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Risk-prone organisations issue regulations to ensure the stability and safety of the socio-technical system. However, the tendency to over-regulate has its limitations. To mitigate these limitations, a railway company introduced a specific participative approach that uses formal debate to construct a compromise. This debate is based on a realistic view of the situation, involving in the writing of the new regulation all the organisational components to which it applies. It was found that the approach had indeed enabled the company to adapt its organisation to tackle some of the difficulties it was facing. However, it also brought forward new, more general limitations and highlighted some of the problems involved in introducing a new regulation.