In almost all of the accident investigations I have been asked to participate in, the local management team was very quick to blame “active failures”. This almost always involves some blame being placed on the human; after all, they were directly involved, and had they “not made the mistakes,” the accident would not have occurred. Hard to argue with such blatant facts. However, as investigators, it serves us well to understand any “latent failures” that were in place that simply set the worker up to fail. We coin the phrase… “it was an accident waiting to happen” when we are really saying there were “latent failures” that contributed to the incident. And in some investigations, I walk away convinced that the “latent failures” played more of a role than the active failures that occurred the moments leading up to the consequence. Here is a breakdown of what “active” and “latent” failures are:
