Application of Leading and Lagging Indicators to Improve Situation Awareness

The study of situation awareness in the chemical industrial operation aims to investigate the perception of what is happening around the operation environment for both the normal situation and the abnormal situation in order to improve the operation safety, which has become an important part in the PSM(Process Safety Management). One of the effective methods to improve individual and team situation awareness and their individual responsibilities to accomplish the team’s goals and objectives is the application of  leading and lagging indicators, which have been recognized as the effective tools to drive process safety performance improvement. The processes and decisions to develop and implement the process safety leading and lagging indicators within the company involves the integration of the applied criteria, the differences between facility-level implementation and company-wide implementation, the potentially encountered barriers to success and the methodology to overcome, and the demonstrated benefits through the use of leading indicators. This paper will help to  provide the methodologies and applications of the leading and lagging indicators to support and identify individual situation awareness, roles of team members, communication, and the breakdown or failure of team members’ shared situation awareness. This paper will also focus on specific root cause manifestations of these two team situation awareness dimensions (first-line leadership and communications) and potential solutions to address these causes. The objective of the paper is to raise industry awareness of the prevalence of challenges associated with team situation awareness practices. The paper explores implications of the leading team situation awareness failure modes for effective operations practices in first-line leadership roles and responsibilities, communications, human-machine interface design, and team training.