Construction and Steel Structure

Biography

Biography: Sherif Mohamed

Abstract

This presentation challenges the traditional way of thinking about construction safety and presents a strong argument for moving beyond compliance. Throughout the world, construction organisations adopt a safety management system that is based on 4E’s (Environment: hazard identification, Engineering: risk reduction, Education: awareness; and Enforcement: regulations and policies. This well-tested system has survived for many years without much challenge. However, recent works on adaptive systems, complexity theory, and organisational sense-making have provided a fresh theoretical lens through which, we can examine construction safety.Safety Management Systems focus on protecting people from failure, standardising the ways of doing things to avoid failure. This presentation recognises that site conditions change all the time, so the focus should be on how people adjust their performance under different conditions to ensure doing things right. In other words, aiming to build resilience in construction site operations in order to respond to the continually changing conditions would ultimately lead to good safety outcomes. To enable building resilience, people would need to be empowered to actively notice and select cues in a changing situation, and relate them to a broader frame of reference (and not a standard procedure) to create a practical and safe environment for everyone. The presentation sheds some light on how a combination of sense-making and adaptive systems had the potential to mitigate latent risks on construction sites.