Understanding industry learning behaviours in the context of safety: A railways perspective

From its inception, the railway industry has sought to develop a safety culture where hazards are identified and addressed and all parties commit to improving safety. However, efforts are often fragmented with limited understanding of cross-jurisdictional knowledge sharing, potentially leading to the under-researched hazard of deterioration in railway safety over time. The paper provides an overview of how the industry conducts safety knowledge retrieval, processing, and dissemination, as well as its relevance for learning behaviours and safety culture. The triangulation method is used to examine the learning behaviours of railway industries in the UK, the USA, Canada and Australia by co-reference analysis of railway accident reports, review of literature in other high-reliability organisations (HROs), and outcomes of stakeholder workshops and participant surveys. The results show the significance of a strong safety culture in promoting a safe environment underpinned by rigorous legislative frameworks and incorporating incentives to learn from historical accidents. Furthermore, failure to learn across jurisdictions may result in misapplied investment and misunderstandings in the prioritisation of resources for advancing railway safety. Several barriers to advancing the safety culture that lead to the potential deterioration of the safety culture have been investigated, including a lack of motivation for cross-jurisdiction learning, legislative framework restrictions, struggles in maintaining corporate memory and technological limitations. Another key conclusion is that learning across jurisdictions and over time fosters a proactive safety culture that anticipates and mitigates risks before they result in accidents.