Johan Bergström

I have a new publication listed at my publication page! It is a research article published in the Journal of Risk Research. The article is based on a study conducted by two master students that I supervised on the topic of what counts as a reasonable level of fire protection. The thing is that in Sweden we have multiple actors engaging in the system of establishing a certain level of fire protection measures in buildings. We also have some regulation. It is when these actors and regulations start interacting that really interesting (and highly complex) phenomena arise. This is the core of the conducted study.

Basically we have a Swedish Law stating that every owner of a building ought to have a "reasonable extent of fire protection measures". This is not an uncommon way of formulating a law, it is inherently vague, open for different interpretations based on stakeholder interests, and gives rise to several goal-conflicts.

What the students that I supervised did was that the…

Today I attend a conference organized by the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency (MSB). The conference is called "New knowledge for a safer society" and I am invited to give a short presentation about the research project on the theme of Organizational Resilience in Escalating Situations that I have been working in during most of my PhD project.

The presentation is not beautiful, but goes through some of the research-problems that we tried to address in the project and our means of addressing them. Simple as that (for those of you understanding Swedish that is). Mainly the presentation introduces safety as a system property emerging from the interaction of actors rather than the reliability of each individual actor (based on ideas from complexity theory and resilience engineering). In terms of what we have done in the project I went through the development of methodologies for team training and team performance assessment that we have developed and finally some of our theore…

So, in Sweden we currently have another case of a person being brought to court for criminal negligence in his work. It is a nurse at the Swedish alarm call-centre who is accused for not having sent an ambulance  to a young man who said he could not breathe. The nurse answering the call saw all the signs of a panic attack and not the signs of a the really unusual spontaneously (without outer violence) broken spleen. The man eventually died.

Now, I am not an expert in this case, but I have followed the news reports. Most of them report how a nurse neglected all "the obvious signs" and the prosecutor also brought the nurse to court for manslaughter. The district court freed the nurse of the charges based on the reasoning that even though he should have sent an ambulance he did not cause the death of the young man, because the ambulance would not have made it in time and the outcome would not have been any different. The young man's mom has been active in discussing the ca…