Alex de Ruijter - A safer barrier

Writing too many procedures

James Reason's classic book Managing the Risks of Organizational Accidents has a lot of great risk management insights. Here are three paragraphs on adding too many procedures over time (p. 49): All organizations suffer a tension between the natural variability of human behaviour and the system's needs for a high

It's not enough to have safety barriers

The best definition of a safety barrier can be found in an article by Sklet from 2006: Safety barriers are physical and/or non-physical means planned to prevent, control, or mitigate undesired events or accidents.This definition has an interesting word. Planned. It implies that besides stopping unwanted events, a

The safety barrier definition

* Sklet, S. (2006). Safety barriers: Definition, classification, and performance. Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries, 19(5), 494–506.

barriers

Use criticality to find important barriers

Which risk barriers are the most important? This question can be answered with barrier criticality. In this article we discuss why & how to approach barrier criticality as well as some challenges.

barriers

Practical applications of bowtie

It can be a challenge to know what to use bowties for. In this webinar we show different practical applications of bowties. From risk communication to barrier monitoring and decision support.

incidents

5 reasons why analysing barrier failures is better than 5-why

I hope you'll forgive me, but I don't really like 5-why. It's a decent methodology, but I think there are better options. Instead, we can use barrier-based incident analysis methods. Why is this better? Well, here are 5 reasons why I think analysing barrier failures is better than 5-why.

bowtie

Why threats in bowties don't always lead to all consequences

In theory all threats in a bowtie diagram can cause the top event, and the top event can cause all consequences. But sometimes a threat can't lead to all consequences. Why is that and is it a problem?

barriers

The barrier maturity model

Many organisations have adopted the idea of barrier management in safety. Many are also searching for ways to take a next step. With the barrier maturity model you can determine where your organisation currently is and see which steps can be taken to mature to a higher level of barrier management.

barriers

An alternative to the hierarchy of control

The hierarchy of control is often used as a brainstorming tool to come up with effective controls (aka, barriers). It's good because it favours proactive interventions like eliminating a source of fuel over reactive interventions like putting out a fire. However sometimes it is misused as a formal classification tool.

incidents

Barrier states

A barrier can have different states in an incident, mostly divided into four types: 1) Missing barriers 2) Failed barriers 3) Inadequate barriers and 4) Effective barriers. There are considerable differences in interpretation of these states, and when one or the other should be used. Here I'd like to give

incidents

30 years after Bhopal

In the media today you can read various accounts on Bhopal, exactly 30 years after the disaster. This video makes you think about how organisations often fail to deal with long term consequences of accidents. Often they already struggle to effectively implement corrective measures directly after an incident analysis is

incidents

Human error is like gravity

There are still incidents that get summarised to 'it was caused by human error.' This isn't useful. It'll be difficult to find an incident that doesn't include human error somehow. It's problematic because talking about the human condition as a whole is unlikely to get fixed anytime soon. Let

rca

The root cause fallacy

After an incident has occurred, most investigations will try to find the root cause on a system or management level. To find the underlying reasons for an incident, instead of focusing on the more superficial ones. An important reason for doing this is the assumption that by fixing a single

risk assessment

Your bowtie is too generic

If I could give one piece of advice to a novice bowtie analyst, it would be to include more specific information. Most risk assessments are too generic at first. This is true not just for bowties. It happens in FMEA, HAZID and other methods as well. It's important to get