Management of Extreme Situations

12Error in Decision-Making Processes in Operational Situations: The Case of Fire Rescue Organizations

12.1. Introduction

In highly reliable organizations, decision making is a resilience factor for conducting business in unique contexts. The atypical nature of extreme contexts does not always ensure that there are no errors in decision-making processes. In this chapter, we have examined the place of error in the decision-making process in extreme contexts. This perspective is even more interesting when we look at the so-called organizational error, which can be described as an error that is part of the organization’s practices and considered the norm in all situations. Our questioning encompasses these two aspects and can be formalized as follows:

• – Can error in decision-making represent an educated practice for situation learning?
• – How can we learn from an error when it written into the organization’s rules?

In order to provide answers to these various questions, this chapter presents a conceptual model for the analysis of error in operational decision making (Gautier 2015). This model built around three concepts: extreme contexts (Lièvre 2012; Godé et al. 2016), situation awareness (Endsley 1995) and reasoning error (Bronner 2007). This model makes it possible to better reflect the uniqueness of the decision-making processes in action within organizations in extreme contexts. Its analysis should allow the recognition of human errors in decision-making processes for the ...