ABSTRACT
Since the industrial revolution, there has been an evolution of organizational controls from ‘nothing’ to a set of legal requirements—particularly for health and safety and, more recently, environmental protection—to engineering and organizations’ standard-setting, up to the latest Safety-II thinking. Structure in control originated perhaps 2500 years ago in ancient China, with the work of General Sun Tzu and The Art of War. Possibly, Tzu was amongst the first to appreciate the merits of structured control. William Edwards Deming was in post-WW2 Japan and, in 1958, reported on the Shewhart Wheel (now widely known as the Deming Wheel or Cycle) of PDCA—Plan, Do, Check (or Study) Act. In 2012, PDCA was adopted by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) as the structure for its high-level structure (HLS) in Annex SL. Since then, ISO 9001:2015, ISO 14001:2015, ISO 45001:2018, and other ISO management system standards (MSS) have been prepared to follow PDCA with standard clauses Context, Leadership (and worker participation), Planning, Support, Implementation, Performance evaluation, and Improvement. The effectiveness of OH&S-MS has been systematically reviewed by Robson et al. (research published 1887–2004), and by da Silva and Amaral (research 2007–18). Research in progress at Harvard University (Viswanathan, Johnson, and Toffel) suggests that registration has led to post-certification improvements in safety performance.
