(40a) Know Your Enemy – the Seven Deadly Sins of Process Safety

As defined in the CCPS Risk Based Process Safety book, effective process safety culture achieves the critical features of maintaining a sense of vulnerability, empowering individuals to successfully fulfill their safety obligations, deferring to expertise, ensuring open and effective communication, establishing a questioning/learning environment, fostering mutual trust, and providing timely response to process safety issues and concerns. With these features helping to achieve process safety cultural goals, they can be characterized as process safety “virtues.” Underlying any meaningful progress towards attaining these virtues is the essential element: a desire to improve. Lack of desire for pursuing process safety improvement could be seen as laziness, a refusal to accept the need for change, or a normalization of high-risk activity. In other words, three of the seven deadly sins: sloth, pride, and gluttony.

This paper explores the seven deadly sins as “vices” in the context of forces that act against process safety virtues, where they have the potential to detract from the beliefs, attitudes, values, and principles that contribute towards a healthy process safety culture. Then, taking a page from Sun Tzu’s Art of War, this paper explores opportunities to “know the enemy and know yourself” by providing hypothetical examples where these seven deadly sins can appear in the context of process safety, and describes opportunities to exploit these vices as advantages in pursuit of process safety cultural improvement. As an example, pride may conspire to prevent a deferral to expertise in the face of normalization of deviation, however, opening a conversation with a box of fresh donuts (i.e., Donut Diplomacy) is an effective way of leveraging gluttony by opening minds (and mouths) to informed ideas when trying to find in-roads to affect process safety program improvements.