Learning organisations

A key element of successful health and safety management is the ability of the organisation to learn from its experiences. Arrangements should be made so that proactive data (e.g. from audit results) and reactive data (e.g. from incidents) in one area of an organisation are shared with other areas in the organisation. In this way, areas have the opportunity to learn from the experiences of others and to consider whether they have similar deficiencies in their systems and processes. The availability of electronic mail systems greatly facilitates the rapid sharing of such information. The information format should provide  

Sharing failure information such as this is a feature of mature and confident organisations. It means that their first intention is to learn from tiieir 

A natural starting point for benchmarking exercises is to focus on the elements contained in their audit process. Features of benchmarking studies include  

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Senge, P.M. (1990) The Fifth Discipline The Art and Practice of the Learning Organisation. Doubleday New York. 

Garvin, D., Building a learning organisation, Harvard Business Review (1993). 

Visible management commitment Safety communication Productivity versus safety Learning organisation Health and safety resources Participation in safety Risk-taking behaviour... 

Senge P.M. (1990). The Fifth Discipline the art and practice of the learning organisation. Doubleday. New York. 

Future research into SHE information systems will need to integrate these two tracks of development. Learning organisations are dependent on prompt and correct feedback of results and access to information that its members find interesting. We need simple and verifiable theory and methods to support this development. Future research in the area has to be output-driven in order to take advantage of the principles from natural selection in generating effective solutions. It remains to be seen whether the end results will attract the attention of middle-sized and small company management. 

The goal of the APO Project is to embed vocational training within the workflow and to consider individual learning efforts as part of a learning organisation (Dehnbostel 00 Albrecht 99). IT technicians will be trained on-the-job and on-demand in a project-like manner. 

Thus resources of an enterprise can be used better to improve human resource development. Therefore the APO concept is not only a contribution to a learning organisation but also a support and an incentive. 

Proof that the new approaches work under normal classroom conditions gives moral support to teachers and challenges them to change their own perceptions of teaching, learning and the curriculum. The results of the evaluation of formal trials of new materials and approaches about the triplet relationship should be made available to the teachers. One effective way to do so is to organise matters such that teachers who made trial use of the materials share their experiences with others (Ferk Savec et al., 2008). 

UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation) (2002) Teaching and Learning for a Sustainable Euture. 

Koomneef F., 2000. Organised Learning from Small-scale Incidents, PhD thesis, Delft University of Technology, Delft. 

Several organisations have lately established electronic databases, recording details of industrial chemical accidents. These should enable the user to learn lfom others mistakes and also establish a fixed version of accidents, which hitherto have changed in the retelling, and the more important have often been retold. The two above are examples of a wider trend. All tend to reflect the pre-occupations of their compilers, which are generally not so much the precise chemical causes of the mishap, but its effects. 

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