This study undertook field studies across several plants to understand whether an “almost incident-free” chemical company had the adaptive capacities necessary to respond to changing risks, using a Resilience Engineering perspective. Providing background: ·       For years safety improvements were driven by evaluating incidents, errors etc., yet current developments “in safety science, however, challenge the idea… Continue reading Learning From Organizational Incidents: Resilience Engineering for High-Risk Process Environments

This third and final part of a series has highlighted one perspective of integrating human performance into barrier thinking approaches. In this part, specific questions and prompts are provided around what makes for an effective human barrier element, like clear and specific task and goals. Most of this comes from the CIEHF ‘Human Factors in… Continue reading Human performance in barrier thinking part 3

Not a humble brag – just genuinely surprised that so many people have accessed our latest paper on audit failures. At last count, it’s now the third-most accessed paper in the Journal of Process Safety Progress with >3k full text views (‘views’ may not be the same as actually read). Not that I’m checking the… Continue reading Audit failures in major accidents

This 2017 brief paper discusses the development of a book, seeking to better standardise terminology in bow ties and barriers. Of course, there’s entire books and guides written about this – but this paper is easier to summarise. I’m not endorsing these terms or perspectives, just providing them for interest. [** Note. For the keen… Continue reading Standardisation of Bow Tie Methodology and Terminology via a CCPS/EI Book

This upcoming study summary explores two different approaches to explain organisational accidents: 1. Individual blame logics (IBL) 2. Organisational function logics (OFL) The individual blame logic (IBL) is said to often beat out the organisational function logic (OFL). IBL is an accusatory approach, aiming to identify guilty individuals. It’s typical of criminal law, but “is… Continue reading Blame logics in organisations following accidents: bad apples, protecting power structures, and organisational learning

How well poised is an organization with near incident-free performance for adapting to changing risks? Is stellar incident performance indicative of adaptive capacities to the management and containment of its risks? This upcoming 2008 study summary, including Sid Dekker as co-author, explored these questions in a chemical company; via what they called a “resilience engineering… Continue reading The relationship between nearly incident-free performance and the ability to anticipate and respond to emerging and daily risks – resilience engineering

This NASA report on ‘Human Performance Contributions to Safety in Commercial Aviation’ was a really interesting read. They note that every day in aviation, pilots, ATC and other personnel perform “countless correct judgments and actions in a variety of operational environments”. These judgements and actions are “often the difference between an accident and a non-event.… Continue reading NASA report drawing on S-II/Resilience Engineering: Human performance contributions to safety in commercial aviation

This study analysed 10 years of serious and fatal incident investigation reports from four international construction companies to: i)                    Assess the reliability of their Critical Controls (CCs) ii)                   Assess the factors that affect the reliability of CCs I’ve skipped a lot – so check out the full paper. Providing background: ·       The authors in a… Continue reading Determining the Reliability of Critical Controls in Construction Projects

If you’re interested in some ways that our systems fail, and how they can provide false indicators of safety, including audits, then my recent presentation at the Global Safety Innovation Summit 2024 in Wollongong may interest you. tl;dr: we have a lot of data on unsafety, but comparatively less in creating safety. Link: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-jay-allen-show-on-safety-fm/id1377151103?i=1000652636239

This post continues material from the CIEHF’s manual on ‘Human factors in barrier management’. The next set of concerns the authors have with how barriers are constructed, and the role of people perceived is that: 5. Barrier systems rarely take a systems view of human and organisational factors that influence barrier performance 6. The cognitive… Continue reading Human performance and barrier thinking part 2