency are based on elements put forward by ergonomics and psychology, where competence is defined as

the individual taking initiative and responsibility for problems and events that they face in professional situations. […] a practical understanding of situations that relies on knowledge acquired and transforms them... [18, p. 70]

This transformation depends largely on resources that can be mobilised in a given situation and the abilities of the individual to mobilise them.

Presented in this way, competencies are transformed whenever they are implemented; they are what allows the player to take action in view of what is available and what is missing. It is, therefore, difficult to contain them in management systems that endeavour to normalise a situation in order to manage it. By attempting to specify and categorise competencies at all costs, we risk creating constraints that are too rigid or an administrative management that is disconnected from the reality of actual working situations, despite the fulfilment of such activities relying on the ability to adapt and invent new solutions.

Another limitation of the managerial approach to competencies lies in their individualising nature. While work requires increasingly collective activity to be performed, the managerial approach to competencies struggles to take into account the collective dimension of competencies.

This is evident in the way competence is evaluated, primarily on an individual basis [15], which is a major component of the "logic of competency" [14], at the core of the differentiation between players and their remuneration.

Despite these limitations, competence and competencies are always present as components of performance, both as regards production quality and industrial safety. Competencies are used in the texts of nuclear operators and regulators as an action lever and a guarantee of efficiency. Questions evolve, the subjects treated change, but competencies continue to be the centre of attention.

As an example, in 2004, the IRSN launched an analysis of the system managing the competencies of the operating personnel working for a nuclear operator. This study demonstrated that the competency reference frames, or "mandatory points of passage" of the competency approaches [13], are often highly detailed and consequently difficult to use. Similarly, the collective dimension of the activity is largely ignored by the management system, which also struggles to consider the competencies in a dynamic manner. Lastly, the deployment of the approach is incumbent upon the trades (mechanics, boilermaking, automation, etc.), while some activities, such as the monitoring of service providers, do not come under the role of a particular trade and find themselves partially "forgotten" by the management system [9]. The APTEIS2 report entitled "Analyse de la chute du Générateur de Vapeur usé n°2 EDF—CNPE de Paluel" ("Analysis of the fall of the Paluel EDF—CNPE worn steam generator No. 2") published in 2017 confirms some of these results concerning competencies related to the monitoring activity, which corroborates the fact that the managerial approach to competencies has its limitations.

If the managerial approach to competencies has limitations, how can we tackle competencies whose implementation takes their singular nature into account, while also taking into consideration the needs of the companies, managers and operators who manage these competencies?

### **9.3 Rethinking Competencies in Work Activities**

We do not consider that there are recommendations on the one side and actual work on the other, but rather that work is an activity that mobilises various resources including recommendations—which must be understood, adapted and interpreted. The players' abilities to adapt are, therefore, not confined to a controlled area of freedom; they are inherent to the normality of work. According to Cuvelier and Woods [5], this "normal deviation" leads to the construction of competencies, instruments and work collectives. Competence is shaped by activities, by combining resources to reach the objective set in view of the specificities of the work situation. Competencies also establish the link between regulated safety and managed safety: effective safety is the expression of competencies implemented during the work activity, which mobilises various resources including recommendations. We, therefore, consider that competencies must be "taken seriously", in other words analysed firstly in their natural environment, that of the work "being done", and secondly considered with respect to the "organised framework" in which they lie and which they structure in return.

### *9.3.1 Analysing the Situational Implementation of Competencies*

### Competencies

are not deployed in neutral universes, but in structured frameworks in which an employer expects the personnel or employees to comply with a hierarchical organisation, a division of the work, the scope of their "job" or "function", and to use the tools that have been imposed. [16, p. 89]

The resources (including know-how, tools, procedures and colleagues) are not always accessible, and the normative frameworks sometimes restrict the players, direct them,

2 For "Analyse Pluridisciplinaire du Travail, Etudes et Interventions sociales", a group of experts specialising in multidisciplinary analysis of work and performing social studies.

even "prevent" them from being inventive. Knowledge is put into practice through relations—with managerial representatives, peers, customers—involving power relationships, effects of identity construction, belonging and self-image. The uses made of technical devices and systems that allow for competencies to be developed also contribute to players' strategies and behaviours. Competencies, therefore, consist of a dynamic combination insomuch as they are the result of mobilising knowledge and "supports" specific to the work context. They are remodelled each time the individuals and work collectives must "do what is necessary" to obtain an expected result, depending on their status at a given time and what is available. Consequently, the competencies implemented cannot be identified without analysing the situated activity.

### *9.3.2 Importance of Organisational Dimensions in the Implementation of Competencies*

In order to act, individuals and collectives require internal and external resources and must be able to control the conditions necessary to access these resources. Yet, these resources are for the most part socially distributed and the product of the inscription of personal trajectories in interaction networks, organisations and institutional structures (labour market, etc.) [4, p. 15].

Thus, the contextualised implementation of resources depends partly on the individual path along which the individual acquires experience, develops certain competencies and loses others and weaves a network of potentially mobilisable interpersonal relations during the preparation and performance of the activity. Part of this path is determined by the organisation.

In theory, the development of the "logic of competency" in companies represents a shift away from seniority-based career development in which professional promotions are awarded purely for seniority at the expense of efficiency in the mobilisation of competencies and the level of performance reached. In reality, seniority-based and merit-based promotions coexist, which may cause some players to lose interest. In addition, increased professional mobility can only be exchanged for individual responsibility in the implementation and development of competencies if the internal job market available is sufficiently large. Otherwise, this may generate a feeling of imbalance, possibly even injustice, and lead the players to become demotivated [8]. Especially since today, there are numerous possibilities for developing a "side activity" [17], professional or not, simplified by communication and information technologies [3].

This possible disinvestment represents a double risk regarding safety and security. The first is that "jaded" players restrict themselves to "procedural compliance". Since industrial safety cannot be limited to a strict application of the rules, there is a strong chance that in this type of situation, the system will seize up. The second risk concerns the acquisition, development and maintenance of competencies. In trades where competencies are acquired in the long term, like most technical trades in the nuclear sector, the lack of perspectives and disinvestment could be prejudicial to the performance of the system.

Some authors consider that "enabling organisations", which promote the development of available resources and the possibilities of using them, must be designed [1, p. 113]. This approach illustrates the importance given to the context in which the competencies are implemented.

On the one hand, because the work context, near and far, serves as a support for the action. The resources present in the work environment—technical devices and systems, procedures, but also colleagues, customers, etc.—may be mobilised by the employees to reach their objectives. On the other hand, because the employees structure their work environment so that it offers "handholds" for the action.

### **9.4 Conclusion**

Most of the activities performed include a collective dimension. They are the fruit of joint actions conducted within collectives where specific knowledge, routines, practices, standards and shared representations have been developed. This collective dimension of the activity, which is ignored by managerial approach of competencies, can be grasped through an analysis of the contextualised competencies, whereby the mobilisation of interpersonal networks and the periods of cooperation reveal the distributed and collective competencies [10].

Regarding safety, in the nuclear industry as in other sectors, to brush aside the aporias of a managerial approach to competencies too focused on single individuals and their know-how, we must analyse the work that goes into guaranteeing safety in a given context by mobilising and structuring the internal and external resources available and questioning the competencies related to this work (whether these competencies are focused on restructuring, finding workarounds, reorganisation or otherwise).

This situated approach towards competencies must also highlight the role of the "organised framework" on the implementation of competencies. The organisational measures set up to hire, train and foster progress for the players have an impact on the action itself, since they allow players to mobilise particular resources depending on procedures that are quite often specific to them. Conversely, players build this framework by creating rules, routines and systems; employees "fit out" their environment in such a way that it complies with and guides their action. This is made all the easier when the context is flexible.

Based on a situational analysis of the activity, a managerial approach to competencies should, therefore, firstly beware of any systematism and highlight the collective dimension of "safety work", including in the evaluation of the competencies and, secondly, consider how to make work environments more flexible. This approach would consist in adding value to surplus, asperities and duplicates, rather than erasing them.

Lastly, it may be worthwhile questioning the deployment of the "logic of competency" in organisations whose operation is still largely based on the planned organisation model [6]. Is there not a paradox, even an incompatibility, in implementing a logic advocating responsibility, autonomous and deliberate mobilisation in organisations where the activity is strictly defined and where players are expected to rigorously apply the rules and comply with the "best practices" enacted by the designers?

### **References**

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

# **Chapter 10 The Design of "Future Work" in Industrial Contexts**

# **Lessons Learned from Worker–Technology Cooperation and Work Transformation Management**

### **Flore Barcellini**

**Abstract** This chapter proposes to discuss work transformation management as a key issue to designing working conditions to ensure safe, healthy and performant work in a context of technological transitions. Here, we view the design of future work as a transition process and as a set of projects—social, organisational, technological—that will together shape a "future of work". We consider lessons from the past regarding: (1) cooperation between workers and technology and (2) project management of work transformations, as resources to manage this transition. These lessons will be discussed with reference to ongoing research dealing with introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) or collaborative robotics at work in the French industrial context, as an illustration of the transformation of industry at a global level.

