What’s the quality of your incident investigation process?
For many leaders, frequent serious incidents are what keeps them awake at night. Despite efforts in automation, isolation, re-engineering equipment, tightening procedures, and retraining staff, the same types of incidents seem to reoccur—some very serious.
These leaders often see their organisation’s Total Recordable Injury Frequency Rate (TRIFR) steadily decline, only to have it disrupted by a string of serious incidents. This raises a troubling question: Do the safety metrics tell the whole story?
One senior manager recently acknowledged to us:
“I can’t believe that with everything we’ve done on the safety front, our people keep putting themselves in the line of fire! There’s something about our culture we’re not quite getting and waving the compliance stick at them isn’t the answer.”
This frustration is understandable. While positive lagging metrics might reflect strong exposure-reduction efforts, they often tell only part of the story. Many organisations achieve these numbers on paper without addressing deeply rooted risks. Without learning from incidents and the right metrics to assess operational reliability, businesses remain vulnerable to inadequate systems and bad luck.
To reduce serious incidents, you must start by asking why they happen.
Is your organisation really learning from unplanned events?
When serious—or potentially serious—incidents occur, they present an invaluable learning opportunity. However, many organisations fail to capitalise on this. Instead, they barely scratch the surface of what went wrong and whether corrective actions made any difference.
Take a moment to evaluate your organisation’s approach. Can you confidently say your incident reports meet these criteria?
- Incident categorisation: Are incidents assessed based on their potential for severe consequences? Is investigative depth consistent with this potential?
- Human error analysis: Are errors understood without resorting to blame?
- Task and organisational factors: Are deep dives conducted into why the operator may have been set up to fail?
- Corrective recommendations: Are these designed to reduce exposure to harm substantially and tracked for effectiveness? Are the corrective recommendations that are put into action actually performing the intended purpose of reducing exposure?
- Metrics and intelligence: Do your safety metrics reflect the actual state of critical risk management in real-time, providing actionable insights?
A thorough review of incidents reveals more than just their causes; it provides insight into:
- the effectiveness of your safety strategy
- frontline leaders’ alignment on acceptable risk tolerance, and
- how well critical risk controls are functioning.
Advances in neuroscience now allow us to better understand human error, including hardwired brain limitations that affect decision-making. By addressing these contributing factors, your actions become far more effective.
Four good places to start:
Start building a safer organisation with these steps:
- Focus on potential, not just actual incidents: look systematically at events with serious consequence potential.
- Tease out causal factors: Dive deep into human, task, and organisational contributing factors.
- Systemise your approach: Build repeatable processes with robust data analytics and metrics.
- Educate your team: Use incident learnings to align leadership on risk priorities and improve frontline risk tolerance.
The good news? You don’t need to overhaul everything at once or alone.
Why Incident Analytics is your best partner
Incident Analytics can help you identify where to start, refine your systems, and seize low-hanging fruit that delivers immediate impact. We’ll help you reduce your risk profile with a systematic, data-driven approach and ensure meaningful, lasting change.
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