This paper addresses the why, what and how of strategic planning to achieve safety culture change.
Why strategic planning? "Managers develop strategies to give order to how an organization goes about its business and to achieve target objectives. Without a strategy, there is no established course to follow, no road map to manage by, no coherent action plan for producing the intended results" (Strickland & Thompson, 1990, p. 3).
What is strategy? A strategy consists of a 1) defined mission, 2) performance objectives, 3) assessment, 4) a plan for achieving those objectives based on organizational assessment, 5) implementation, and 6) feedback for evaluation and course correction.
According to John Bryson (1988), strategic planning is an eight step process. The steps are:
Initiating and agreeing on a strategic planning process.
Identifying organizational mandates.
Clarifying organizational mission and values.
Assessing the external environment: opportunities and threats.
Assessing the internal environment: strengths and weaknesses.
Identifying the strategic issues facing an organization.
Formulating strategies to manage the issues.
Establishing an effective organizational vision for the future. (p. 48)
Although strategic planning has played a major role in improving organizational effectiveness, it has not been widely used in the safety field in culture change efforts. The following model provides a framework for such planning.
The S.O.S. framework (Exhibit 1) provides a tool to diagnose barriers to safety improvement and design action plans for change. It provides a way to think about safety as a process that permeates the whole system, rather than as a separate task. And, it provides a conceptual foundation to broaden the outlook of the safety manager so he/she can lead the restructuring of safety systems and safety culture to improve safety performance.
The S.O.S. framework (Exhibit 1) is an organizational model adapted from the work of D.A. Nadler and M.L. Tushman, two recent leaders in organization design (Organizational Architecture, 1992). It is based on a view of organizations as open systems. "Open systems, such as organizations and people, exchange information and resources with their environment. They cannot completely control their own behavior and are influenced in part by external forces" (Cummings and Huse,1989, p. 66).
This view of organizations led to "open systems planning," a technique developed by Richard Beckhard and Reuben Harris (1985) to improve organizational performance, and here applied to safety culture change. According to Beckhard and Harris, an organization faces constant pressure to change itself to remain in balance with its environment. These changes often result in internal instability. The safety manager's dilemma is to respond to external demands while meeting the safety performance goals of the organization.
The S.O.S. "open systems" model has been designed to help managers achieve this work. It has six components:
environmental demands,
inputs,
transformational process,
output,
feedback loop, and
culture.
The arrows depict that an organization is never static and that relationships exist between each part of the whole.
