As I have said many times, we MUST examine all Latent Organizational Failures before we even begin to look at the actions of the worker(s). Far too often, investigations will first (and usually only) look at the ACTIVE failures that led to the consequences. This is how so many accidents IMPROPERLY and UNFAIRLY get put on the back of the worker(s) involved. Even when those actions were recognizable “unsafe acts”, as investigators we MUST fully understand what drove those behaviors.
This leads me to what many will call “Unsafe Supervision”. This is NOT about transferring blame to the supervisor(s), but as I will demonstrate, the actions of supervisors or worse – the inaction of supervisors can cause a lot of problems that align to result in an accident. Here are the four (4) categories of “Unsafe Supervision” and how they play a role in our causal analysis.
Unsafe supervision has four subcategories:
- Inadequate Supervision,
- Planned Inappropriate Operations,
- Failed to Correct Problem, and
- Supervisory Violations