ABSTRACT
People at all organizational levels face critical decisions involving conflicts or tradeoffs between safety and competing goals such as staying within budgets, completing projects on schedule, avoiding downtime or simply getting their job done. Inadequate handling of conflicting goals has repeatedly been identified as a causal or contributing factor in accidents. Commonly used strategies for ensuring safe handling of goal conflicts are attempts to influence attitudes through campaigns, slogans etc. (or attempts to influence behaviour through incentive systems which may include negative sanctions for decisions deemed inadequate) (Swuste et al., 2008; Ryggvik, 2008). Based on a study of 57 accidents at sea,Wagenaar and Groeneweg (1987) concluded that very few accidents are the consequence of deliberate risk taking by persons at the sharp end, i.e. close to the sources of danger. A large majority of the captains had been completely taken by surprise. They had been running a risk rather than taking a risk.
