Growing a Culture of Process Risk Reduction With Statistically Validated Actionable Leading Indicators

In recent years many studies have been conducted to assess the landscape of potential leading indicators for Process Safety.  But few have leveraged a large global multi-company data set and structured statistical process to support the findings.  This paper will review the leading indicator research findings drawn from applying analytics to a large industry data set of leading and lagging Process Safety activities. It will reveal the key cultural factors as measured by an actionable leading index which has been found to be uniquely strong in organizations who continue to sustain top-level lagging performance.

For the past several years, a group of global Energy and Chemicals companies has been working on a research initiative with a common mission to find an actionable leading indicator index to drive Process Safety and eventually overall Operational Excellence performance.  The target of this initiative is to identify routinely measurable traits of leadership and organizational activity which lead to minimized likelihood of high-severity incidents and thus result in near zero loss performance.

This group has been collaborating to provide a large multi-year data set, which contains millions of data records from events such as incidents, investigations, near misses, audits, observations, assessments, and many other routine field-level activities. Since 2008, a rigorous statistical analysis process has been iteratively applied to this data to identify the mix of leading metrics which most effectively predict Personal and Process Safety performance outcomes.  

From the analytical research and careful review with this consortium of industry Process Safety executives and Subject Matter Experts, the index that was found to best predict the outcome performance of an organization included measurements of (a) proactive event reporting (Reporting Culture), (b) the execution of Process Safety business processes, (c) the disciplined completion of important corrective / preventive actions, and finally (d) the responsiveness of supervisors and line managers in supporting the overall process.  The index and its components collectively measure the cultural factors that drive process safety risk reduction.

This paper will start with an overview of the data sources and analytical process used to find scientifically validated leading indicators.  Then it will conclude with examples of how the findings are being applied by operations leaders to drive focus on the leadership and organizational behaviors that lead to top-tier performance.