**Keywords** Worker–technologies cooperation · Transformation of work management · Activity-centred design · Ergonomics · Industry 4.0

### **10.1 Introduction**

Work situations in industry are facing a profound transformation in relation to the introduction of technology due to both an evolution of this technology (evolutions of AI algorithms and massive data analysis, collaborative robotics…) and a political invitation at an international level [11] to promote the "modernisation" of industry. Indeed, a closer look at issues raised by technological transformations reveals that some "old" ones seem to be ignored by promotors of those transformations.1 In this context, the objective of this chapter is to recall lessons learned concerning both workers-technology cooperation and work transformation management. We discuss

F. Barcellini (B) CNAM, Paris, France e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
© The Author(s) 2022 H. Laroche et al. (eds.), *Managing Future Challenges for Safety*, SpringerBriefs in Safety Management, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07805-7\_10

1 See for instance [22] for an argumentation.

the relevance of these lessons learned on the basis of several ongoing collaborative research projects dealing with introduction of collaborative robotics in industry line [5, 12, 30, 37] or artificial intelligence in various work situations (radiology, online counselling, legal activities, design and engineering) [5, 22, 23].2

In this chapter, we propose to discuss work transformation management as a key issue to designing "a future work" to ensure safe, healthy and performant work in a context of technological transitions. Here, we view the design of future work as a transition process and as a set of projects—social, organisational, technological that will together shape a "future work" in a given situation. We focus here on lessons learned from the past regarding two key issues for managing this transition: (1) cooperation between workers and technology and (2) project management of work transformation, i.e. design project management.

### **10.2 Lessons Learned for Worker–Technology Cooperation Research and Project Design Management**

### *10.2.1 Is Worker–Technology Cooperation a Myth or a Possible Reality?*

Worker–technology cooperation has been studied at least since massive introduction of automation at work, as well as the first surge of artificial intelligence or expert systems in the late 80s, and in particular in relation to safety. Previous works on automation, AI and cooperation between human and machine sought to qualify the feasibility of human–machine cooperation and the risks implied for human health and organisational safety [26, 27, 35, 42]. These earlier works outlined limits such as impossibilities for an "intelligent or cooperative machine" to access and interpret context of action or to build a shared understanding of a worker situation, a poor relation between workers and technology that may be unidirectional and nonadaptative, i.e. the "machine" is not able to display dynamic behaviour in the course of the joint action with workers. These limits implied that the "machine" was not actually cooperative in a strong sense, as cooperation is anchored in the capacity of sharing common goals and of regulation of interdependent situations on the basis of understanding of a given situation of action [27, 39]. Technologies and workers were, thus, mainly in interdependence more than in cooperation [18, 26, 39, 42]. Regarding safety issues, these limits in the worker–technology relationship may imply [26]: loss of human expertise and lack of mutual control over a given situation, limited situation awareness construction and thus reliability of the worker–technology systems; complacency of workers regarding technology proposals and lack of self-confidence;

2 ANR project HECTTOR ANR-17-CE10-0011; ANR project ICARO ANR-10-CORD-0025 on collaborative robotics. Collaboration with Orange Labs or car manufacturer on introduction of AI in various work situations (radiology, online counselling, legal activities, design and engineering).

and finally a lack of adaptivity of the worker–technology system due to a lack of anticipation and feedback [36]. Moreover, these limits are reviewed as being one cause of accidents [21, 38]. They can be explained by: (1) the limitations of the technology, the lack of in-depth modelling of human socio-cognitive activities [2, 16, 35]; but also (2) by the way, the introduction of technology is managed in particular with relation to socio-organisational consequences of technological changes, as outlined by the participatory approach and activity-centred ergonomics approach since the 70s [24, 40].

### *10.2.2 A Lack of a Participative and Work-Centred Project Management Approach in Introducing Cooperative Technology at Work*

Indeed, several studies reveal that a majority of projects to introduce new technologies "fail" (60–80% according to studies [15]) with regards to delays in actual usage of new systems, budget overrun, goal achievement, safety and health issues [41]. Different models may be considered to explain these failures. There is extensive literature about a so-called resistance to change in organisations or an organisational inertia [20], the necessity of a cultural change or the role of leaders and managers [3]. However, there are several strong empirical and theoretical limitations to these models addressed by alternative research in ergonomics, sociology, organisation and management sciences (see [1, 7, 10, 24, 31, 33] for critics of previous models) revealing alternative causes of project failure: (1) the lack of political management and of actual cooperation in project management (weakness in the political management of the project and in the definition of project goals; poor collaboration of leaders; technically driven projects; absence of true participatory design approaches) and (2) the work that takes place in the organisations is approached only as a set of theoretical tasks in project management. The social and organisational dimensions of work are overlooked at the beginning of the projects and addressed only at a later stage, as consequences of technological choices. The constraints and leeway related to work activity, the consequences on health and on the quality of production or safety are poorly addressed. These may lead to some hazardous consequences for performance and health of workers, including safety and reliability. In order to overcome these pitfalls, some participative and work-centred project management approaches have been proposed for more than 40 years by participatory design or activity-centred ergonomics [24, 40]—sometimes supported by legislation successfully framing industrial relations as in Scandinavia [29], or not as the failed "Auroux" laws in France in the early 80s [28], and with more or rather less actual adoption in organisations.

### **10.3 So, Are Ongoing Transformations of Work in Relation to Technology Neglecting Lessons Learned from the Past?**

As said in the introduction, industrial work situations are experiencing ongoing transformations in relation to introduction of technology (big data, RFID, virtual reality, AI, collaborative robotics…), these transformations are being encouraged by various national political programmes [11], such as "Industry 4.0" in Germany, "Industrie du futur" in France, "National Network for Manufacturing Innovation" in USA, "Manufacturing Industry Innovation 3.0 Strategy" in the UK, Made in China 2025. Here, the statement is that the globalisation of the financial market, coupled with the ageing of the working population and industrial facilities and ecological issues, may make it necessary to improve production plant and competitiveness. Moreover, the COVID-19 crisis may increase the wish to preserve and to develop a strong and innovative national industrial activity. So, what can be said about this "new era" of workers-technologies cooperation and the way introduction of these technologies is managed with regards to lessons learned from past research? To address these questions, we focus on two flagship "modernisation" technologies: AI and collaborative robotics, and we analyse proposals made by the French programme "Industrie du futur" to organise transformations, as it is claimed that this is one of the only national programmes which puts "Humans at the heart" of transformation.

### *10.3.1 A Strong Techno-Determinism, a Lack of Explainability and an Under-Estimation of the Socio-organisational Impacts of Technologies*

Ongoing studies [5, 12, 22, 23] and analysis of the French "Industrie du Futur" programme using concepts and framework developed by activity-centred ergonomics and sociology [5, 30, 37] reveal a strong techno-determinism in the way technologies are still being conceived/thought of. Technologies are still seen as "remedies" to "problems" (e.g. competitiveness; safety…) with a lack of systematic analysis of those "problems". In addition, the possible consequences on company performance and worker health of the introduction of heterogeneous technologies "there and everywhere", without imagining their joint integration and the contradictions in everyday work that they may generate for workers, are not always considered. It is, however, necessary to assume there is a duality of "cooperation between workers and technology vs. subordination of workers to technology" and evaluate its risks for health, performance and safety, considering organisational and collective issues associated with the introduction of technologies. One can argue that some "old issues" are re-emerging nowadays even if they may be renewed by the enhanced performance of a "machine" [22, 37].

Concerning AI, Gamkrelidze et al. [22] pointed out that issues are tackled from an economical and technical angle, mainly to promote new AI systems. The same is observed for collaborative robotics3 [34, 37]. Promotors of those technologies advocate for an *augmented* or *collaborative* approach between workers and technologies and not a *substitutive* approach. Beyond those promises, we observed in three studies [4, 12, 23] that collaborative robotics or AI still raise the question of actual cooperation between workers and technologies as well as questions about transformations of professional gestures, division of labour between workers and technologies, autonomy and responsibility of workers dependent of a machine behaviours, organisational issues or more societal job issues.

