Page 118 - Serious Incident Prevention How to Achieve and Sustain Accident-Free Operations in Your Plant or Company

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Identifying the

Critical Work—

Management of

Change

Serious-incident-free operation is the norm. Even poorly managed or-
ganizations do not typically experience such occurrences on a daily,
weekly, or monthly basis. However, with the catastrophic impact of seri-
ous incidents, organizations must be committed to sustaining incident-free
operation for the long term—decades rather than months or years.
Managers must adopt a mindset of completing careers without serious in-
cidents within their areas of responsibility.
With serious-incident-free operation the norm, a simplistic approach
toward sustaining such operations is to prevent or control the occurrence
of changes. Obviously, in practice, we want some conditions to remain
constant while other changes are desirable and intentionally implemented.
While maintaining the status quo is not feasible, it is clear that the capa-
bility to prevent serious incidents is directly linked to effectiveness in
managing both unplanned and planned changes.
Two forms of change must be addressed:

Unplanned changes
Planned changes

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