incident investigations

Incident Investigations

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

Promote Worker Engagement

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

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

Incident Management

Avoiding Blame in Incident Management & Incident Investigations

In the previous article, The Purpose of Incident Management & Incident Investigations, the foundational principles of learning and improving were discussed. Further, in the article How we React Matters the concept of how organizations react to news from the workforce … Read More

Incident-Management

The Purpose of Incident Management & Incident Investigations

Incident management and incident investigations, while not typically welcome due to their nature of something having gone wrong, are a necessary tool in any EHS professional‘s toolbelt. They have been getting a bad reputation lately and pushed to ‘lagging indicator’ … Read More

Corrective Actions

Are Your Corrective Actions Really Fixing Your Problems?

Many highly successful companies are actively looking for trouble and are pleased when they find it.  These companies know that you can’t improve if you don’t know what to improve.  They establish various work feedback loops, encourage their managers to … Read More