(55a) Bridging Chemical Engineering (Risk Based Process Safety) to the Humanities - 7 Mega Elements' Approach (Protocol) of Accident Investigation in Light of Ethical Dimension, Architecture & Epistemology

In 2007 Center for Chemical Process Safety (CCPS) unprecedentedly presented to process industry RBPS 4 Pillars (and relevant 20 Elements), among which 4^th Pillar "Learn from Experience" consists of 4 Elements: Incident Investigation, Measurement & Metrics, Auditing, and Management Review & Continuous Improvement. In this paper, the challenges from Incident Investigation - one of those 4 main ingredients of "Learn from Experience", would be examined in comparatively larger context, probably not only in history of Global Congress on Process Safety but of CCPS, of bridging Chemical Engineering (RBPS) to the Humanities.

In practice nowadays process safety practitioners face some big challenges from incident investigations, especially the challenges for high quality and consistency of incident investigations across the corporate, for which there might have been many efforts, discussions, and even some solutions. As inspired from Sun Tzu's The Art of War, however, the author claims that Incident Investigation, actually whole 4^th Pillar, should ultimately play a role of "espionage/ diagnosis", not to the enemies/ other patients but to our organization ourselves. And the fact that till today most accident/ incident investigations in process industry could be neither of "the deeper the better" nor of "the more comprehensive the better" seems mainly due to the "counter-intelligence/ diagnosis resistance" from our organizations in excuses of organizational "national security/ individual privacy".

And the author further argues that both the issues of quality and consistency of incident investigations and the seemingly "dilemma" of espionage/ diagnosis should be explored and reflected in broader context of bridging Chemical Engineering to the Humanities, of which the modern earliest similar topic was raised by MIT retired professor Louis Bucciarelli in his masterpiece Engineering Philosophy in 2003, and of which the ancient Sun Tzu's Humanities rich legacy of post-war analysis (accident investigation), and of war outcome foreknowledge (accident prevention) as well, for military (process safety) management might be another, and perhaps more important, source for process safety practitioners to pursue. And during pursuing bridging Chemical Engineering (RBPS) to the Humanities, the author believes that those following 3 core topics, each of which inherently correlates with Incident Investigation, and a brand new vocabulary (7 Mega Elements' narrative on Incident Investigation) of Chemical Engineering-Humanities dialogue as well would be inevitable.

- 1^st Core Topic: How committed is committed enough? Or necessity of an ethical dimension of CCPS 4 Pillars? ;

- 2^nd Core Topic: maturity of architecture of CCPS 4 Pillars (20 Elements - temple model)? ; &

- 3^rd Core Topic: what epistemology should process safety practitioners have?

And this Humanities enlightened new vocabulary, actually an outcome of benchmarking CCPS 4 Pillars against The Art of War, consists of 7 Mega Elements as below:

- RBPS Core Value (Tao)

- Process Safety Cultural Communication (future form of process safety culture)

- Leadership

- Weather/ Climate

- Espionage

- Terrain

- Discipline

And based on the above the author attempts to characterize: how these 7 Mega Elements might help dramatically elevate the quality and consistency of Incident Investigation & whole 4^th Pillar, through developing & maintaining a more practicable corporate wide, even industry wide, communication protocol (7 Mega Elements' vocabulary) among BoD, Executive Management, Operation Managers, Legal, HR and process safety practitioners etc.; through this protocol, how corporate organizational culture improved in truly sustainable manner, Incident investigation at enterprise level someday become of "the deeper the better and the more comprehensive the better", lessons truly learned among all stakeholders, and learnings more easily disseminated across geographies and between dissimilar business units.

At conclusion, the author also gives an outlook on AIChE's future mission in bridging Chemical Engineering (RBPS) to the Humanities, an emerging group of Chemical Philosopher-Engineers and a new era of process safety Accident/Incident Investigation (RBPS Diagnosis) & Learning from Experience (RBPS Foreknowledge & Prevention).