Learning From the Past

Learning from all process safety sources of experience is vital for sustainable process safety performance and continuous improvement. Past process safety incidents and near-misses provide valuable learning opportunities. Companies normally assess these incidents and translate the lessons into actionable programs that improve process safety practices and culture. However, because of recurrent industry accident and PSM compliance "root cause themes", it is becoming evident that we need to expand our sources of learning to those available outside our plant, company, and even industry because we cannot wait to only learn from our own mistakes. Moreover, the ability of a process safety leader to integrate the significance of weak accident warning signs to catalyze "early prevention" is an emerging necessary skill. Such weak signals include: repeat root causes for accidents and near-misses, recognizing that seemingly non-relevant accidents may have important lessons, chronic audit problems, poor leading metrics trends, increasing unsafe behaviors, and lackluster safety culture. This session seeks presentations on innovative programs, actual examples and guidance on effective practices for plant and organizational learning that results in a brighter and better process safety radar screen to warn against and preempt a slide towards a catastrophic process safety accident.