For instance, actual cooperative AI or systems should be able to understand the goals and actions of workers, and workers must be able to understand the functioning and decisions of AI or cooperative systems. This goal has not been reached yet as AI is still not really "explainable" [23]. In the same direction, collaborative robotics exemplified the promises—and pitfalls—of articulation between so-called cooperative technologies and evolution of work situations. On the "promises" side, this technology is presented as "easy to implement and to maintain"; "favouring productivity gains"; virtuous by making certain workstations more attractive for young workers or by contributing to the prevention of musculoskeletal disorders (MSD) cobots taking over repetitive or strenuous tasks. This illustrates well the "technologies seen as remedies" perspective referred to above. On a previous project,4 we tried to articulate technical and work-related issues in the design of a collaborative robot demonstrator intended to equip automobile assembly lines in order to prevent musculoskeletal disorders [5]. Although the demonstrator was not industrialised,5 its design helped to understand technological locks related to dynamic regulation of interdependence between workers and cobots (e.g. dynamic re-planification of robot trajectories related to its analysis of the worker's position in space, gestures or direct communication). However, it was impossible to evaluate its potential role in MSD prevention. Indeed, the demonstrator was designed to reduce some of the biomechanical constraints incurred by workers, but it was only a necessary condition to prevent MSD and not a sufficient one. Indeed, design of the technology alone will not solve prevention and health issues; psychosocial dimensions of work, work organisation, interdependence between introduction of technology projects and other organisational projects related to the work situation [30] are as just as necessary—or even more so—than design of technological artefacts. Yet, in the former project, neither the evolution of the professional gestures nor collective or organisational issues related to the future work organisation were addressed. This advocates for strong proposals of work transformation project management approaches, in order to jointly design technologies and future work situations, including social and organisational issues.

3 There is no consensus on the definition of cobot [32]. We will consider that cobots are robots assisting workers but remaining dependent on worker objectives and gestures. Cobots are thus seen as partners of workers with a direct physical interaction between them.

4 ANR funded project ICARO ANR-10-CORD-0025.

5 Because the demonstrator was too slow to cope with the pace of the industrial line.

### *10.3.2 A Claim for More Participative and Collaborative Project Management with a Lack of Operational Proposals*

As said previously, there is a claim for the centrality of humans and a "vital" need to renew design and change management, but we outlined that those discourses are still dominated by technical rationality and political communication with a poor representation of human and labour sciences (ergonomics, occupational psychology, sociology of work, management and organisational sciences, adult education). Indeed, there is a lack of understanding and proposals regarding transformation of work situations and introduction of collaborative organisations. This is obvious, for example, in the "Industrie du Futur" programme and in the operational means that are proposed to companies to achieve their transformation. On the contrary, we observe a promotion of the Lean Management model as "the" model for so-called operational excellence [19] even though the limits of this model have been outlined in the French context [9]. Moreover, despite the wish for more "collaborative innovation" processes in industries, only technical or financial tools are proposed to help industries in coping with transformations and not really alternative project management approaches supporting actual collaboration of workers in designing their future work and developing the potentially relevant uses and usefulness of technologies as one of the resources of work [13]. Finally, the place left to "Humans" is reduced to training, with training programmes that mainly ignore the importance of "past" experience and the presumed outdated competences of workers to ensure performance and safety at work while assuming that training may compensate for a lack of anticipation of organisational evolutions of work situation questions regarding organisational issues. If humans and work are taken into account, it is often with an individual perspective and situated only at the workstation level, thus neglecting the collective dimension of work and its role in—once again—preserving performance, safety and health.

### **10.4 What Recommendations to Foster the Success of Projects in Terms of Health, Safety and Performance?**

Here, we advocate for widespread promotion and experience of participatory or activity-centred ergonomics project design management approaches [6, 8, 17, 24] as good candidates for one of the "collaborative innovation" approaches. These approaches are designed to address political, social, organisational and technical issues related to work transformation. Indeed, the finality in work transformation related to introduction of technologies has less to do with the characteristics of the technologies themselves (products, tools, working spaces, workstations, organisation, technologies, etc.) as with the *work situations*—articulating individual, social, organisational and technological dimensions—in which these technologies are present. It assumes that work transformation projects are decision-making and design processes [14], socially determining work situations (i.e. structured by a set of decisions made by CEO, designers or prescribers of work in general) and defining a set of prescriptions (tasks to be carried out, technologies to work with organisational structure staff allocation, contracts, timetables, rules, etc.) that workers will have to cope with [25]. In order to be successful, these approaches argue that: (1) an effective political management of work transformation articulating and organising debates and negotiation within the different logics at stake in the project (technology, safety, health, production, human resources, etc.) in a systemic way is needed; (2) and that the decision-making process must be grounded in an understanding and a modelling of actual and future work situations based on an in situ activities analysis.

**Acknowledgements** This chapter is based on past and current collaborations during the ANR ICARO (Corinne Grosse, Adolfo Suarez, Antoine Lasnier, Nahid Armande, colleagues from LAAS and Lirmm) and HECTTOR (Caroline Moricot, Anne-Cécile Lafeuillade, Willy Buchmann, Tahar-Hakim Benchekroun, Marco Saraceno, Celine Rosselin, Thierry Pillon, Gérard Dubey, Ali Siadat, Mouad Bounouar, Richard Béarée) projects and a collaboration with Orange Labs (Moustafa Zouinar, Tamari Gamkrelidze).

### **References**

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

# **Chapter 11 Standardization and Risk Regulation for High-Hazard Industries**

**Michael Baram and Corinne Bieder**

**Abstract** Hazardous industrial activities have historically been regulated from a safety and/or risk management viewpoint based on regulations enacted by governmental authorities. This chapter describes and explains the decline in the role played by governmental actors in the process of safety regulation and the rise of private standards development organizations. Such an evolution raises a wide range of concerns regarding the incentives to enhance safety, the interests that are protected by standards endorsed by regulators, and at a societal level, the drift away from democratic governance of high-hazard activities.

**Keywords** Standardization · Regulation · Governance · High-risk industries · Safety

### **11.1 Introduction**

Government regulation has played a major role in shaping the safety management programs and practices of companies engaged in high-hazard activities. But, there are many other forces at work in modern society that also influence safety management such as negligence liability, insurance coverage, investor decisions, behavioral norms, and increasingly, the development of national and international standards by both private and public sector standards developing organizations (SDOs).

The scope and scale of private standardization activities are vast. Worldwide, thousands of private SDOs engage in setting a multitude of voluntary standards that become available for adoption by national regulators, companies, legislators, and international organizations [18]. In addition, governments are now using standardization to address the governance of new technologies. A survey of the comprehensive

M. Baram (B)

School of Law, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
C. Bieder ENAC, University of Toulouse, Toulouse, France

US Code of Federal Regulations reveals that US agencies have adopted over 10,000 privately developed standards and, by doing so, made them enforceable regulations.1 In the EU, three official organizations are striving to harmonize standards adopted by 33 countries and are also directing the development of new EU standards for topics such as artificial intelligence (AI).2

This chapter focuses mainly on private standardization that is relevant to industrial safety. It begins with a discussion of the growing role that such standards play in shaping risk regulation and then considers factors that motivate and empower private SDOs, the benefits and challenges that SDOs pose to self-regulation, and the platforms that SDOs provide that enable industry-led governance of new technologies. Further discussion highlights concerns about growing societal reliance on privately developed standards, and the EU and US focus on the "trustworthiness" criterion for artificial intelligence standards, the subordination of safety regulation, and the drift away from democratic governance of high-hazard activities.

### **11.2 Interplay Between Standards and Risk Regulation**

For decades, national and international standards for products, processes, engineering and management practices have been developed by SDOs for many purposes: e.g., overcome trade barriers, advance the safety of consumer products and industrial equipment, promote interoperability of multiple products, and gain competitive advantage [3]. Well-known examples are voluntary standards for home appliances, communication systems, medical equipment, construction materials, fire protection, food safety, pressure vessels, and many engineering systems and practices.

The largest private SDOs, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) (over 23,000 standards)3 and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) (over 1200 standards)4 , proclaim their neutrality and independence and enlist global networks of experts, governmental and company representatives for participation in their standard-setting proceedings. Among other types of SDOs are industrial and trade associations that develop consensus standards which reflect the economic, safety, and other interests of their member companies. For example, in the oil and gas sector, standards have been developed by SDOs such as the American Petroleum Institute (API) (over 700 standards)5 and its Norwegian counterpart, Norsok (79 standards).6

1 National Institute for Standards and Technology, Standards incorporated by reference database (showing 11,259 total incorporations by référence as of December 20, 2014): https://standards.gov/.

2 https://www.cencenelec.eu/.

3 https://www.iso.org/.

4 https://www.ieee.org/.

5 https://www.api.org/.

6 https://www.standard.no/.

Most standards relevant to the safety of hazardous industrial activities apply to the design, testing, and performance of the products, systems, materials, and equipment involved. But, safety-relevant *management* standards have also been enacted. Some are generic and applicable to many different industrial sectors, such as ISO 9000 on Quality Management, ISO 45001 on Occupational Health and Safety, ISO 14000 on Environmental Management, and ISO 31000 on Risk Management. Other standards provide technical detail for the design and operation of industrial systems, such as IEEE standards on protection and coordination of industrial power systems, secure communication networks, and surveillance testing of nuclear safety systems. Finally, UN agencies and other international organizations enact voluntary standards to advance human rights, sustainability, resilience, transparency, and corporate social responsibility [12, 20], (OECD; World Bank). Obviously, companies that adopt any of these types of standards must adapt their safety management systems accordingly.

