Audits, excessive compliance focus and risk blindness

Still genuinely surprised that our last paper on audit failures has generated, relatively speaking, so much interest: now the second-most accessed paper in the Process Safety Progress journal.

[* It shows as number 1 but that’s a glitch in the matrix. There’s a study on ‘red squirrels tests’ that has HEAPS more views.]

No doubt a large part of the rating is my regular spruiking on LinkedIn rather than a more organic growth of interest 😁. But, hey, gotta hustle right? [accessed doesn’t actually mean read, of course.]

I’ve covered some findings I found particularly interesting in past posts. Here’s something else I liked (image 3):

As a different example, Transocean’s CEO, responsible for the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig involved in the Macondo disaster, reportedly misconstrued the essence of a safety system management review.

The CEO erroneously regarded audits as an “activity carried out by Transocean’s consultant, Lloyd’s Register”, rather than acknowledging it as an “activity he [as the CEO] should [be] leading.”

I found it an interesting view on the role that senior leaders should have in these types of organisational activities (* rituals).

Something else (image 4), investigators took aim at overly prescriptive and ‘compliance-driven’ audits.

They remarked that these types of assurance and improvement activities that focus excessively on the letter of the law, may sometimes be blinded to identifying and correcting the most significant operational issues; a type of risk blindness.

Study link: https://doi.org/10.1002/prs.12579
My site with more reviews: https://safety177496371.wordpress.com

LinkedIn post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/benhutchinson2_still-genuinely-surprised-that-our-last-paper-activity-7283634150484385792-4x5Z?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

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