Conscience for Hire:How Consultant PHA Facilitators May be Utilized By Their Clientsas Ethical As Well As Technical Resources

Independently contracted Process Hazard Analysis (PHA) Facilitators hold an underutilized body of ethical knowledge that can be of great value to their clients and are less subject to pressures that can undermine internally conducted PHAs.

Many practicing engineers are not required to obtain certification from professional organizations such as the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) or American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE). The primary ethics training they may receive is whatever is provided by their parent company. Regardless of ethics training, a long term employee will often become accustomed to their host company’s ethical culture, accepting it as the norm. Independent PHA facilitators are often exposed to a broad range of engineering ethics approaches and cultures across multiple companies and are well suited to provide fresh ethical insights.

Internal safety personnel are subject to many pressures that conflict with safety. These pressures can be as simples as the desire to avoid operational disruption or as subtle as “Syngergism.” Syngergism is the situation where no one in an organization takes responsibility for unethical decisions that all in group members know are occurring because everyone’s direct personal actions are not seen as unethical. Independent PHA facilitators are inherently “outgroup” members and will be insulated from these pressures and others.

In this paper, the authors provide examples of instances where shortcomings in engineering ethics have led to incidents, and where synergism has been prevalent. Then, the hallmarks of a quality external facilitator are described, so that when utilized, problems of groupthink and patchwork ethics training are significantly mitigated.