SafetyInsights.org

This meta-analysis of evidence on the contribution of leadership styles to followers’ mental health indices may interest you. Not a summary – but you can freely read the full study. 53 studies with 217 effect sizes, comprising >93k participants met inclusion criteria. They found that: ·        Transformational and destructive leadership were the strongest predictors of overall… Continue reading A Meta-Analysis of the Relative Contribution of Leadership Styles to Followers’ Mental Health

This upcoming summary explored how social factors permeate across organisations, thereby strengthening and weakening operational barriers. They argue that while technical and operational barriers are pretty definable—valves, interlocks, drop zones—what counts as an ‘organisational barrier’ is more elusive. They re-analyse Hopkins’ analysis of the Macondo blowout from a barrier perspective. Hopkins’ implicated several factors in… Continue reading Social forces, group think, normalisation of warnings and barrier system integrity

Another study from Dillon & Tinsley which looked at how near-miss events & reporting may increase our exposure to risk rather than improve learning and safety. Again, I’ve done a terrible job summarising this… This used 2 experiments with participants. In ex.1, participants read a vignette about a planned cruise that could be impacted by… Continue reading Near-miss events, risk messages, and decision making

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