Safety Science 47 (2009) 795–797

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Safety Science

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Editorial

Resolving multiple criteria in decision-making involving risk of accidental loss

The risk of accidents is often an important issue in decisionsmade by companies and governments, whether they are made ex-plicit or not. Managers involved in decisions regarding investmentsin modern infrastructure, in the exploitation of energy resources, innew plants or new technologies all face this issue. Decision makersmust simultaneously take a number of different criteria into ac-count in investment decisions, the risk of accidents being one ofthem. How should the losses due to accidents be weighed in thedecision-making alongside other issues such as political or societalacceptability, return on capital, efficiency, and reputation or evenlong-term survival of the organisation? What decision approachesare used in these cases to balance the different criteria against eachother? Which stakeholders are involved in the decision-makingand what priorities are made? There are also investments directlyaimed at improving safety, such as major investments in safetybarriers in road or air-traffic systems or investments in the remotecontrol of hazardous chemical processes. Such investments mayresult in a shift in the balance between risk and other organisationor system objectives or even between different safety objectives.What is traded off for increased safety in these cases and howare the interests of different stakeholders balanced?

There is abundant scientific evidence of how decisions in a nat-ural context deviate from the normative prescriptions of a simpleand rational decision-making process. Different stakeholders mayjudge the uncertainties linked to the benefits and costs of aninvestment differently, depending on their position in relationshipto them. An excessive risk of major accidents may be used as a sur-rogate argument, because it provides a more acceptable basis for agiven position than the perceived financial, political or societalgains or losses. Even decisions with very considerable financialand social consequences are taken within a bounded rationality,which may exclude adequate consideration of risk. Decisionsmay be dominated by a concern for corporate image, politicalexpediency, or the desire to shift the responsibility away fromthe principal decision maker. So it is also important to ask howthe responsibility for safety of the whole system is taken care ofin a complex system or organisation with several actors, eachresponsible for the safety of a sub-system? It may, for example,be tempting for a decision maker to avoid expenditure on the infra-structure of the public road system and so improve the economicsof that sub-system, by claiming that the real responsibility forsafety in transportation lies with the road users or vehicle manu-facturers. Another example of a shift, this time in time, would bea decision to improve the apparent profitability of an investment

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by postponing the visualisation of the necessary expenditures forsafety measures until a later phase of the development, when he/she is no longer in charge.

There is, with some notable exceptions, no authoritative guid-ance on how such decision-making should be tackled, within thereal world constraints of decision-making in complex systems ororganisations and under uncertainty. An analysis of investmentdecisions, involving the risk of accidents as a significant issue, isneeded. To what extent do decision-makers apply analytic meth-ods and to what extent does this contribute to the quality of thedecisions? These questions are essential, especially in the light ofthe increased professionalism of the area of decisions under riskand uncertainty over the last two decades. We have become muchmore systematic in our approaches to risk management, withtransparent safety management systems, auditable risk assess-ment methods and explicit safety cases. Have we, as a result, alsobecome more effective in integrating other criteria when takingdecisions? How do authorities and major companies try to ensurethat they do not become victims of a too bounded reality?

This special issue addresses a number of these questions. It usesthe perspective of the decision makers in investment decisions oflarge organisations, both public and private. The papers of the spe-cial issue fall into two main sections. The first section includes fourpapers that deal with decision-making from a theoretical perspec-tive. Thereafter follows a section of seven papers presenting casestudies. A final paper analyses the case studies from a theoreticalperspective.

In summary, the papers illuminate the roles and dilemmas ofthe decision makers and the assistance that they can be given bytheory and methods. Decision areas include investments in energyinfrastructure, air and road traffic systems, new chemical produc-tion systems, research and development of new technologies suchas software languages or nanotechnology and genetic engineering,and major improvements in safety management, culture or perfor-mance. Contributions come from both successes and failures inmajor decisions.

Firstly, the use of risk analysis in decision-making may lead todiffering decisions because the concept of risk is not understoodin the same way by all those concerned. Risk analysis often implic-itly deals with the notion of uncertainty, which is often not wellunderstood. This lack of agreed knowledge has significant conse-quences on the decision process. The paper by Terje Aven discussesthis issue, questioning the attributes characterizing risk and thesignificance of uncertainty for decisions.

796 Editorial / Safety Science 47 (2009) 795–797

The way a decision is made depends on the setting of this deci-sion. The understanding of this setting is essential to choose thesuitable approach for deciding. The paper by Ragnar Rosness pro-poses a contingency model of decision-making involving risk ofaccidental loss, which is based on two dimensions: the proximityof the decision-maker to the hazard and his/her level of authority.It also provides an analysis of five concrete decision settingsinvolving the management of risk that fall within different areasof this two-dimensional model. This typology is used to provideadvice for improved decision-making.

In the area of safety, decision-making is often based on trade-offs between benefits (e.g. saved life) and costs (treatment costs,residual harms, etc). Cost-benefit analysis techniques provide aframework for this analysis. They force the decision maker to spec-ify the decision criteria and their relative weights. The latter aremade explicit by being converted into monetary units. The paperby Baker et al. highlights the use of the value of statistical life(VSL) as a unit, which remains a controversial issue. The paper pre-sents a straightforward calculation of a VSL which allows practiceby policymakers to be compatible with a cost-benefit decision-making approach.

