Virginia everyday

Virginia tech was a barbaric case of killing by a man who had some psychic disorders, it was terrible to see young students being killed by someone who was mentally unstable and horrifically dangerous , but the question that poses to educational institutions today is can such incidents be foreseen and barriers put to stop them?

Educational institutions run in a complex environment and handle complex beings , most organisations have these crisis embedded in them due to the culture of the institution. Lagadec said that ‘nothing will grow spontaneously on the terrain of disaster. The aptitude to react in times of crises is closely linked to the work that has been done before the upset. This goes for all parties involved’. The culture of the organisations in terms of their attitude towards training, developing contingency plans, beliefs in diagnostic systems etc can be fundamental in creating an environment in which crises emerge. If there is proper training then the actions taken during the crises can be very different from the ones taken by someone who is untrained and this can be critical in the crises turning into a disaster.

The idea is that those in management who devise rules and restrictions to prevent a crises, may help to create that very event through their systems of beliefs. The condition remains a key source of denial and ensures that controls will be inadequate. Also argued is that organisations show a tendency to deny the warning of crisis potential when these come from outside of the organisation. In addition, organisations also tend to deny warnings presented by those deemed not to have legitimate expertise in the area.

If this is to be believed then incidents like Virginia tech, London bombing, September 11th and many more could have been stopped if the stakeholders involved would have acted on a faster note prior to the accident and taken the hints given to them more seriously.
The biggest problem most of us face in such issues is one of disbelief, Turner had argued that most of us don’t want to believe that major causalities like such can happen and managers who have to plan do not make contingency plans or put barrier points as it challenges the fundamental approach of positive management, making the organisation vulnerable and generating pathways for such accidents to occur.


Another academic Reason’s work builds upon the notion of incubation of crisis within organisations and grounds it within the psychological literature on human error. Reason makes the distinction between active and latent error within systems failure, with the latter proving to be much harder to identify and manage. He used a medical metaphor, and argues that latent error potential sits within an organisation or system like “resident pathogens”.
These pathogens remain largely undetected until a series of trigger events expose the latent error pathways and allow incidents to escalate into catastrophic accidents. Reason makes the argument that these latent errors both create the workplace conditions in which active errors and violations occur and also embed pathways through organisational defences. It is these pathways which allow for the rapid escalation of incidents into accidents and which beguile attempts at mitigation.

In Virgnia Tech, killer of those innocent people Cho Seung-hui had given enough signs and most people in the lectures with him had made earlier complaints about his actions; in fact a local newspaper reported a case of no one attending his presentations as the content used to be very disturbing, no authority took notice of that story. In Glasgow university itself a few of us went to the accommodation office to show our concerns about someone we thought of having problems mentally but we were asked to give it in writing and action could not be taken till the accident happens, this shows the very slip in our systems as we wait for the causalities to happen before taking any actions and hints are not taken seriously, generating a controllable situation into a disaster story.

These factors vindicate the academics view that culture of the organisation is such that these signals/warnings are neglected and no (or not enough) measures are taken to stop such casualties, reflecting the fact that there are no trained personals to counter such an attack making the organisation vulnerable to such an event. These factors lead to pathways of vulnerability in the system as the target becomes exposed to the attacker due to bare defences.

It is high time and enough cases now that these institutions realise the importance of understanding the real problem and creating systems so that such accidents can be stopped and human life is not put in danger, as they say ‘prevention is better than cure’.