Beyond Process Safety Management: Integrating Culture and Capability into Process Incident Prevention

Short Description:

This presentation provides a framework for moving beyond traditional process safety management to an approach that creates a strong process safety culture supported by strong organizational capabilities. The Presenter will discuss how to leverage existing systems with concrete steps that build high-functioning organizational culture.

Long Description:

Process safety management is concerned with preventing catastrophic events - meaning - incidents in man-made systems that result in multiple fatalities/serious injuries, “major” property damage, or public or reputational impact. These events can occur in a wide variety of organizations, from petrochemical to manufacturing, and from utilities to transportation to mining. While 25 years of innovation have led to better and stronger technical and management safety systems that mitigate these risks, catastrophic incidents continue to occur.

Research shows that alongside the proximate causes of these incidents, there also exists an underlying fabric of systems, mechanisms, and culture that allows risk to persist and processes to be ignored. In other words, traditional approaches to process safety management are not sufficient for addressing the precursors that lead up to catastrophic events. The systems designed to control and mitigate major events are only as effective as the culture in which they operate and the capabilities of individuals managing the systems.

This presentation discusses a comprehensive approach to process incident prevention that leverages existing process safety management programs. The approach focuses on measuring the key elements of process safety culture shown to correlate to process safety outcomes, the leadership practices that create them, and the organizational capabilities that support and sustain them.