(42a) Transforming Near-Miss Experience into Global Risk Reduction & Accident Prevention Training Techniques

Human factors literature shows that individual experiences have the tendencies to influence behavior and this has been true with organizational learning as well. Historically, in case of the process industry, attention to risk reduction efforts are significantly elevated following catastrophic event in one organization that had primarily experienced the incident. Such high-severity incidents are sparse. In contrast, there is an abundance of low severity incidents and near-misses which are often treated as leading indicators of process safety. However, they have limited visibility and the risk reduction efforts that are derived from the analyses of near-misses are limited to the organization or the facility that experience them. This paper discusses an approach to treat some common near-misses as catastrophic events by transforming the leading indicators into lagging indicators in hypothetical scenarios are then used in global safety training programs and policy development. A case study will be discussed to show implementation of such human factors and training technique in the process industry.