Overview

Despite remarkable advances in safety management, the same incidents keep happening over and over. Do you know why? The reason may not be what you think! This presentation answers this question.

"The Role Of Human Error In Safety Culture" assesses how well management systems, behaviour based safety, safety leadership and a human error prevention program deal with the prevention of incidents. It outlines what options organisations have to achieve zero harm, which one is the most cost effective and why so many organisations have fallen short of the zero harm goal.

Summary

Do you think that the reason why people are still getting injured is because we haven’t had enough incidents? Or is it that perhaps we are not asking the right questions when incidents take place?’

Your organisation has a great safety program. Hazards have been engineered out where possible, your safe operating procedures are up to date and your employees and contractors are well trained. So, you’re not having any incidents, right? Unlikely.

In 1931, Heindrick postulated that 88% of incidents are caused by unsafe acts. Since then, the majority of the effort to manage safety has been targeted towards the implementation of safety management systems primarily, as well as behaviour based safety and safety leadership.

But even organisations that have completed programs with all three approaches still have incidents. And, more importantly, how much effort has it taken? Not an insignificant amount.

The research on how people make errors, mistakes, miscalculations and misjudgments – mostly unintentionally, without meaning to, not on purpose – identifies a basic behavioural patterns that cause over 90% of incidents.
These patterns not only apply at work, but at home and on the road as well. They are very simple to understand and people agree with them instinctively. The research also identified techniques to teach people how to make many less errors, thereby making them more responsible for their own safety.

Until we start dealing with human error as a preventable initiator to incidents, we will continue to have incidents that would not have been prevented by safety management system, behaviour based safety and/or safety leadership.