Safety Thought of the Week

A bloody episode in a long war introduces the idea that defenses designed to protect against one kind of hazard can render their users prey to other kinds of danger, usually not foreseen by those who created them or even appreciated by those who use them. In short, defenses can be dangerous. This is no…...

It is suggested that LATENT ORGANIZATIONAL failures are analogous to the “resident pathogens” within the human body, which combine with external factors (stress, toxic agencies, etc.) to bring about disease. Like cancers and cardiovascular disorders, accidents in complex, defended systems do NOT arise from single causes. They occur through the unforeseen (and often unforeseeable) concatenation…...

So many want to accuse Heinrich of being too heavy on “unsafe acts” and claim that he held the workers too responsible for their injuries. This is just pure hogwash! I have shared many passages from Heinrich’s writings from the 1920s-1930, and each one clearly shows that he was more a fan of what we…...

These days, too many companies have short-circuited their “new employee safety orientation.” They have either substantially shortened the time employees are in “safety orientation” or, worse, changed the format from face-to-face to a CBT format using information that is NOT even specific to the site-specific safety programs/practices. And then they call me and ask, “Why…...

I have discussed this approach before but think it is worth repeating. In our SMS/Safety Process, we need to view the men and women who do our dirty and dangerous work as our “customers,” just like we view our business customers through the lens of our Quality Management System (QMS). Imagine the outcome if we…...

Imagine trying to build a house today without the proper tools, such as a hammer/nail gun, handsaw/power saw, and tape measure. These are obviously critical to the task being done WELL and EFFICENTLY. Sure, we could build a house without them, but would it be one we would buy and put our family in for…...

In a mature Safety Process/SMS these four (4) elements play a critical role in delivering VALIDATED data to management so that the data can be analyzed and properly responded to in order to INTERVENE in the conditions/actions/attitudes BEFORE an event delivers undesired consequences. The late great Trevor Kletz said it best three decades ago in…...

All this talk about “Sh_t That Can Kill You” (STCKY) and focusing on those Low-Frequency, High-Severity risks is just one of the current safety fads. I like SIF, and if you really think about it, SIF and Process Safety are very much aligned. But I have never understood why it needed to be its own…...

Heinrich did not blame workers for accidents—quite the opposite. He was more in the camp of Latent Organizational Failures, as James Reason taught us in the 1980s. In this passage from his 1928 article “The Origin of Accidents”, Travelers, we can see his position on accidents on full display… Remember, he said this 96 years…...

If your team is focused on an event’s probability or likelihood, you’re NOT doing SIF! The Serious Injuries and Fatalities (SIF) model is intended to IDENTIFY events that have opportunities to cause life-altering injuries and death. And yes, most of these will (hopefully) have LOW frequencies/probabilities. So, to justify NOT responding to these LOW frequency…...

The purpose of barrier[/controls/safeguards] management is to make the kind of implicit controls explicit:  to be clear about exactly what controls are relied on to prevent incidents, to understand their characteristics, to have an understanding of how reliable they can be expected to be, and to know what needs to be done to ensure the…...

Some raw materials are sensitive to humidity; this valve sticks and is more demanding than its supposedly similar neighbor; that pump has broken down; this operation sometimes occurs at night and sometimes during the day, sometimes when it’s hot, other times when it’s cold, sometimes our co-worker is tall, sometimes he is short, we may…...