ABSTRACT
Discussion of the need for resilience in organisations is only of academic value, if it is not possible to assess in advance of accidents and disasters whether an organisation has those qualities, or how to change the organisation in order to acquire or improve them, if it does not already have them. Proactive assessment of organisations relies on one form or other of management audit or organisational culture assessment. In this chapter we look critically at the ARAMIS risk assessment approach designed for evaluating high-hazard chemical plants, which contains a management audit (Duijm et al., 2004; Hale et al., 2005). We ask the question whether such a tool is potentially capable of measuring the characteristics that have been identified in this book as relevant to resilience. In an earlier paper (Hale, 2000) a similar question was asked in a more specific context about the IRMA audit (Bellamy et al., 1999), a predecessor of the tool that will be assessed here. That paper asked whether the audit tool could have picked up the management system and cultural shortcomings which ultimately led to the Tokai-mura criticality incident in Japan (Furuta et al., 2000), if used before the accident happened. That analysis concluded that there were at least eight indicators in the management system that the hazards of 290criticality had become poorly controlled, which such an audit, if carried out thoroughly, should have picked up. It is of course then a valid question whether these signals would have been taken seriously enough to take remedial action, which would have led to sufficient change to prevent the accident. Responding effectively to signals from audits is also a characteristic of a resilient organisation; but this in turn can be assessed by an audit, if it looks, as did the IRMA audit, at the record of action taken from previous audit recommendations.
