At COMET we live in the world of prevention, working with people from all over the world who strive to increase the certainty in the irrespective organisations activities, often against the backdrop of high hazard industries and supply chains that struggle with consistent strategies for the prevention of failure.

Prevention over reaction: A wider view on failure

Safety is the obvious consideration, but we look at failure prevention more holistically, working on the premise that root causes and the catalysts for them pay no attention to the nature of the chaos they strive to achieve. They just happen, and when they do, we know all too well that their impact can be and often is multi-faceted. Traditional prevention efforts across the realms of safety, quality, environment and equipment are now being joined by efforts to prevent health and wellbeing issues, and cyber-attacks.

Weaved into this world are a whole myriad of people and technology programmes, processes and technology solutions constantly seeking to innovate and evolve to get after the incremental improvements that even the very best organisations can still achieve and sustain.

The Illusion of progress in safety culture

You’d be forgiven for thinking that the low hanging fruit of exponential performance improvements achieved through the establishment of SSOW/COW solutions and reinforced by a recognition that culture matters had long since been achieved, but you’d be mistaken!  It is still the case today, as was reinforced by a recent interaction with a large public sector organisation, that the training & technology they wanted to procure was needed not to reduce incidents and non-conformances but just to manage them...

This, regardless of your cultural maturity or capacity is an incredibly dangerous mindset and one that has no place in the world we feel privileged to occupy.

Capacity, resources, maturity, all tough realities but not one an excuse not to make reduction the focus of all efforts. I think most enlightened professionals would accept that human error is normal, and that developing a resilience to it is key.  Mastering the DNA of ‘prevention over correction’ is at the very heart of any organisations sustained progression. Trying to manage and ‘fix’ events that have already happened is time wasted, time and (proportionate) effort is needed to not only establish what’s going on, but more importantly why. Only then can a business that records 500+ unplanned events in a calendar month think about that line in the sand day where the focus moves to reducing that number, firstly to 450 but then as knowledge and effective actions grow, to achieving 300, 200 and in time even less.

Like many we don’t easily subscribe to ‘Zero’ type QHSE campaigns/initiatives – our domain is not a destination, it’s a state of alertness that is constant, all the time. I’ve lost count the number of times I’ve witnessed a safety milestone quickly followed up by an LTI triggered by a lowering of the guard.

Culture, openness, and the rise of Just Culture and HOP

It's not uncommon early in a journey to reduction to see incident stats rise, not because more are happening but because their detail is revealed through more complete incident management and investigation activities.  Culture when it keeps up encourages openness, and honesty so that preventive not just corrective actions are well enough informed to have a fighting chance. The emergence of HOP and Just Culture programmes are tangible examples that this progress continues at pace.

So, when a business makes budget and people (however constrained) available to address something as important as incident management, they simply must procure with an eye on the medium to long term. A firm eye on reduction! They must ask themselves:

· How is the system, process, programme or methodology going to help us reduce as well as manage our unplanned events?

· How do we break the cycle we are in, and improve our safety, profitability, and reputation?

· How do we ensure that improvement can be firstly sustained, then built on, and how do we see what is driving our progress?

These aren’t ‘would like’ questions, for me they must be answerable before a £/$ is spent or any resource is allocated.  Yes there is effort, yes there is MOC, but with that comes hope and opportunity that previously accepted norms can be significantly improved upon as time, momentum and maturity grow.

‘Effort’ is one area where technology is helping more than ever, both in terms of the ‘leg work’ needed to produce quality investigations, and in terms of the tools now available to grasp key steps like causal factors, barrier and change evaluation, human error, preventive actions and big data.  Not pick list recording systems but immersive process led solutions developed by domain experts, and brough to life by very clever technology people.

From tolerance to elimination: What the future demands

In the next 5 years our tolerance to repeat failure will reduce yet more – and the tools and processes will be there to help you to deliver those results. Don’t be one of those content with managing your pain, be a change maker intent on understanding and eliminating it!

Ready to stop managing incidents and start reducing them?

Click here to learn how COMET for Incident Management makes that shift possible.

Or dig deeper into more expert commentary on risk, culture and prevention: Back to COMET News & Insights