EHS incidents can be painful for injured employees, the environment, and an organisation’s bottom line, but incident management and reporting doesn’t have to be a pain point.
Safety and environmental disasters rarely occur because of a single event or incident, which is why it’s critical to adopt an incident management system that identifies root causes and protects your business from future occurrences.
Ask a group of people what caused the Titanic to sink and most will say, “An iceberg.” If one person in that group is a risk or safety manager, he or she might respond that the Titanic tragedy was caused by a series of events — management failures, poor-quality construction, employee errors/lack of training, poor planning, and either failure to track incidents or the inability to analyse incident data in a meaningful way — that ended with the sinking of the ship.
“Rarely does a single event cause a tragedy. It’s a cascade of events … there were problems lying in wait,” Gordon Graham, who spent 30 years with the California Highway Patrol and now is an attorney who educates and lectures about risk, told a conference audience several years ago (ISEA Executive Summit, Orange County, CA, 2013). “That ship was doomed long before it was built, designed, or hit the iceberg.” According to Graham, almost every bad outcome is preventable.
So how do we prevent these bad outcomes? As indicated by Graham and others, just meeting compliance with regulations and following procedures cannot prevent a bad outcome.
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