One of the most prominent mistakes organizations make when implementing their Behavior-Based Safety Process (BBSP) is that they still operate under 1990s-era assumptions regarding how they view and manage incident reporting and investigation and the behaviors of personnel involved in those undesired events.
An improperly implemented and managed BBSP can create numerous biases, with the primary bias being that “unsafe behaviors cause all accidents.”
A leadership team with this bias, as reflected in their investigations and causal analysis, is not ready for a BBSP. However, even organizations that are mature enough in their safety thinking when launching the BBSP can revert to this mindset. It is just too easy to blame the worker, and the bias can be too strong to overcome.
