Peter Susca Profile

The Impact of Decision-making on Organizational Health & Safety

Decision-making in an organization is the fulcrum of benefit and risk – success and failure. Quite often the focus of decision- making is on those that make the last decisions, the front-line workers. However, most of their decisions are predicated by decisions made way above their pay grade.

When business and operational decisions are not made in a balanced fashion across imperatives, benefit and risk, imbalanced processes and expectations are created. A by-product of this imbalance is the potential for excessive risk. Excessive risk of failure and harm is not limited to safety, it has the potential to affect all organizational values and imperatives.

This session will discuss decision-making tiers and the implications of each tier on the others. The Culture to Unwanted Outcomes Relationship will be used to show how the implications of poor decisions make their way into the operational reality. In addition, a variety of operational risk creation examples will be presented.

The principles of balanced decision-making such as cross functional factors, imperative thresholds, decision-making processes and gatekeeping responsibilities of Line and Staff Functions will also be presented. Session participants will acquire a new way to look at the origin of risk and risk variation in their organizations.