Page 50 - Serious Incident Prevention How to Achieve and Sustain Accident-Free Operations in Your Plant or Company

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28 Serious Incident Prevention

condition of employment, developing procedures, conducting inspections,
and applying disciplinary actions. All of these are important actions, but
safety performance can be further enhanced through actions that reduce
employee and management resistance. Ensuring employee participation in
the job planning process, use of safety teams, and other actions to increase
involvement, understanding, and ownership are examples of actions that re-
duce restraining forces.
A force-field diagram, Figure 2-1, illustrates the relationship between
driving and restraining forces and their importance in maintaining perform-
ance at a high level. One approach to raising the safety performance bar is
to increase the intensity and number of driving forces. For example, an or-
ganization may enhance the depth or frequency of audits. A second, com-
plementary approach involves taking actions to reduce the impact of
restraining forces such as knowledge gaps and lack of accountability.
In practice, many driving forces also serve to improve conditions that
restrain performance. Employee involvement and training, for example, re-
duce performance restraints arising from limited ownership and lack of
knowledge. Other forces intended to drive improvement have limited im-
pact on restraining forces and may have very limited driving power as well.
Examples of driving forces that typically have very limited impact include
management exhortations, posters, and slogans. A process that strives to
maximize driving forces while ignoring the need to reduce restraining
forces will consume a substantial level of management’s energy. With
today’s lean organizations, it’s doubtful that long-term success could be sus-
tained with such an unbalanced, resource-intensive approach.
History confirms that breakthrough achievements usually do not occur
totally by chance. Even accomplishments that initially merit classification
as a “miracle” are usually found upon further research to have been given a
planned birth. So it is with achieving breakthrough improvements in sus-
taining safe operations—commitment and proactive actions are required.
The barriers may be formidable, and overcoming them will require an ef-
fective process—one that not only drives improvements but that also mini-
mizes restraining forces within the organization.

References

1. S. R. Covey, Principle-Centered Leadership (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1992), 161, 195. Excerpt used with permission. All rights reserved.
2. Ibid.
3. D. Gano, Apollo Root Cause Analysis (Yakima, Wash.: Apollonian
Publications, 1999), 147.
4. V. L. Grose, Managing Risk—Systematic Loss Prevention for Executives
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1987), 26.