Any catastrophic event poses serious questions to senior executives about the state of safety performance in their own organizations. Over the past 20 years we have seen that despite considerable differences in the particular circumstances, catastrophic events tend to share the same set of organizational failures that allowed them to occur. Yet a large part of today’s safety management thinking fails to account for the lessons these events have to offer. Instead, many organizations and leaders continue to manage safety through narrowly defined programs, directives and memos, and an unspoken bias that “it can’t happen here.”
Here are the five most important things that catastrophic events teach us – and that leaders need to know:
- Safety is a CEO Issue – Most safety technology systems are effective most of the time. But true operational integrity, i.e. operating systems and cultures that produce uniformly safe and reliable behaviors and outcomes, remains uncommon across industry. The unpredictability in many industries presents a problem and an opportunity for C-suite visionaries and their management and operations teams. All must be dedicated to setting and meeting a new standard. Traditionally, safety efforts have required support or sponsorship from senior leaders. While many leaders are supporters of safety improvement, their commitment does not always translate into an effective vision and personal safety ethic for their organizations. Explained and implemented correctly, however, these attributes establish safety as a value, which is the basis of a strong safety culture.
- Organizational Failure Enables Technical Failures – Technical failures in catastrophic events are made possible by failures resulting from the interactions between people and processes and equipment. In many instances, the development of sophisticated technical operating systems capability outpaced leadership’s ability to assure behavioral reliability, i.e. the consistent performance of safety-specific activities. In a world where increasingly complex and sophisticated technology is allowing organizations to exceed previous production and operating limits, the need for balancing technical achievement with fluency in the human sciences, e.g. organizational behavior, cognitive psychology, and human factors, becomes even greater.
- Confusion Between Process Safety and Employee Safety is a Serious Hazard – The objective of employee safety is to prevent injuries and fatalities on the job. Process safety’s objective is to prevent fires, explosions, and uncontrolled releases of hazardous materials. The two categories overlap when a serious process failure injures or kills employees. Many senior executive leaders mistakenly assume that good performance in employee safety means there is good control of process safety. However, the failure to distinguish between employee safety and process safety can give organizations with low injury rates a false sense of security.The vast majority of employee injuries are not associated with major process incidents. Managing these two areas requires complementary but different approaches. The highly visible and ubiquitous tracking and reporting of employee injury rates along with the assumption that this indicates good process safety management can divert attention from the need to strengthen the systems and processes that protect against process safety events.
- Host-Contractor Relations Are a Serious Hazard if Not Managed Properly – While not every poorly managed engagement will lead to catastrophe, the use of contractors in any organization makes having a consistently strong safety culture difficult. The difficulty increases as the work contractors do becomes more integrated with the work of the company’s employees, and where multiple contractors are present and their work is integrated with each other. Leaders of host organizations need to assure that there is alignment of safety standards with and among contractors and that they establish sound roles and responsibilities, accountability, and procedural clarity.
- Safety Leadership and Safety Culture Are Foundational to Effectiveness – The effectiveness of safety enabling systems and organizational sustaining systems is dependent on having leadership and an organizational culture that supports safety. Consider that the risk management processes of most major oil companies are structurally almost identical. Yet the occurrence of fatal and serious incidents among the top five oil companies varies greatly. The patterns are similar in other industries. This variation relates to how the technical risk management systems are implemented—via human interactions, communications, teamwork, etc. –not what they are.
Our ability to prevent catastrophic events is dependent finally on our ability to assure operational integrity across the organization. Recognizing this fact should trigger leadership vision and long-term drive for safety and operational excellence in 2012 and beyond.