Many privately developed voluntary standards subsequently become enforcible regulations. Government policies (EU, US) tell regulators who intend to develop a new rule to instead consider adopting or incorporating by reference a relevant private voluntary standard and have it serve as their own regulation.7 ,8 This enables regulators to capitalize on the expertise and industry support developed by SDOs, substantially reduce the regulator's costs and administrative burdens, and keep pace with rapid technological advances.

In the US, most regulation of industrial safety and prevention of major accidents is prescriptive and technically detailed. A regulator who intends to develop a new rule but avoids adopting a relevant private standard is likely to encounter opposition by the targeted industry and be caught up in lengthy adversarial proceedings. Thus, it is no surprise that US regulators have readily chosen the private standard option that embodies the expertise and industrial support developed by the SDO. As a result, in the oil and gas sector in the US and many other countries, virtually all regulations on exploration and production operations are prescriptive versions of hundreds of voluntary standards originally developed by API [2].

In the EU, the regulatory approach to industrial safety is more likely to be performance-based and self-regulatory in that companies are expected to determine how to fulfill safety management functions and perform operations safely. Although companies had sought this flexibility, once gained, many thereafter seek detailed guidance on how to comply with the broad mandate for self-regulation and call upon regulators to provide such guidance. In the Norwegian oil and gas sector, guidances and mentoring are provided by regulators with persuasive reference to relevant voluntary standards set by Norsok and other SDOs [13].

Thus, privately developed standards become essential features of both the selfregulatory and prescriptive approaches to industrial safety [14], and this interplay, as the oil and gas examples indicate, leads to societal dependence on private SDOs and

7 European Commission, *Standardization Policy*, https://ec.europa.eu/info/.

8 American National Standards Institute, U.S. Standards System: https://www.standardsportal.org/ (last accessed on 07/09/2021); and the National Technology Transfer and Advancement Act, 15 U.S.C 3701 et seq.

the subordination of safety regulation. Although a low-visibility feature of modern risk governance, this trend needs to be better understood and aligned with public policies and norms.

### **11.3 Toward a Better Understanding of Standardization**

The universe of private SDOs can be seen as a global knowledge-producing infrastructure that serves the standardization needs of companies, countries, nongovernmental organizations, trade groups, and many others [23]. It is subordinating and replacing government regulation, thereby bringing about a de facto change in public policy. It is, therefore, essential to gain a better understanding of the standardization infrastructure and its influence on regulation and management of industrial safety.

The public–private divide between most standardization and regulation needs to be kept in mind. Regulation (and its co-regulatory and self-regulatory variants) is a government-created framework for transparently making decisions in the public interest. Open to stakeholders and public involvement, regulation employs established procedures and follows substantive mandates that are aligned with societal norms and public policies, and it provides for accountability. In contrast, standardization is a fragmented, unregulated, opaque field populated mainly by privately owned and financed SDOs who set their own procedures, usually exclude public involvement, disregard transparency and restrict access to documentation, and make self-serving, private-interest decisions that are usually driven by economic considerations. Simply put, regulation is public domain, standardization is private domain (unless directed by government as in the case of the EU's single market program), and arranging for their complementarity is the main societal task at hand [5].

As discussed earlier, two types of standards are often safety-relevant. *Technical and engineering practice standards* number in the thousands, and usually apply to the design and performance of an extremely broad range of products, their design, interchangeability, interoperability, and their integration into systems, processes, and controls. *Management standards* are few but adopted by many and apply to structure, procedures, functions, tasks, communications, quality control, and other aspects of an organization's system for meeting its goals.

Regulators often adopt or incorporate by reference such standards as generically applicable rules or as highly persuasive (de facto mandatory) referential guidances as discussed earlier. This supports regulatory programs that are prescriptive and take a one-size fits-all approach to safety. But when done routinely to facilitate industrial compliance with a self-regulatory program, it can harden the program's soft law approach to industrial safety [18].

The initial claim of soft law/self-regulation was to provide some leeway for companies to consider their unique circumstances and accordingly define their own best-practice approach to safety management. But, the massive adoption of detailed technical standards leads back to a prescriptive approach to safety, where individuals and organizations at all levels are expected to follow referential standards and guidances for compliance. Thus, standardization can facilitate industrial compliance with self-regulation but can also transform self-regulation into a prescriptive regime.

Standardization of management systems can also work against another intended benefit of self-regulation, that self-regulation would enable a progression of advances in risk analysis and safety culture by experts in these fields. But, management standards such as those set by ISO incorporate knowledge from many fields which may be outdated, biased, or based on insufficient expertise, yet because of their widespread adoption, such standards may enable a "cementation of inadequate principles and methods" [1].

Among its other attributes, standardization provides platforms for industrial leadership on important societal issues that legislators and regulators have failed to fully address [21]. Private SDOs such as API can be expected to integrate and imbed industrial positions on environmental, societal, and governance (ESG) issues (e.g., sustainability, climate change, privacy) in their standards and thereby enable industry leadership on the issues before public awareness and discourse and before government positions are taken [15].

Finally, it is well-established that most privately developed standards are designed to serve the economic and private interests of their developers rather than deciding solely upon best practices for workplace and societal safety. This obviously raises questions regarding the relevance or value of having these standards serve as references to fulfill an organizations' self-regulatory responsibilities. Safety-relevant standards also incorporate assumptions as to the characteristics of high-risk organizations and their operational context, assumptions that correspond to the characteristics of the organizations involved in developing the standards. Although the assumptions may not be realistic or acceptable for many other organizations not part of the SDOs, the standards will serve as references in their cases as well.9

Despite these observations, standardization is of great value to the global economy and technological advancement, and as discussed earlier, there are pragmatic reasons for its proliferation and power. It shapes regulation and enables self-regulation, helps industry take the lead in societal governance of new technologies, and avoids the bureaucracy, procedures, public involvement, costs, and politics associated with regulation. It enlists expertise and industrial support rapidly and is more capable of keeping pace with technological advances. It is promoted by legislators and regulators. Its SDOs are unaccountable participants in risk governance. And it creates markets and technical and commercial collaborations, enables competitive advantage, gains safe harbor from negligence liability, and secures regulatory outcomes that fit the practices and interests of the entities involved. But even the most ardent proponents of standardization recognize the need to have this private enterprise complement safety regulation and align with public policies [21].

9 An industrial SDO may lose member companies that have more progressive policies on corporate societal responsibilities. See Total Withdraws from the American Petroleum Institute (15/01/2021).

### **11.4 Standardization and AI**

Perhaps the most important attributes of private standardization are its ability to generate the technical knowledge needed for soft law governance of new technologies and its enabling of relationships and transactions between developers of the technologies, users, investors, and governments. These relationships are essential for the financing, interoperability, implementation, and commercial success of the technologies [7].

The case of artificial intelligence (AI) is instructive. The EU and the US are committed to deriving societal value from AI but worry that governance too stringent will stifle its further development and applications and are, therefore, cautiously issuing interim policy statements and guidances that are leading to self-regulatory/soft law governance of AI [9, 17]. Foreseeable problems are being addressed, involving, for example, access to proprietary information, monopolistic practices, and allocation of liability for harms [8].

Both regimes are confronted by widespread public concerns about the value and societal impacts of AI itself and about potential misuse and unintended consequences when put to use in an unlimited range of applications. This has led both the EU and US to identify and define the core issue of the "trustworthiness" of AI and create interim *principles of trustworthiness* (often referred to as "ethical principles") for AI developers and users to self-assess the acceptability of their AI systems and applications. Trustworthiness principles common to both the EU and US include accuracy, explainability, reliability and resilience, privacy, safety, mitigation of bias, transparency, fairness, and accountability, with the EU list adding an emphasis on ensuring informed human involvement in decision-making and oversight [10, 11]; (NIST n.d.).

These broad principles for self-assessment provide the basis for an extremely loose and ineffective form of self-regulation unless further defined for use in actual cases, and credible oversight, mentoring, and accountability functions are established through government-industry co-regulation. A co-regulatory approach with these features is especially important for AI applications to workplace safety and safety management systems for the prevention of major accidents such as surveillance and remote control of operations and evaluation of near miss incidents.

Given the evidence that governments are reluctant to regulate AI, it can be expected that the EU and US approaches will be extremely reliant on private standardization of AI applications and the trustworthiness/ethical principles. A cascade of private standards is already underway with the IEEE announcing its finalization of 14 voluntary AI standards and associated compliance certification programs on topics ranging from algorithmic bias to well-being metrics for ethical AI. Not to be outdone, ISO has 31 voluntary AI-related standards ready for adoption or use as guidance, or in progress, including a forthcoming standard for AI risk management.

