It’s been nearly a decade since our first SIF study explained why so many companies were seeing recordable injuries improve while fatal injuries were level or increasing. Dr. Tom Krause, with collaborators from 9 global organizations studied the problem in 2010. They concluded that the disturbing trend was the result of differences in the situations leading to serious and fatal injuries compared to other types of injuries.
This work demonstrated that the traditional approach to safety improvement is ill-advised. For decades, the strategy was to reduce exposure at the bottom of the safety triangle in hopes that serious and fatal injuries would follow. Today we know that a top-down strategy would be more effective: Focus on SIF precursors and supplement those efforts as needed in order to reduce all categories of harm.
Uneven Progress
The global safety community has made progress integrating the new view into existing safety programs, but progress is uneven. For example, some organizations report SIF potential data all the way to their CEOs. This is positive and brings focus and attention to SIF prevention efforts. However, just as many organizations have stalled, stuck in the quagmire of well-established systems and deep attachment to familiar metrics. Further, many safety leaders still struggle to recognize SIF precursors in their plants, let alone use precursor information effectively.
One organization, for example, has been aware of the original SIF study for over 6 years. Despite significant efforts to reduce SIFs, its leaders still do not agree on what a SIF is. They don’t agree on what situations have SIF potential. This lack of alignment has blocked progress and they stalled at level 2 on the SIF maturity curve, seen here.
Collaborative Innovation is Needed
Experience has shown that a group of organizations sharing experience, data, and expertise is a cost-efficient way to quickly build capability. Such a strategy can yield high quality, actionable information aimed at the groups’ specific objectives.
A single organization taking on the problem alone can spend years of study and millions of dollars. In the end, results don’t begin to match the learning potential of a collaborative approach. We believe the common value for safety and shared goal of preventing every serious and fatal injury represents a unique opportunity for a rapid learning model that will uncover methods to accelerate improvement.
More to Learn
Experience has taught us that leadership sets SIF improvement in motion. Our own research demonstrated that site-level leaders’ decisions play a major role in injury causation and prevention. Incident investigations show time and again that when SIFs happen, it’s almost always the case that layers of protection were compromised well before the event took place. Further, we realize that the way leaders go about solving these problems impacts culture, and culture affects all areas of performance well into the future. Unfortunately, knowledge of these factors and using them to improve are different things.
Every organization has more to learn, but different organizations are in different places on the journey. If you’d like to learn more about how you can get involved in our SIF prevention learning group, please contact Laura Blackburn at lblackburn@krausebellgroup.com.
7 insights into safety leadership is a fantastic book and I have recommended it to our companies senior leaders to promote through the business. Thank you
Risk Management is the key!
To build it is necessary a multidisciplinary team. Nowadays we don’t have a good attention with this step and the teams don’t have a knowledge and experience necessary for it.
The impact is a confuse risk management and amount of critical controls.
In summary, we don’t provide the senior’s leaders the key information to avoid SIF.
Thank you for the article.
I feel like we get complacent about complacency. We conclude the managers “set up” an employee for failure but stop short of holding them accountable for it. We insist that our leaders be able to find and prevent circumstances that lead to SIF, but then shrug our shoulders when they tell us they knew but didn’t know what to do about it or felt helpless to do anything. I get very frustrated!!
I see most organizations initially having difficulty moving to SIF focus or metrics as safety professionals have been conditioning our leaders on lowering lagging metrics, incident rates and increased %Safe Behaviors, etc. These success measures have created organizational blind spots to SIF potential risks within the organization. Also I find business leaders struggle with the language of using Fatal or Life-Ending or Altering terms as they feel they are now reversing their course and messaging in a negative way. Safety Professionals as you suggest have to bring risk based critical based information to the leaders of the organization to drive a change in conversation and action. Also leaders must understand that safety does not equate to absence of harm but to the presence of controls. I big mind shift change has to take place in understanding that low level controls do not directly affect energy levels or severity of harm. Many leaders believe if they have some written fatal prevention programs they are in control of high risk work, which is not the case. Most organizations surprised to learn that anywhere from 20 to 30+% of the past incident had the potential to be SIF events or resulted in same. I have found gaps in design play a bigger role in SIF exposures or mishaps (30 to 40%). A new learning can also be seen when you inform them that anywhere from 80 to 90% of the current job tasks have controls that do not match the SIF risk. Additionally leaders are surprised to learn even with very low incident rates, multiple SIF Precursors existed at time of incident or during post incident risk assessments. The organizations that begin to see the need to change and act differently is when they begin to believe and see a potential SIF risk as the event itself and act on it in advance of mishaps. When I ask leaders how they recognize or celebrate mitigating a SIF risk in advance of an event there is silence. I see an opportunity to get the organization to see and recognize safety in a new way. Reducing the SIF risk profile of an organization (when nothing negative is taking place) is a very big deal. These success stories and proven SIF prevention solutions must be viewed as intellectual property that is central to an organizations sustainable safety and operational excellence journey. Just some thoughts as what I see working with organizations.