Safety Thought of the Week

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…....

Several organizational characteristics can feed organizational silence: Managerial illusions: managers can believe that the situation is under control simply because of the number of procedures. They can also believe that failure to follow a procedure is the only possible mechanism that can produce accidents. This discourages feedback about situations where procedures are difficult, time-consuming, or…...

COMPREHENSIVE HAZARD IDENTIFICATION is key to effective risk management. The RISK arising from a HAZARD that has not been identified cannot be managed…. Membership Required You must be a member to access this content.View Membership LevelsAlready a member? Log in here...

“…if you do not manage human error, human error will manage the organization, always at great cost and often at great danger.” James Reason – Video Series, Managing Human Error… Membership Required You must be a member to access this content.View Membership LevelsAlready a member? Log in here...

The appreciation that a person makes of the situation depends mainly on the following four elements: the nature of the information available personal experience, which results in personalized mental models, and a library of configurations that the brain recognizes. the purpose of his current work: if the operator is focused on the resolution of an…...

It is impossible to change the safety culture without modifying the signals that the organization sends through the greater or lesser quality of what it offers in terms of technical design, safety management systems, and integration of human and organizational factors.   Source: The ICSI “Safety Culture” working group (2017). Safety Culture: from Understanding to…...

Each time the site director has been confronted with a contradiction between safety and production, he has chosen to favor safety, or on the contrary, he has accepted to “adapt” safety rules to achieve a production target. Each time an operator reaches a production target but has taken a risk to do so, the management…...

Improving the safety culture requires an integrated approach to safety through coherent actions in three (3) areas:… Membership Required You must be a member to access this content.View Membership LevelsAlready a member? Log in here...

The significance (or severity) of an event depends upon the consequences suffered and not on the error that initiates it. The error that triggers a serious accident … and the error that is one of the hundreds with no consequences… can be the same error.   Human Error, James Reason, Department of Psychology University of…...

Management’s responsibility for controlling the unsafe acts of employees exists chiefly because these unsafe acts occur in the course of employment that management creates and then directs. Management selects the persons upon whom it depends to carry out industrial work. It may, if it so elects, choose persons who are experienced, capable of, and willing…...

Do parents have safety metrics for their children’s safety? Do we put up banners to demonstrate the significance of our children’s safety? I am betting not on both. It is not needed as we naturally VALUE the safety of our children. We may never have the same level of VALUE of safety towards other adults…...

“An operator’s behavior is strongly influenced by their working situation and the human and organizational factors that characterize the situation. If unsafe behavior is noted, the most effective way to prevent it from happening again is to eliminate the conditions that produced it. This implies that time and thought must to given to an analysis…....