As a result, concerns about the proliferation of AI standards are being expressed such as the hardening of the self-regulatory or co-regulatory approach, the difficulty of assessing numerous standards to identify gaps and contradictions, and the need for a coordinating entity [16]. The path forward will be difficult unless responsible oversight and direction is brought about by private–public collaboration.

### **11.5 A Concerning Trend in Progress**

The reliance of regulators on privately developed standards is not new. It had already become common practice since the emergence of self-regulation in the 1980s. Selfregulation was presented as a step change in the management of industrial safety, leaving more leeway to high-hazard companies to define the safety enhancement measures best suited to their characteristics and circumstances as opposed to routinely complying with generic standards prescribed by regulators. A close look at what led to more self-regulation and more standardization at that time shows that the fast pace of technological advances and the limited resources available to regulators were key elements outweighing ambitions to enhance safety [4].

The situation has not changed since then. Technology is still fast and requires fast response for its governance and the adaptation of safety management systems, whereas regulatory processes remain cumbersome and slow. Furthermore, regulators lack expertise to keep up to speed with new and evolving technologies and have budget limitations preventing them from recruiting the best experts or developing the required competences in-house. Privately developed standards circumnavigate some of these challenges and quickly provide pragmatic results. However, this growing public reliance on privately developed standards entails critical concerns.

Privately developed standards can be considered a missed chance to significantly improve safety in practice. Standards developed by industrial SDOs are meant to protect and advance the interests of their members. Setting very high-level standards inspired by the best practices of the most safety-mature member organizations would do no good for and, be opposed by, the least progressive members. Therefore, standards developed by private SDOs are instead aligned with the practices of the least progressive, providing no incentive or insights for organizations to do better safety-wise. This fall back on standards with limited ambition enables "business as usual" and also serves another purpose that is dear to the SDOs member companies. Adopting them is easy and helps to establish a "safe harbor" against negligence liability for these companies.

The universe of private SDOs is unregulated, and its uncoordinated response to a new technology such as AI with a multitude of standards can create difficulties in assessing and putting them to use. Reliance on such standards for effective selfregulation and highly valued interoperability outcomes requires responsible public– private leadership to carry out oversight, coordination, and harmonization functions.

At a broader societal level, the increasing role of privately developed standards in the governance framework leads to neglecting or crowding out public interest perspectives. Whereas regulators are meant to represent the voice of the society, the process of developing standards by private SDOs usually does not provide for transparency nor the involvement of stakeholders that represent a balancing of different societal interests and norms [6].10 In that respect, reliance on private standards escapes the democratic process that regulators are supposed to follow and resembles the contractual outsourcing of governmental decision-making functions. In the absence of representation of other interests beyond that of industrial organizations, economic value becomes the main driver in standards development, and cost–benefit analysis becomes the main decision tool for deciding what a standard should provide.

The democratic deficit that is incurred by the privatization of regulation reaches beyond the opaqueness of standards development. Many standards involve proprietary information, and thus cannot be explained. Although standard-setters claim that ethical and other societal interests are incorporated in the standards, there is often no way to know the details of what was done exactly and how or to test the standards.

Thus, all these issues involved by the regulatory reliance on private standardization reflect a concerning drift away from democratic governance of hazardous industrial activities.

### **References**

10 CEN-CENELEC, Standardization and Societal Stakeholders at cencenelec.eu (last accessed 07/09/2021).

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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# **Chapter 12 Adaptive Imagination at Work in Health Care**

# **Learning from a Pandemic to Prepare for the Future**

### **Steven Shorrock**

**Abstract** This chapter starts with the premise that the future of work is unpredictable. This has been illustrated by the COVID-19 pandemic, and further profound changes in contexts of work will bring significant and volatile changes to future work, as well as health, safety, security, and productivity. Micronarrative testimony from healthcare practitioners whose work has been affected dramatically by the emergence of the pandemic is used in this chapter to derive learning from experience of this major change. The narratives concern the nature of responding to a rapidly changing world, work-as-imagined and work-as-done, human-centred design and systems thinking and practice, and leadership and social capital. Seven learning points were drawn from clinicians' reflections that may be more widely relevant to the future of work.

**Keywords** Health care · COVID-19 · Change · Work-as-imagined · Work-as-done · Work-as-prescribed · Adaptation

### **12.1 Introduction**

The future of work is, self-evidently, unknown to us. The future of work has become what is now popularly known as "work-as-imagined" [5]. While this term is often used to describe imagined work now or in the past, it equally applies to work in future. Experience shows that our imagination of the past and present is incomplete and incorrect in fundamental ways. And so, of course, our imagination of the future is even more limited. It is unpredictable, in that it is not possible reliably to characterise with confidence—except in some very broad terms—the details and patterns in the nature of work in the coming decades.

This presents a dilemma for a writer looking to envisage the future of work in a few years, let alone in 2030, and beyond. At the time of writing, the COVID-19 pandemic has changed work dramatically within one year in almost all sectors of industry, and is living demonstration of the limits of imagination applied to the future

S. Shorrock (B)

EUROCONTROL, Brétigny sur Orge, France e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
© The Author(s) 2022

H. Laroche et al. (eds.), *Managing Future Challenges for Safety*, SpringerBriefs in Safety Management, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07805-7\_12

of work. Research projects and white papers in health care and aviation, for instance, on the future of work have lost some relevance with fundamental changes to the nature of work brought about by COVID-19.

What we *can* reliably predict about the future of work is that it will change unpredictably and significantly. Changes are likely to involve many "aspects of context": geopolitical, political, legal, regulatory, judicial, economic, societal, social, cultural, environmental, organisational, technological, and informational, with implications for health, safety, security, productivity, and work in general. The changes will require adaptations at all levels of the system, from front-line staff and service users to regulators and governments. The pandemic has therefore offered an opportunity to look at how work has changed in the light of significant unforeseen events, and how workers and organisations have responded, in the hope of drawing some lessons that may remain valid in the coming decades.

In this chapter, I take a narrative approach to understanding aspects of the future of work, relying not primarily on the predictions and reflections of previous authors, or my own, but the high-context accounts of front-line healthcare workers, whose work has been affected dramatically by the emergence of the pandemic. Using a rapid, micronarrative research approach [7], combining aspects of narrative inquiry and grounded theory [6], I aimed to explore and conceptualise clinicians' experience in textual form. Via twitter, I asked known healthcare practitioners to answer the following question: *What have you learned about work from the COVID-19 pandemic?* I requested that answers be limited to around 100 words. The reason for this was to allay expectations of a long, written response (which deter response, especially among busy healthcare professionals) and to encourage respondents to prioritise the most important learning points for them, via reflection-on-action [9].

The data from the 24 participants were subject to thematic analysis and are presented in this chapter with associated learning points, providing insights into front-line experiences of work that may apply to other workers in health care, and beyond.

### **12.2 Responding to a Rapidly Changing World**

In the light of the likelihood of future disruptions (e.g. pandemics, major outages, climate change), the COVID-19 pandemic has illustrated how the future of work will involve responding to volatility and unpredictability, requiring timely adaption. The importance of front-line involvement in such change was emphasised by several clinicians. That "people are the solution" was noted in the context of many healthcare functions. Participant 1 (Intensivist, Australia) stated that the only thing we can reliably predict about the future is the need for change, and that "Frontline workers are the solution to most problems that will inevitably arise. They are the most valuable resource in healthcare, both for delivering the care and for designing how to do it". His remark mirrors contemporary thinking about safety. As Cook [2] noted,

Human practitioners are the adaptable element of complex systems

and

The system continues to function because it contains so many redundancies and because people can make it function, despite the presence of many flaws.

Dekker [3] (p. vi) sees

people as the source of diversity, insight, creativity, and wisdom about safety, not as sources of risk that undermine an otherwise safe system.

The need for rapid response was mentioned by several clinicians. Some noted the need for interdisciplinary collaboration on a scale never seen previously. A specific example was provided by Participant 2 (Anaesthetist and Health Education England Simulation Lead, England) in the context of the new major "Nightingale" hospital in the UK, where he "witnessed enormous willingness and motivation amongst practitioners and managers to respond to the need for rapid change". Reflecting on prior inertia in health care, he noted that "This felt like a big contrast from previous 'norms' of organisational behaviour in healthcare". Similarly, in an ambulance context, Participant 3 (Ambulance Service Patient Safety Manager, Scotland) discovered that "some types of ambulance service work systems that would previously have been considered very difficult to change, can actually be reconfigured at pace and new ways of working can be introduced, which lead to significantly different system performance". Participant 4 (Anaesthetist, Australia) noted also how health care has "a reputation for resistance to change".

