(56i) High Reliability Organizations - Should Chemical/Processing Facilities Aspire to Become Them?

High reliability organizations (HRO) have received research is recent years to determine what makes them so successful, both in the U.S. and in the U.K. The Health and Safety Executive in the U.K. has conducted some of this research. HRO’s have two characteristics that separate them from other organizations:

• Their risks are high consequence and low frequency.
• They operate with these risks almost free from major incidents.

There are several examples of HROs in modern industry: commercial nuclear power, airlines and the companies that manufacture commercial airplanes, and the U.S. naval nuclear power program. These organizations are highly regulated, but that doesn’t account for their level of success.

HROs are characterized as follows:

Built-in redundancy including the provision of back-up systems in case of a failure, internal cross-checks of safety-critical decisions and continuous monitoring of safety critical activities.

• Decision-making is hierarchical during routine periods and is accompanied by a clear differentiation of responsibilities. However, in emergencies, decision-making migrates to individuals with expertise irrespective of their hierarchical position within the organization, i.e., HROs defer to expertise.
• HROs have well-defined procedures for possible unexpected events.

• Preoccupation with failure or an attentiveness to minor or trivial signals that may portend more serious events.
• Systematic investigation and analysis of all these warning signals, no matter how trivial they may appear to be.
• Explanations regarding the causes of incidents tend to be systemic rather than focusing on blaming personnel.

• HROs have a “just” culture characterized by open reporting systems for near misses and accidents without fear of punishment, empowering staff to abandon work on safety grounds, and fostering a sense of personal accountability for safety.
• HROs also exhibit a learning orientation characterized by a constant thirst for knowledge, a climate of continuous training (using the most modern and sophisticated methods, e.g., simulators), and the constant updating of their procedures.
• HROs exhibit a positive leadership culture by the proactive commissions of audits and inspections, welcome communication of bad news, being visible to front line staff, and Investment of resources in safety management and the ability to balance profits with safety.
• In HROs management has a high degree of technical competence in the processes they manage.
• Another characteristic of HROs is resilience. Resilience refers to the ability of an organization to recover from errors quickly and easily.

Although most organizations have some of these characteristics, HROs will typically have all of them. An argument can easily be made that most facilities in the process safety community would should be HROs. They share similar risk profiles as other facilities that are mentioned in the literature as HROs.