Process Safety: Is It Time to Broaden the Angle?

Process Safety has come a long way. We could say that then, and still now, it was largely about solutions regarding technical expertise. On the other hand, it is also about resources and acceptable risk.  At this point is where technical aspects meet with management to make great improvements in Safety. But there is something more to Process Safety and that is people and organizations.

They are, of course, included in the Safety Management Systems, but how much do we know about them and how they interact with process safety.

There has been an evolution to deal with process safety goals with answers raging from purely technical to purely management ones and all their possible combinations, in order to eliminate, reduce, control and accept risks. This has brought better prepared organizations, although accidents still happen and will go on happening.

It is almost impossible to foresee every potential future event. People work in a changing environment and so does the organization.  We can be prepared for certain scenarios and even prepare for crisis situations or better said we can know ourselves and our limitations to be prepared. The context is dynamic and technical and management systems are slow to move or adapt.

Many tools have been developed, used, discarded and so on to improve Process Safety in this changing context. Management of Change (MOC) is an example of these efforts. Also Operational Discipline has a significant merit and has proved successful in many cases, but it has its limitations. A good example of this is how procedures hardly keep the pace with the small, imperceptible and continuous changes of real life. Also, people may be trained, well intended, highly motivated and even concentrated on a particular task but still they will make a mistake. This is out of reach for Operational Discipline.  An important fact arises: life is dynamic and we are only humans. Even machines fail, and we just take this into account every time we design a process. This is when we must look at the other side of the coin: people at the frontline work have the control. In many cases they are the ones that change the procedures to adapt them and reduce the gap between the real outcome and what is intended in the normal operation, and by doing this they are achieving process safety goals.

This is what human factors are all about: knowing people´s way of thinking and better designing for what and how we are. We could say the same about organizations. We need to take a better look at them and understand the basic principles that underlie each form of organization as the ground were safety culture is built.

We should begin to see today´s industries as what they are: complex organizations developing in a dynamic context. Process Safety needs a new perspective that considers industries as socio-technological processes.

This brings us to a more important conclusion. There is no single tool that will make us reach our goals. These tools may be technical, management ones or even come from the social disciplines, but only a better understanding on how humans and organizations response to their high-tech environment, will leads us to a better choice and use of the tools to achieve those goals.

The purpose of this paper is to present a conceptual model of the interrelations between engineering, human and organizational factors as key components to find opportunities for process safety improvements.

We will explore, through practical examples, these concepts and compare them to other classical models to bring out the scope, strengths and weaknesses involved.