Monday, September 16, 2013

Overcoming Illogic at ASSE's Upcoming Symposium


At ASSE’s Fatality & Severe Loss Prevention Symposium this November, Mike Allocco, PE, CSP, will present Overcoming Illogic, a seminar on how to better mitigate exposures to severe loss by combating assumptions and applying hazard analysis and risk management.

Allocco, a fellow in the International System Safety Society, believes that new approaches toward safety have caused many to forget the axioms and traditional ideas on which system safety is based. “Everything was discovered in the past but we seem to forget,” he says, adding that rather than valuing system safety axioms, today’s safety professionals often focus on their own experiences and observations, which may provide only a limited view of risk.

“Common statements support safety avoidance logic, and these statements are often made in the context of safety, which may be inappropriate,” Allocco wrote in “Common Statements . . . . Trouncing Safety”, an article published in Journal of System Safety. These statements can include assumptions such as “automating the task will make it safer,” “our approach to safety is the best way to go,” and “the probability of this risk is EE –X based upon past accidents”.

Allocco warns against relying on automation because safety issues are complex, and automated systems often cannot detect those complexities. He says in order to evaluate the systems in place and assess risks sufficiently, safety professionals need to study every individual and every machine involved in their operations as well as the interactions between those individuals and machines. “One [has to] keep an open mind; one has to think in a creative way and abstractly,” Allocco says, noting that automated systems do not support such a view of safety.

Becoming too confident about one’s own processes can also cause safety professionals to overlook hazards or assume that current practices pose little risk to employees. “What I’ve learned is to constantly question myself,” says Allocco. “If I make a decision that’s inappropriate, I become part of the problem.” He suggests seeking knowledge from other experts and looking at safety from as many different perspectives as possible.

While some standards rely on quantitative numbers and promote calculating the probability of an incident as part of risk assessment, Allocco believes probability can be detrimental in that people may assume a risk is not worth mitigating if an incident is relatively unlikely.

Rather than focusing on quantitative data, Allocco recommends hypothesizing incidents by assessing each procedure, product, employee and their interactions with each other, then determining all potential outcomes of those practices. Safety professionals should apply different hazard analysis and risk assessment techniques to gain a broad perspective of their company’s operations and potential hazards.

“The concept of a single hazard is ridiculous,” says Allocco. “[One should ask], ‘are there latent hazards that could manifest under certain conditions?’”

Although Allocco realizes that it is sometimes necessary to trust standards, he cautions against relying on standards alone to provide knowledge for assessing and mitigating risks because standards are generic and risk is dynamic. “We have to accommodate that dynamic,” Allocco says. “We need to understand how hazards evolve.” He recommends following standards but says that applying hazard analysis and risk assessment to the standards themselves may be beneficial when applying the standards to specific operations. For example, a company may benefit from reviewing its practices or testing its equipment more regularly than the relevant standards require.

Allocco’s approach to system safety focuses primarily on the identification and mitigation of hazards and it includes setting up barriers within adverse progression of safety issues. His presentation will address additional ways in which illogic contributes to risk as well as strategies for managing exposure to severe loss.

ASSE’s Fatality & Severe Loss Prevention Symposium, Avoiding the Worst, will be held Nov. 21 and 22 in San Diego, CA. Find a complete listing of seminars and more information at http://www.asse.org/symposia/index.php.