(13a) Building a Dependable Practice: Techniques for Embedding Process Safety Lessons in Shifts, Groups, and Teams

The Risk Based Process Safety (RBPS) framework is designed to help organizations develop stronger systems for managing process safety. It has been recognized for enhancing performance in the process industry and lowering the risk of major accidents. Despite this progress, a continuing challenge in process safety—and across high-risk industries—is effectively learning from unintended outcomes, such as accidents, fatalities, and near-misses, to proactively prevent similar issues or repeat incidents in the future.

This paper begins by reviewing the components of the RBPS Learning from Experience pillar. It then examines specific strategies, informed by various high-risk industries, for deliberately shaping an organizational culture that promotes learning from experience within smaller workgroups, such as shifts, groups, and teams. The paper highlights key enablers and barriers to creating and “maintaining a dependable practice” of localized learning within shifts, groups like EHS, Process Safety, Engineering, HR, Operations, Maintenance, and Executive Leadership teams.

Factors influencing these learning cultures include staffing patterns (e.g., consistency in team composition), communication styles (hierarchical vs. egalitarian), knowledge sharing (awareness of both explicit and tacit knowledge), and leadership intent (e.g., setting and modeling expectations, maintaining accountability). This paper outlines how these factors can work together to support or hinder a learning culture and offers practical guidance on how groups, shifts, or teams can leverage enabling conditions while addressing potential barriers.