The costs of accountability bias
The accountability bias hampers
Reactive resilience development..., because the investigations do not
focus on the design
changes needed to improving the resilience (
Dekker, 2007 ). Famous examples are:
- In avionics: Following the AF 296 accident in the 1988 air show in Mulhouse-Habsheim, France (
Wiki ...), the French authorities decided to accuse the pilot for not being up-to-date about the design changes of the new
fly-by-wire features of the Airbus 220. They set the pilot to jail and disregarded the need to fix problematic protection envelop. Subsequently, in 1990 an IA 605 airplane crashed due to the same design mistake in the
protection envelop (
Wiki ...).
Source ...
- In nuclear power plants: Following an instance of the pressure release valve of the David Besse PWR in 1977 remaining stuck open (
Derivan
...), The manufacturer added an indicator to show the valve position in the control room.
However, the wrong instructions for handling the situation were not corrected, and the information about the incidence did not arrive to the sister PWR at the TMI plant (
Adams
...). The rest is history.
Another problem caused by the
accountability bias is that the operators are not reluctant to provide information about safety issues to the management, because this information
might be used later to accuse them.
Updated on 03 Mar 2017.