Learning from successful experiences: An undeveloped potential in the nuclear industry?

In the nuclear industry, a strong emphasis is put on collecting lessons from unwanted events. This is reflected, for example, in the legislations, regulatory requirements and company policies. Lately developments in safety research have made a case that understanding successful activities is also beneficial when ensuring safety. This implies that there is a need to put effort on learning from successes in the nuclear industry. In this paper we discuss how learning from success currently takes place at nuclear power plants and how it could potentially be facilitated. We found that there were a variety of informal practices in place that utilized successes for learning purposes at the plants we studied. In some cases the plants had also attempted to formalize some practices to facilitate learning from success. However, often the learning activities appeared to be non- systematic, underutilizing successful experiences or the lessons learned remained within individuals or groups rather than on organisational level. The development of better tools and methods for practitioners and organisational culture sensitive implementation guidelines may be beneficial for facilitating learning from success. Furthermore, we propose that looking into providing industry-wide incentives may encourage promoting learning from success at nuclear power plants.