All company staff and support functions (e.g., HR, Quality, Procurement, IT, etc.) are subject to silo building. But silos are inefficient and can cause extra expenses while isolating company functions into unintegrated sects that act in their own interest more … Read More
Jim Loud
Don’t Get Stuck in Hindsight Bias – Best Practices in Incident Investigations
“How could they have been so stupid?” “Why didn’t they show more common sense?” “They should have seen it coming.” “The cause was clearly human error.” “Why didn’t they just follow the procedures?” “This accident was clearly preventable.” Do these … Read More
Don’t Waste Your Safety Resources: Promote Worker Engagement
The most important asset we have in safety is our workforce. There are far more of them than there are of us and no one understands the work, and often the hazards, better than they do. In addition, as workers … Read More
Human Error: A Meaningless Term
“Egyptian authorities suggest that the Ever Given container ship that ran aground blocking the Suez Canal could have been due to human error.” Such headlines attributing serious accidents to “human error” are remarkably common following nearly every serious incident. But … Read More
Beyond Compliance: Using Performance-Based Assessments to Drive Continuous Improvement
For almost 20 years of my career, I led assessment teams and assessment organizations for both commercial nuclear and defense nuclear facilities. Along the way I learned to value the power of work observations in assessing safety performance, as well … Read More
The Importance of Periodic Performance-Based Assessments (PBA)
Are We Safe Yet? How Do You Know? How do you know your company is safe? You should already have some clues beyond your OSHA injury rates and other lagging indicators. A lack of recent (reported) injuries is a demonstrably … Read More