While many workers, especially those in office-based roles, have switched to working from home with extensive use of videoconferencing, a corresponding change in health care has been a switch to telemedicine. Participant 5 (Emergency Physician, USA) described how the job changed rapidly from in-person clinical care: "Our telemedicine urgent care started seeing hundreds of COVID patients a day, a disease and volume that were totally new to us". This clinician, and her colleagues, learned to adapt rapidly to the new conditions, which presented challenging trade-offs.

Self-organisation and staff-developed standard operating procedures (SOPs) extended to other hospital functions. Participant 6 (Radiologist, England) noted that homeworking was arranged rapidly "after years of dragging feet". This was helped by having the required IT equipment already available, but not set up, in hospital, as well as adaptive IT support. "Radiologists were split into two groups", he wrote, "one at home, one in department. Radiographers worked out their own rotas. Radiographers and nursing staff worked on SOPs for imaging COVID positive patients".

Some indicated, however, that the degree of clinician involvement in change was variable, with a contrast between top-down change done "to" people and change done "with" and "by" people [as discussed by Russell [8], in terms of "modes of change"]. Participant 4 (Anaesthetist, Australia) highlighted especially the "to" mode of change—top-down initiated change, with limited clinician consultation, particularly regarding the rationing of personal protective equipment (PPE). Other organisations, she wrote, have initiated clinician-led processes, "resulting in durable models of care but uncovering 'wicked problems'". Participant 4 reflected, "COVID-19 has taught me that engaging clinicians doing the work increases short-term complexity, but doing otherwise risks failure in the long term, losing trust on the way". This can be seen as an acute-chronic trade-off [4] in responding to change.

Participant 7 (Intensivist, New Zealand) noted the importance of diverse views for solving complex, dynamic problems, such as the rapid reconfiguration of an intensive care unit (ICU). "This required many different teams: ICU clinicians, infection control nurses, biomedical engineers, builders, ventilation engineers and quality improvement specialists". This clinician highlighted the importance of pre-existing relationships, in this case built up during a prior volcanic burns incident.

Similarly, in a French ICU context, Participant 8 (Anesthesiologist, France) wrote of the need for more ICU beds. "Equipment wasn't designed for ICU, nor were newly formed teams used to working together in this stressful environment". He noted the effectiveness of "collective intelligence via inclusive collaboration and open communication" for preventing harm both to patients and to healthcare workers.

An iterative approach to adaptation to keep pace with a rapidly evolving situation, especially in the context of uncertain and volatile information, was the focus of Participant 9 (Intensivist, New Zealand): "By starting to address problems iteratively we could create a network of actions that we could knit together. We rapidly developed a tolerance of failures, using them, with active feedback, to modify our processes and facilities adaptively, alongside the new information that became available".

The requirement for rapid responses is sometimes confounded by the economic and organisational contexts, including resource constraints, communication channels, and the political context, such as policy and communication. Participant 2 noted his experience of challenges to redesigning clinical services in the context of constraints such as "workforce availability, skill mix and preparedness for redeployment; creating and adapting new clinical environments; accessing critical specialised equipment and supplies quickly and reliably". Similarly, Participant 10 (Professor of Health care, England) highlighted "the structural and cultural barriers to leveraging talent in surge demand". Characterising the limitations of blunt-end response to changes in work, she noted that "It's like a slow-moving major incident without the implementation of a major incident plan".

### **12.3 Work-as-Imagined and Work-as-Done**

Several respondents highlighted differences between work-as-imagined and workas-done (WAI-WAD), concepts that have recently gained currency in health care. Participant 11 (Surgeon, Scotland) stated that the pandemic "has shone a light on how we work, and the dichotomy between 'work-as-imagined and work-as-done'". Participant 4 reflected that "It is critical that 'work-as-prescribed' reflects 'work-asdone' to prevent depletion of the workforce through infection and exhaustion". A specific example mentioned by some respondents was PPE. Participant 12 (Anaesthetist, England) noted that, despite 25 years working in anaesthesia, the COVID-19 pandemic presented his first introduction to PPE and FFP3 masks. Fit testing and training in PPE donning and doffing was, however, not adequate preparation for the daily challenges of working in PPE. "The impact of heat, the need for good hydration, and the communication challenges became stressors—recognised and managed by great team working through adaptations in how we worked". He remarked further that, "Looking back, local practice is not 'work-as-prescribed'".

Participant 13 (Consultant Anaesthetist, England) also commented on unimagined and unintended consequences of PPE: "Working in PPE is hot, tiring and difficult to both hear and see. Staff avoid drinking to reduce bathroom visits, all of which affects their ability to work. Extra time is taken from patient care to put on and take off the PPE". She noted that measures to reduce the risk of COVID indirectly affected patient safety in other unimagined ways. Participant 14 (Consultant in Emergency and Retrieval Medicine, Scotland) similarly reflected on unforeseen communication difficulties while wearing PPE, especially for aerosol-generating procedures. "Voices are muffled, hearing is compromised and implicit communication through facial expression is lost". He noted that this is a particular problem for resuscitation teams working under pressure.

Difficulties in compliance with work-as-prescribed [10] were noted by other respondents. Participant 15 (Former Critical Care Outreach Nurse, England) stated that some rules and guidance were developed by people remote from the work and were no longer applicable. "These rules end up being a barrier to do the right thing. For example, filling a 35-page safety booklet about a newly admitted patient takes us away from practical tasks such as personal care or administering medication".

Participant 15 stated that "Now, no-one knew the best way to do things. There was no evidence base to draw from, and no exemplars to follow". Participant 2 similarly noted policy-level problems: "multiple channels and frequent shifts in emphasis of central guidance and policy". This was reiterated by Participant 16 (Critical Care Nurse, South Africa), who cited "information overload, inconsistent messages and departure from plain common sense".

For Participant 15, the absence of written authority required a collaborative local approach. "Everyone came up with ideas, and many more came from social media", she wrote. "We openly learned from each other. We were finding solutions from the ground up and the senior leadership team listened".

The dearth of appropriate procedures and guidance was also noted by Participant 13: "Without timely clear guidance arriving down the traditional lines, the ability of staff to innovate and adapt was remarkable. The constraint of normal change bureaucracy was temporarily suspended and essential new ways of working arrived in a rapid and remarkably effective way, significantly prior to written SOPs". She stated that front-line staff instead required underlying principles [1] and developed and translated them in appropriate ways for their own local work and working environment. This leveraged the competency and expertise of military nurses who had significant experience with PPE and Ebola.

Team approaches to learning are needed to maximise the impact and ensure the safety of such adaptations, remarked Participant 17 (General Practitioner, Scotland): "In my GP practice, daily 'huddles' (short meetings) were used to discuss how we implemented rapidly changing guidance while coping with varying conditions (e.g. demand and capacity) and competing goals (e.g. reducing hospital admissions while maintaining patient safety)". These huddles encouraged sharing of innovative practice and increased understanding the rationale for decisions, and how decisions affected other parts of the system. They also "supported those making difficult decisions and ensured people did not drift into unsafe practices". Participant 11 (Surgeon, Scotland) also referred to an approach to team learning in Scotland involving regular reviews of reports by clinicians for the purpose of collective learning, which has helped to bridge this WAI-WAD gap.

Participant 14 (Consultant in Emergency and Retrieval Medicine, Scotland) and colleagues co-designed a checklist to improve communication using PPE called "PRESS": P—Pre-transmission pause. Think before you speak; R—Read back close the loop; E—Eye contact—ensure focused attention; S—Say again—repeat critical information; and S—Shared team mental model with a team rally point.

Participant 13 (Consultant Anaesthetist, England) remarked that the WAI-WAD gap also applied to clinicians' imagination of "patient work": "Initially we asked our patients to self-isolate for 14 days prior to elective surgery, and (as we knew the reasons) we imagined that they would do that unquestioningly. We 'prescribed' that to them, without explanation, and then anyone who proceeded to surgery had to 'disclose' that they had completed this. Only the patient ever knew whether they had done so". She stated that it took time to identify this gap, which is taking longer still to close.

Participant 3 (Ambulance Service Patient Safety Manager, Scotland) noted that the WAI-WAD gap can be minimal for changes up to a certain scale. However, "with larger groups of workforce, it can be very difficult to influence multiple, often subtle, changes in work-as-done to match with the more easily changeable work-asprescribed (and work-as-imagined)". He noted that this was particularly evident in the early stages of the response phase when clinical, logistical and PPE criteria were becoming established.

A word of warning was sounded by Participant 18 (Anaesthesiologist, USA), about rapidly created bottom-up methods. "Although this pandemic has brought lots of new concepts and working conditions, it's imperative that we maintain our usual high standards and not be tempted to try new techniques and alter our usual routine safe practice". Participant 7 usefully expanded that, in the New Zealand intensive care context "the redesign of clinical work was based on four requirements: to be SAFE, SIMPLE, SUSTAINABLE and ADAPTABLE". Reflecting more recent focus in safety management on everyday work, he noted that "the ability to anticipate potential challenges required imagination and a deep understanding of the realities of everyday work".

