“Safety is our number one priority”, so says leadership. Interestingly, this was also mentioned by the CEO at BP prior to the Deepwater Horizon/Macondo disaster. I just summarised a 2016 paper which analysed the “CEO-speak” of BP leaders prior to the disaster. Summary posted in a week or two. They found that: ·        Overall, by analysing… Continue reading CEO-speak and the Deepwater Horizon explosion

What biases are present in construction safety investigations? A new study from Thallapureddy, Sherratt, Bhandari, Hallowell & Hansen explored this question via role-play simulation interviews. They found the following to be common biases:1) Confirmation bias2) Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE)3) Past experience bias4) Anchoring bias5) Hindsight bias6) Conservatism in belief revision. Post in the next week or two –… Continue reading Biases in construction safety investigations – roleplay scenario study

This study analysed 13-years of data from the Mine Safety & Health Administration’s (MSHA) database, incorporating 772 fatalities to see whether the safety triangle predicted subsequent injuries or fatalities. The categories included: Because the hours worked by a mine may influence the chance that the same mine may experience a fatality, a comparison was made… Continue reading Heinrich Revisited: a New Data-Driven Examination of the Safety Pyramid

This study explored the links between specific organisational factors of safety management systems (SMS) and specific risk variables, and their function as leading indicators. In particular, they looked at how project and site complexity, design and resourcing influences safety risks. It’s not the first study to research the links on site complexity and design etc.… Continue reading Organizational factors and specific risks on construction sites

This scoping review evaluated the evidence surrounding how psychosocial safety climate (PSC) influences health, safety and performance of workers. 93 papers were screened from an initial sample of >13k records. Providing background: Results Key findings from this literature review were: Discussing the results, it’s said that PSC, as an “upstream job resource construct”, was found… Continue reading Influence of psychosocial safety climate on occupational health and safety: a scoping review

How does organisational and project complexity and resourcing factors influence safety risks in construction?. I just summarised a paper that explored this; post in the next week or two. Unsurprisingly, they found that: ·        “Resources on site” is strongly determinant in explaining influences on risk variables because it affects all the risk variables in their model… Continue reading Construction complexity and resourcing on safety risks

I found this an interesting paper, exploring literature around the effects of hindsight on potential learning. Hindsight bias is also known as “I knew it all along” effect. Straight off the bat, they note that “Almost universally, the nearly 600 papers that have cited Fischhoff’s seminal work in this area have claimed that hindsight is… Continue reading A sensemaking model of hindsight bias

This assessed the contribution of design issues to the occurrence of fatal work-related injuries in Australia. Work-related injury data was sourced from a national coroners’ information system. 210 fatalities over the 2000-02 period were included. A limitation of this dataset is that it was not produced for the purposes of incident prevention (nor did it… Continue reading The Role of Design Issues in Work-Related Fatal Injury in Australia

This 2000 paper explored the role of counterfactual thinking in learning from incidents, and how organisational accountability influences learning. Two studies were used. Study 1 analysed hundreds of aviation near miss narrative events, including 89 with clear codable instances of counterfactual reasoning. Study 2 had 42 students use a flight simulator [* So, of course,… Continue reading The Lessons We (Don’t) Learn: Counterfactual Thinking and Organizational Accountability after a Close Call