Decision-making requires the choice of attributes. The paper byRune Elvik analyses the trade-off between two attributes in roadsafety policy: efficiency of road safety measures and the equityin the distribution of risk between different user groups. Elvik alsodiscusses how actual decisions among policy makers in Norway aremade in the light of this analysis and how this affects the possibil-ities to reach the vision of zero severe injuries and fatalitiesadopted by the Norwegian policy makers as a long-term goal.Elvik’s paper represents a transition from theory to case studiesin this special issue.

The policy for road traffic safety is also considered in the firstcase-study paper, that by Roger Johansson. He presents the deci-sion process leading to the establishment of ‘‘vision zero” in Swe-den and how it translates into concrete road design criteria used bythe Swedish road administration for designing streets and roads.He shows the value of using the reduction of consequences of acci-dents instead of their frequency as basis for the trade-off. Elvik andJohansson describe two fundamentally different ways of distribut-ing the responsibilities for decisions about road safety measuresbetween policy makers and executing authorities in Norway andSweden, respectively. Concrete examples highlight the fact thatthe way decisions are made may have a great influence on the ac-tual residual risks.

The arctic is often considered as the ‘‘last wilderness”. Oil andgas development in the offshore arctic is controversial due to therisk of oil spills. Economic considerations must also be taken intoaccount in the decision process. The paper by Hasle et al. presentsthe principles for making decisions in such petroleum activities.They are illustrated by the authorization of exploration drilling inthe Norwegian Barents Sea. Their paper highlights the decision cri-teria, the handling of uncertainty, the influence of the stakeholdersand the role of the authorities.

Decisions to introduce innovative solutions in the safety do-main need to handle uncertainty. Although already existing solu-tions may be intrinsically unsafe, the risks are known and undercontrol. The paper by Christoph de Haën presents two cases, whichillustrate this situation. He analyses how a group of people handlesvarious attributes of a decision depending on their cultures: engi-neering, finance, business, etc. He also shows how rational argu-ments and intuition interact. He proposes two approaches toanalyse the decision-making processes: the knowledge-culture-conditioned bounded rationality and the artificial neural networkprocess.

Despite a significant focus on safety in the design of air-trafficcontrol systems, major accidents do occur. National and interna-

tional air-traffic control agencies have to make decisions after theiroccurrences about what, if anything, to change in the way the sys-tem is operated. The paper by Johnson et al. proposes an extensionof Klein’s model of recognition primed decision-making to under-stand organisational responses to these accidents. This model isused to assess the actions of several organisations following theÜberlingen mid-air collision in 2002. It does not concern individu-als or small groups of decision makers but takes a macro-level andorganisational viewpoint.

More and more complex software applications are being devel-oped to control physical devices, whose malfunctioning may leadto harm (e.g. in transportation or production systems). Numerousmeans have been introduced to regulate decisions made in soft-ware development in order to manage software failures. The pa-per by Gilles Motet shows that the role of software languages israrely questioned or included in these decision processes, despitethe fact that they constitute the software implementation tech-nology. The paper shows that the evolution of those languagesin the past has improved the development performance (reducingthe costs of the products) and prevented faults in programs(increasing the safety of these products) simultaneously. Recentdevelopments in software languages represent a break in this pro-gress. The paper proposes a way to trade-off between develop-ment performance and safety in the situation where they nowconflict.

The paper by Jan van Ginniken and Andrew Hale presents anexample of decision-making leading to a major initiative to im-prove safety in a steel company’s maintenance department. Itshows that a first, top-down approach, was not accepted by keystake holders. A second approach followed, taking into account hu-man factors and the need to change the culture in the department.It shows that safety can be used as a spearhead to improve generalmorale and productivity as well. The initiative presented was notbased on a rational one-step decision using a complete set of crite-ria. Decision-making in this particular case may rather be de-scribed as a process where problem formulation and search forsolutions evolve over time and emotion and ‘convictions’ play acrucial role.

Research into dangerous pathogens exposes laboratory employ-ees and the general public living in the vicinity of the laboratory tosignificant threats to their health. The paper by Michael Baramuses pathogen research in the United States as a case and describeshow different government authorities, universities and other stakeholders affect critical decisions such as the location, design andoperation of maximum security and safety laboratories. Pathogenresearch is located at a crossroad between safety and security,and Baram highlights how the safety tradition of openness in rela-tionship to the stakeholders conflicts with the secrecy demands ofsecurity. He concludes that there is a general lack of coordinationbetween the different authorities involved in the management ofrisk in pathogen research and that it lags far behind other high haz-ard areas such as nuclear and chemical safety. In order to addressthe risks involved, a better understanding of the prevailing culturein the scientific research community is also required, because itframes the decisions made.

The final paper by Ragnar Rosness analyses the different casestudies based on his previously presented two-dimensional modelof decision-making. He shows that the cases presented in this spe-cial issue range from highly structured processes to ‘‘garbage can”processes where the actors, solutions and problems find each otherby processes which may involve a high degree of chance. Struc-tured decision processes are used in highly politicised decisionswhere transparency is required. The cases also demonstrate exam-ples, where a change of direction in an unstructured decision-mak-ing approach has been necessary in order to implement newprinciples for safety.

Editorial / Safety Science 47 (2009) 795–797 797

Urban KjellénDepartment of Industrial Economics and Technology Management,

Norwegian University of Science and Technology,Trondheim, Norway

E-mail address: kjellen@online:no

Gilles MotetFondation pour une Culture de Sécurité Industrielle & Université de

Toulouse – INSA – LATTIS, Toulouse, FranceE-mail address: gilles:motet@icsi-eu:org

Andrew HaleSafety Science Group, Delft University of Technology,

Delft, NetherlandsE-mail address: A.R.Hale@tudelft.nl