Learning from incidents, accidents and disasters contributes to improvement of safety and the prevention of unwanted events. In this review, literature on learning from safety incidents within organizations is studied and compared with the organizational learning theory of Argyris and Schön. Sub‐processes, such as learning lessons, sharing, storing and applying lessons, are described, and factors that influence these processes are listed, such as trust, the severity of the consequences of an incident and the people involved in learning. In comparison with the theory of Argyris and Schön, aspects about the information to learn from, i.e., the incident and analysis, are much more specified in the safety literature. However, the organizational learning theory gives more details about the earlier mentioned sub‐processes.
Many incidents have occurred because organisations have failed to learn from lessons of the past. This means that there is room for improvement in the way organisations analyse incidents, generate measures to remedy identified weaknesses and prevent reoccurrence: the learning from incidents process. To improve that process, it is necessary to gain insight into the steps of this process and to identify factors that hinder learning (bottlenecks). This paper presents a model that enables organisations to analyse the steps in a learning from incidents process and to identify the bottlenecks. The study describes how this model is used in a survey and in 3 exploraorganisational learning incident survey learning potential case studies
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