(18a) Safety Culture for the 21st Century–Systems Approach with Applications

Process plants are complex structures involving interaction of many components. They are part of business enterprises which in turn are part of societal systems. Process plants are designed and built and operated for many years. It sees many changes during the course of its operation. Increasing complexity of the process systems and requirements from the society poses new challenges to process systems safety. Newer understanding is required to meet these challenges.

Safety is an emergent property of a system and it cannot be considered in isolation from the society and business environment in which it operates. Better hardware designs and highly trained staff need not necessarily result in improved safety of the process system. Many case histories are evidence to this. Safety culture is the result of dynamic interaction of the components of the system and has to be viewed as such to understand and improve it.

This paper will examine the basics of theories on safety culture and further present a systems point of view. Systems approach considers components as parts of the whole system and looks specifically at their interrelationships. Safety culture can be understood better in terms of the interrelationships that emerge in society, business and organization. Systems theory is ideally suited to understand the dynamics of these structures and enables better visualization of safety culture and thereby means to improve the same.

In conclusion the paper will demonstrate that systems approach will be able to offer new insights on safety culture and process safety management and help in better decision making in the face of the new challenges that rise in the 21st century. To support the same hindsight reviews of incidents will be presented with systems approach methodology