2025 Spring Meeting and 21st Global Congress on Process Safety

(13c) Process Safety Cultural Cause Leading Indicators: How Well Are They Understood and Used?

Author

Bradley Eccles - Presenter, ABS Consulting LTD
A common finding of most incident investigations and root cause analyses is an issue relating to how somebody behaved. This has been widely recognized and over the last few decades there have been improvements in the understanding of Human Factors (HF) and Performance Influencing Factors (PIFs) as they relate to the Job, the Individual and the Organization, as outlined in The Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 (UK HSE 1999). Yet despite best efforts to address Human Factors, many organizations have repeated situations where individuals failed to behave as expected.

In major incidents, where external bodies perform the investigations, the safety culture of the organization receives significant focus and often that is where the most significant underlying causes are identified. Therefore, the challenge is how to identify the Process Safety (PS) culture leading indicators and manage those, as we do with better understood engineering and Process Safety Management (PSM) indicators.

Organizations should take all reasonable measures to prevent and mitigate incidents from occurring. They also should be ready to learn from these incidents. This can be achieved via a combination of proactive Risk Assessment (RA) and reactive Incident Investigations (II) and Root Cause Analysis (RCA). There are established methodologies for these processes, however, they tend to focus on the PIFs associated with the Job and the Individual. Many organizations struggle to effectively investigate PIFs associated with the Organization (i.e. culture). This is generally because investigation teams do not have the time, resources or efficient methods to identify cultural causes.

Several years ago, ABSG Consulting Inc. (ABS Consulting) developed (1) a cultural assessment model and (2) a complimentary Cultural Cause Analysis™ (CCA) tool based on the Center for Chemical Safety (CCPS) Risk Based Process Safety (RBPS). Together these allow an organization to initially assess its perceived process safety culture, but also to investigate cultural causes in their Incidents / Process Safety performance issues, no matter how significant.

By adding cultural cause analysis into the II/RCA process, leading cultural key performance indicators can be created and used as part of a continuous improvement program. If behavioral safety is considered as a “Plan-Do-Check-Act” (PDCA) process and a safety culture assessment and subsequent intervention program are the “plan” and “do” elements, the CCA can be used to improve the “check” element; in our experience this is an area that is often missed by some organizations.

This paper explains the key aspects of performing a CCA, which can support organizations in assessing the underlying behaviors, actions and cultural issues that led to experienced incidents. We will go through the key elements of the approach, our implementation experience, examples and share some of the lessons learned.