Compensation for Human Behavior Variability

The lack of visibility of social processes and fast-changing natural/climatic ones nowadays indicate that the possibility of crises is real. Failures in complex organizational and socio-technical systems increase uncertainty about the best safety barriers for each situation and the dynamics of events.

Studying organizational and technological functions considering behavioral aspects in group work at the workplace can indicate, in the operational routine, how the functions are related to the transfer of hazard energy towards the accident. It is essential to understand which are the different connections of the failure, which are the environments that make the situation dynamic and where the hazard energy passes with more intensity. These investigations demand new techniques to make the Reason's Swiss Cheese model be quantitative.

The lack of predictability of the variability and reliability of human performance with accuracy demands ways to compensate it with measures to reduce the impact of this variability on human, managerial and technological factors. The barriers must help prevent the accident from occurring and must also isolate the hazard or change its route through the change in products, processes, and tasks. It is necessary to study systemic failure through Operational Culture and its connections. This model was applied to the flammable gas industry.

A good compensation work is treating the human elements that are projected to decrease hazard energy - through SARS (Safe & Alert Resilient System) - in different dimensions: Technological (Risk and Complexity), Managerial (Stress and Leadership), and Human features (Communication, Cooperation, Commitment and Competence) in the workplace. In addition, Just Culture should also be considered for safe behavior; and in this paper, references to a PLG case study are used to explain better.