Participant 19 (Anesthesiologist-Intensivist, France) noted the role of acceptance of uncertainty, and humility: "This whole experience was new for everyone. For many professionals, it has created a touching sense of humility, both among frontline actors and managers. I believe that this humility has facilitated communication and the emergence of a shared governance between caregivers and administrators where I've been working". He noted that, for the first time, work and its goals were shared and the WAI-WAD gap was minimal.

### **12.4 Human-Centred Design and Systems Thinking and Practice**

Adaptive imagination is necessary to respond tactically, or even opportunistically, to rapidly changing circumstances, but there remains a need for more strategic humancentred design and systems thinking in design, and therefore a need for support to integrate appropriate approaches. Traditionally, such approaches are seen as more "blunt end" analysis and support (often over the timescale of months or years), but there is a need for more rapid integration into operations (over the timescale of days or weeks). There is therefore a requirement to balance the need for rapid, user-led change with durable user-centred design.

Emergency care is an aspect of health care characterised by improvisation. Participant 20 (Emergency Physician, Trauma Team Leader and Simulation Educator, Canada) reflected on the nature of emergency care. "Healthcare is a precarious thing, balancing on the backs individual and team resourcefulness and resilience. Emergency medicine, in particular, suffers from 'ad hoc-itis'. Our ability to improvise solutions in the face of massive systemic limitations and inefficiencies is practically a professional badge of honour". Participant 20 stated that COVID-19 has highlighted the need for more understanding of complex system design. "We can build systems that make sense. We can use simulation-informed design, prototype testing, multisource feedback and hazard analysis to help manage complexity rather than compel us to work against it". He remarked that the pandemic requires a rethink of how health services adapt, beyond front-line tactical or opportunistic adaptations: "and therein lies a massive challenge and unprecedented opportunity: let user-centred and data-driven design lead us in rebuilding".

Participant 1 (Intensivist, Australia) remarked there has been some success with this. "Locally, we have seen rapid, successful innovation of work practices through the marriage of simulation and human-centred design principles".

Human-centred design does, however, need to be embedded in systems practice. One of the fundamental activities of systems thinking involves making boundary judgements. Participant 21 (Anaesthetist, Scotland) stated that "Where you draw the system boundary matters. I started chairing a theatre COVID preparedness group in March. We quickly transformed the theatre complex to handle a surge in patients with COVID, while keeping staff safe. We liaised with ED, ICU and the wards which are upstream/downstream of theatres". The teamwork, dynamism, and psychological safety of the working group, he said, were critical. The system boundary chosen did not include the whole hospital system, since others were focusing on this. However, there were other aspects of the health and social care system that would have benefitted from the group's input: "Looking back now I wonder about the care homes. They were not within my system and I didn't give them a second's thought within my planning. Whose system boundary included care homes? What were their working conditions, demands and constraints?"

### **12.5 Leadership and Social Capital**

In the narratives above, the importance of teamwork has been emphasised. More generally, clinicians remarks concerned leadership, human relations, and social capital. Participant 19 (Anesthesiologist-Intensivist, France) stated that "COVID appears to have acted as a powerful inductor for team building". He found that "strongly empathetic and benevolent leadership can have a positive impact on patient safety, work organisation, coping and caregivers' well-being". Participant 22 (Midwife, England) similarly noted that "The need for sincerity and genuine characteristics is essential. A focus on leadership over management is required. Midwifery managers/consultants need to be able to utilise the clinical skills they started off with to enable support and understanding of their units in today's world".

Participant 18 (Anaesthesiologist, USA) noted the need to "foster good relational coordination amongst colleagues particularly during a time of great uncertainty and constant change". Participant 23 (Anaesthetist, Australia) similarly highlighted the criticality of high-trust relationships to safety. Referring to the importance of bridging social capital, she noted how "The pandemic has required groups to leave their silos and to collaborate rapidly on high-stakes issues". Some professionals (Participant 19 noted specifically aerodynamic scientists and occupational hygienists) had not previously routinely been included in healthcare teams to keep workers and patients safe. With a nod to the technological context of work, she also mentioned that "many of these experts are accessible on social media, primarily twitter, and have been generously sharing their expertise for the benefit of all". This rapid, interprofessional adaptation—outside of organisational boundaries—arguably could not have happened without social media.

Participant 15 (Critical Care Outreach Nurse, England) stated that the "flattened hierarchy" does not imply effective leadership, but can be a barrier to effective communication. "For example, everyone is wearing the same outfits, no name badges are shown and no one recognises anyone. So who is the leader? Being involved in a medical emergency with no leadership evident is a scary place to be". According to Participant 15, the role of a decisive leader has been critical during the pandemic: "[It] has given me comfort and guidance when I have felt as if I was floundering".

Participant 24 (Orthopaedic Resident, Poland) remarked that "During the pandemic, I learned that no matter how well organised the healthcare system is, you end up counting on good people to do everything they can to overcome and minimise effects of hopefully rare but inevitable system flaws".

### **12.6 Lessons for Future Work**

From the micronarratives collected, a number of lessons can be drawn for future work, whether in the coming years or decades. While the context will change, many of the lessons that can be identified from these narratives would appear to be relevant. I have drawn the following lessons from the narratives:

**Ethical Statement** Data collection and reporting is undertaken under a protocol that informs participants of the use of their testimonies, with anonymisation of interviewees and health facilities.

### **References**

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

# **Chapter 13 Conjectures and Challenges of Safety Management**

## **A Peek at the Future**

### **Jean Pariès**

**Abstract** Climate disruption, changing demographics, globalisation, financialisation, industrial and economic fragmentation and complexification, mass digitalisation are all major changes currently taking place in the world and in societies, and theoretically, they will accelerate by 2030–2040. The impact of these major trends on the strategies for managing industrial safety is a rather underexplored topic that is the subject of this collaborative book. This final chapter looks at some of the lessons from the book and places them in perspective by offering conjectures on the place of the human operator, the responsibility of stakeholders and organisations, the reliability and vulnerability of sociotechnical systems, the strategic vision of safety… Taking into account this range of possibilities and the challenges the industrial sector is facing, it proposes avenues to explore so that, in future, risks continue to be managed to the standards expected by society.

**Keywords** Human reliability · Responsibility · Safety strategy · Anticipation · Complexity · Instability · Adaptation · Politics

### **13.1 Changes in the World and Changes in the Minds**

Like many others, this book starts from the premise that the world is undergoing a radical, global change, and on the scale of the history of societies, this is occurring at an extremely fast pace. In fact, everything is changing. The long-announced global warming is confirming its inexorable nature and beginning to show the power it has to destabilise habitats, the economy, ways of life and relationships to the environment. The world population will continue to grow exponentially for decades, particularly in Africa, and stagnate and age considerably in the most economically developed regions. It will inevitably redistribute itself through mass migrations. The value production chain continues to be relocated offshore to countries with cheap labour.

J. Pariès (B)

FonCSI-ICSI, Toulouse, France e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
© The Author(s) 2022

H. Laroche et al. (eds.), *Managing Future Challenges for Safety*, SpringerBriefs in Safety Management, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07805-7\_13

Its organisations are becoming globalised, financialised, fragmented and complexified in increasingly interdependent networks. Galloping digitalisation, virtualisation, machine/deep learning, along with mass connectivity and data processing are transforming attitudes towards the company, production and work. The financial stakes take such a high priority and are so huge that, for the 737 Max, the top management of Boeing imposed on its legendary engineering team technical choices that defied common sense and the basic rules of design. The Big Five are becoming the leaders of the global economy. Their stock market value far exceeds the GDP of France. That of Tesla has reached the trillion-dollar mark, making its value one hundred times higher than that of Renault and higher than all of the other car manufacturers in the world combined. Elon has become a popular first name.

The list does not end there, and the deeper meaning of these transformations is a source of debate. But while the trajectory is not yet clear, one thing is certain: the scale and momentum of the changes underway are those of the major 'revolutions' in history. In other words, this is a metamorphosis of society. Based on this observation, this book poses the question: "What will be the impact of this metamorphosis on industrial risk management strategies and, more precisely, on the place of human actors in these strategies?" And incidentally: "What would need to be done, today or tomorrow, so that in the future the industrial sector continues to manage its risks to the standards expected by society?"

These questions are difficult for two reasons. Because prediction is a difficult art, particularly in a period of radical changes. But also, because the very notion of safety strategy remains unclear, or even contradictory in some respects. The introduction to this book highlighted this by putting in perspective the official safety model, based on predetermination and total control, and a practical model which more realistically integrates uncertainties and necessary adaptations. And the 'objective' world is not the only one changing. Our mental representations of it are also changing, as the real world remains constant. The models are changing; the theories themselves are undergoing major 'revolutions'. And in this dual process, the changes in 'reality' and changes in 'theory' interfere with one another. As seen with COVID-19, certain unshakeable certainties regarding 'budgetary orthodoxy' or the benefits of globalisation were… shaken. What was 'impossible' became necessary. Conversely, this blow to the theory will also generate or facilitate changes to the economic 'reality' post-COVID-19.

