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.