Week 1: Safety
Article 1: Cognition, Technology, and Organizational Limits: Lessons
from the Air France 447 Disaster
From a limits perspective, failures occur when organizations attempt to do things that are
beyond their capabilities.
Stress Model: overall “limit” that NASA exceeded, was Its ability to Fly the shuttle safely in the
face of:
• Multiple external demands
• Highly ambitious launch schedule
• While deploying complex, unreliable technologies “at the frontier”
Organizationally, NASA NASA exceeded the limit of its ability:
• to identify, interpret, communicate and act upon information about the foam strike
• while simultaneously attending to other demands.
1. Organizational Limits
1.1 Organizational limits concept
All organizations have limits in the range, amount, duration, and quality of things they can do
with their current capabilities, and these limits may originate in their members’ perceptions, in
their policies, in the technologies they adopt, or in their environments.
1.2 Categories
• Limits to cognition are significant because they constrain the ability of actors to
recognize, interpret, and respond appropriately to events
▪ Conceptually, cognitive limits are rooted in constraints in the capacity of human
beings to pay attention to many things at once while processing and sharing
information.
• Limits from managerial quest for coordination and control. Deadlines and budgets are
mechanisms to control resources and to coordinate interdependent activities by
establishing limits within which actors are expected to work.
, • Limits from constraints of the environment: Societal restrictions, market mechanisms,
laws of science.
The first two categories of limits are endogenous to most organizations because they stem from
aspects of organizational cognition, structure, and process that contribute to (or impede) an
organization’s ability to meet demands.
The third category of limits is exogenous, in that the limits originate in the organization’s
environment
Similarity between cognition-based and managerial-based limits is both recognize limited
capacity for attention and information processing.
Differences:
• From the cognitive perspective, a crucial limiting factor of what an organization can do
is determined by the ability of its members to make sense of what is happening around
them; transgression of this limit is likely to lead to failure
• Managerially defined limits typically serve to either focus attention (controlling time or
cost, or limiting task variety, for example) or provide a framework within which
decisions can be devolved to lower levels, thereby reducing monitoring and
information-processing costs
Endogenous limits refer to the limits of what an organization is able to do, with reasonable
consistency and reliability, given its characteristics and capabilities.
Exogenous limits refer to restrictions on organizational action that emanate from the
environment in which an organization operates