The same is true in the field of safety. More particularly, as regards the place of the human operator in safety, industrial views and practices have changed a great deal over the last three decades. The integration of knowledge from the human sciences into the safety model has profoundly transformed it. The view of the operator and of 'human reliability' has changed. The initial equation (safety = technical reliability + obedient operator) has become more complex. The operator has become a 'fallible reliability agent' in an environment that is itself recognised as less predictable, requiring some adaptations in real time. And thus, an 'intelligently obedient' operator, and more open, cooperative leaders who are willing to listen.

### **13.2 The Future of the 'Compliant yet Intelligent Operator' Injunction**

One could conjecture that this model will be little affected by the transformations underway. We already know most of the processes at work: automation, virtualisation of activities by putting distance between the human operator and the real-time physical process, replacement of the human operator with robots, transformation of the actor into a supervisor. These changes have occurred in several industries, notably in aviation. They will spread to other industries and, within each of these, to more occupations higher up in the pecking order (e.g. doctors rather than nurses). This will mobilise new, more disruptive technologies and will involve human–machine interactions complexified by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. Overall, the remaining operators will find it even more difficult to construct a 'mental model' of the machine and to predict and understand what it is doing. We already know the associated negative effects: overconfidence in the machine; loss of comprehension; issues with alertness; loss of basic know-how, which remains crucial in degraded mode. We also know that they can be partly controlled and that the final outcome is most often favourable or even highly favourable to safety.

The most reasonable conjecture is thus that the number of safety issues associated with the reliability of frontline operators will continue to drop significantly when it comes to designed-for and normal operation. One corollary is that the onus should shift from the users of the systems to their designers unless, like Tesla and their colleagues, these designers manage to convince everyone that the operators are always 'in charge' of said systems. However, the capacity of operators to intervene and take over control in 'beyond design basis' situations will also diminish drastically. And it will become less and less possible for operators to offset this tendency with a better knowledge of the systems they are handling, as these will have become too complex and inexorably 'esoteric' in degraded mode. Should we still feel the need to maintain some level of control over 'beyond design basis' situations, the 'sense-making' ability of the operational team will need to be improved by giving them real-time access to the necessary network of expertise, and the systems will have to be designed to include a mode of operation which does not require access to causality, similar to the 'state-based control' used in the nuclear plants when proper understanding is lost, in contrast with event-based control. This will imply training the designers in complexity, its consequences and its management, a great deal more than they are right now.

But at the level of the organisation, the company, and even more so at the level of society as a whole (public, media, justice political arena), the safety strategy is still largely perceived as resulting from the capacity to anticipate all situations, to predetermine the right technical and human solutions and to ensure conformity with what was anticipated. All of this through an increasingly detailed formalisation, a 'rationalisation' of the system, processes and activities, and through ensuring their quality ("we write down what we do, we do what is written, and this is what protects us against lawsuits if an accident does occur"). In short, a model of a programmed, deterministic and linear machine, controlled by an all-powerful 'command and control' system, which knows nothing of 'beyond design basis'.

### **13.3 Rise and Fall of a Paradigm Shift**

Yet, for the past three decades at least, some scientific schools of thought1 have proposed other visions of safety, built on the recognition of the dynamic complexity of the sociotechnical systems that constitute the industrial world. This 'complexity' means constant and irreducible variability, turbulence, circular causality, nonlinearity between the causes and the effects, interference, resonance, long-range coupling, 'butterfly effect', etc. In that world, variation is part of the normal state and is the irreducible background noise to the 'life' of the system. The underlying metaphor is no longer that of a programmed machine, but that of a living system. Its survival does not imply the absence of deviations (on the contrary, these are an integral part of its evolution), but rather managing these, constantly compensating for them, blocking those that are unfavourable and selecting those that are favourable to adaptation and adaptability. And in this vision, safety is inseparable from the other vital objectives: it is not possible to get food or water without exposing oneself to predators. Resilience can only be thought of in terms of compromise between the different survival needs.

Unlike HOF, this systemic vision was not 'bought' by industrial safety. At least, not in its entirety. Though it is possible to identify certain aspects that have been partially borrowed. The COVID-19 crisis has trivialised the word "resilience" and sharpened our awareness that the only certainty is uncertainty, i.e. that unexpected and unpredictable things will happen. But as already mentioned, the safety 'paradigm' remains essentially tied to anticipation and predetermination. One could even say that it is becoming reinforced, with an increase in standards and compliance efforts. Incidentally, these are largely validated by the undeniable, and at times considerable, progress achieved in safety over the last decades. And today, a majority of the designers and strategists in the industrial sector are awaiting a new breakthrough in this strategy, thanks to the spectacular advances made in digitalisation, AI, big data, digital twins and deep learning, which they believe should bring a leap forward in modelling, prediction and monitoring capacities.

Yet, the analyses reported in this book clearly indicate that the current sociotechnological revolution will generate intense stress characteristic of great societal transformations and the adaptability challenges they bring. Europe will probably experience a strong shortage of specialised skills due to a gap between those produced by its universities and the needs of its industrial sector. The ageing of its workforce will be at odds with the need to have several successive occupations over the span of

1 E.g., Normal Accident Theory (C. Perrow); High Reliability Organizations (T. Laporte & al.); Risk Management in a Dynamic Society (J. Rasmussen); Systems Theoretic Hazard Analysis Technique (N. Leveson); Resilience Engineering (D. Woods, E. Hollnagel & al.).

a career. Its cultural conversion, increasingly in favour of respecting the environment and living more frugally or even ascetically, will undoubtedly not catch on in the rest of the world, at least not initially. It risks a consecutive transfer of the nerve centres of its industries—design, normalisation, financing—to Asia, thus prolonging the migration of the value production chains. With the fragmentation and globalisation of the industrial sector, the technological innovations underway and those to come will surpass the monitoring and certification capacity of regulatory bodies to guarantee safety, as already illustrated by the challenges in certifying self-learning systems. The divide will widen between those (designers, major players) who will understand the algorithms and have access to the data and those who will 'consume' without understanding. Self-regulation and third parties (insurers, standards bodies, professional alliances) will increasingly replace official authorities. Systemic computer network failures and cybersecurity will replace operator reliability as the central concern for 'safety'. With the loss of intelligibility and the growing dissociation between benefit and risk, the risk aversion of the public, the users and local residents will continue to grow, and along with it distrust and suspicion, amplified by social media, in a world that is increasingly esoteric or even magical and has shifted into 'emergency' mode, destabilised by climate change and the boomerang effects of ecosystem destruction. More and more risks will become uninsurable.

Beyond this forecast, which will inevitably prove to be wrong and which, it is hoped, presents a pessimistic view, the socio-technological revolution underway could thus generate a real paradox. By extending the industrial fabric to a global scale while fragmenting it and multiplying the interconnections, the revolution inexorably increases its complexity and thus, by definition, the limits to its modelling, and the uncertainty and 'fundamental surprise' potential associated with it. At the same time, there is a growing feeling that the computing power is developing faster than the object of the modelling: since a future which can be entirely pre-calculated is now within reach with the digital twins, exhaustive predetermination and total control could be just around the corner. And there might finally be some kind of an end to safety risk management. In this, there is no doubt an illusion of the same nature as that which, at the end of the last century, believed the end of history was coming. This does not mean that all the promises of digital technology are false. It is certain that we will have factories, trains, aircraft and nuclear reactors controlled at levels one order of magnitude higher than our current best levels. But—this is a banality—this control will never be total. And most importantly, it will concern local processes, not the entire system. Accidents will become rarer, but increasingly of the 'black swan' type.

### **13.4 The Risk of a Late and Stale Evolution of Safety Management**

Thus, everything is happening as though the story of safety was that of a slow ascension within the levels of the organisation, beginning with the machine, the operator and their workstation, continuing at the level of the teams, the workshops, the procedures, then the processes, the departments, the production sites. But, everything is also happening as though the safety strategy was always one level behind. The more complex the system becomes, the more the root factors, which 'produce' the risk and allow its modulation, shift to the next level up. We think about the workstation level when it is already the design and processes that are the issue, about the process level when it is already the company's strategy that is the issue and about the strategic decision-making level of a company when it is the global value production chain that is generating instabilities… And while safety studies are carried out for internal and local changes within the company, this is not the case for major changes affecting the world. Safety is leaving the confines of the company, and its systemic dimension is not being dealt with at the right level. If we are not careful, the future of safety will resemble that of antibiotics. Given our sterilisation strategies, the threat of the future is not so much the original pathogen, but the fact that our defences are always one mutation behind.