Safety Management System

We hear a lot about our biases showing up in many SMS elements and how these biases hamper the SMS and mislead us.  But not all biases can be a bad thing.  One element where our biases shine brightly is in the Causal Analysis of accidents.  For decades now, we have been told over and…...

Competence is defined in ISO 45001:2018, 3.23, as “the ability to apply knowledge and skills to achieve intended results”. Competence enables a person or organization to act effectively in a job or situation. It is acquired through training, education, experience, or a combination of these, as determined by the organization. Workers whose activities affect or…...

It is difficult for engineers to change human nature and therefore, instead of trying to persuade people not to make errors, we should accept people as we find them and try to remove opportunities for error by changing the work situation — that is, the plant or equipment design or the method of working. Alternatively,…...

If you want to have some fun VALIDATING the Hazard Identification element of your SMS/Safety Process, use some of these cartoons or real images in a fun but eye-opening exercise. Get a group together, show the cartoon/image, and have the group (but individually) identify all the hazards they can recognize in the cartoon/image. Then we…...

As I rant on about validating and verifying our safety data and defining and quantifying our safety processes, I wanted to share another incident where we learned the hard way.  I managed a chemical facility with many corrosives; thus, eyewashes and safety showers were important items in the mitigation layer.  And as most of us…...

Whether it is on leading or lagging data, data validation and verification is a MUST if we want to build a solid SMS. Making decisions on bad (unverified/unvalidated) data leads to bad decisions, or worse – inaction in risks as leadership may believe all is well…. Membership Required You must be a member to access...

This article was written by Carsten Busch, Safety Mythologist and Historian. The “Indiana Jones of Safety.” Experienced safety, quality, and productivity enabler. carsten@mindtherisk.com It was translated from Dutch to English using Google Translator and Grammarly.  I follow Carsten on LinkedIn as he, too, is a defender of H.W. Heinrich.  He was kind enough to allow…...

If we want to understand why the activity of operators has a particular characteristic, it is often necessary to look for reasons other than those that are immediately visible. The operator working on an aspect of the process is placed in a working environment that will play a part in determining his/her activity and, therefore,…...

To say that accidents are due to human failure is not so much untrue as unhelpful for three reasons: Every accident is due to human error: someone, usually a manager, has to decide what to do; someone, usually a designer, has to decide how to do it; someone, usually an operator, has to do it…....

That would have been my headline as a safety professional with over 30 years of experience investigating serious accidents. I am always amazed at how society sees failures like organizations do. If the DOJ truly believes what they claim to have found in the 2-year investigation of the MPD, then why did they prosecute the…...

The pandemic is chocked full of LEARNING opportunities that we can translate into our effort to improve safety at our facilities. The one that screams at me the most is one of how our elected leaders (and I use that term loosely) behaved. I said back in the middle of the pandemic that we needed…...

Imagine a room of 100 adults, and I am teaching these adults basic math for the first time.  I write on my whiteboard that 2+2 = 4. And I repeat this over and over. Out of these 100 adults, there will be 10% that believe me because I am the teacher, and they understand they…...