How to shift from reactive to proactive OHS

International safety expert Erik Hollnagel explains why OHS leaders should make safety productive, not protective.

A common shortcoming with many existing OHS methods is that they are driven by events that stand out from the normal — which usually means that something has gone wrong.

International safety expert Professor Erik Hollnagel says these kinds of methodologies often lead to a reactive approach, where the main purpose is to find problems and then fix them.

“In the search for clear and understandable causes, each issue is typically addressed on its own, which means that opportunities for synergies may be lost,” said Hollnagel, who is a Professor at the University of Southern Denmark. He is also a Visiting Professorial Fellow at the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at Macquarie University.

“The efforts to prevent future accidents actually serve a dual purpose — to be safe and to feel safe. But sometimes the latter stands in the way of the former.”

Speaking ahead of a series of Safety Institute of Australia (SIA) workshops and seminars, to be held across Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney this July, Professor Hollnagel said that most analysis methods currently used are of the type ‘model-cum-method’.

“This means that the methods are based on a particular understanding either of how the world works or of how the world is organised or structured,” he said.

An example of the first is linear causality, as in root cause analysis or the Ishikawa diagrams, which OHS leaders may recognise; while an example of the second is the five-level safety culture model or the abstraction hierarchy. In these cases, Hollnagel says the method provides a way to map an event or situation onto the underlying model, for example, the result of the analysis is expressed in the terminology of the corresponding model.

The FRAM (Functional Resonance Analysis Method) — which will be the focus of the SIA workshops and seminars — does the opposite, as it is a method to build a model or a representation that describes how a given activity takes place.

Professor Erik Hollnagel.

Since the purpose of the FRAM is to produce a representation of how work is actually done, it is not limited to a specific type of analysis, such as accident investigations, nor to a specific domain. OHS leaders can take a number of steps in working with business leaders to practically realise this process.

Safety in 3 steps

The first step would be to make safety productive rather than protective.

“Safety is more than the absence of accidents, and cannot be achieved only by eliminating hazards and by preventing things from going wrong,” said Hollnagel.

“Safety management must also learn how things go right and find ways to make sure that it happens.”

A second step would be to realise that it is more important to learn from what happens all the time, even though the consequences may seem small, than to learn from what happens rarely, even though the consequences may be large.

“It is also a lot easier, since there is an abundance of data that is readily available,” Hollnagel added.

A third step would be to understand the importance of variability (approximate adjustments) for everyday performance. Hollnagel said variability is generally useful and should be controlled rather than eliminated.

Professor Hollnagel, author of more than 500 academic works, will be presenting a practical introduction to the FRAM in two-day workshops (limited to 30 registrations) in Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney throughout July 2015 for SIA. For more information, visit www.sia.org.au/events/fram-series.