Eliminating Wrong Choices

The causes of management system failures which have led to many of our worst workplace disasters such as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the Texas City refinery explosion and the loss of the Piper Alpha oil platform can often be traced to a number of disastrous decisions.

To prevent these decisions leading to such disasters, it is essential to understand both the human and organisational factors that contribute to an individual being unable to anticipate a problem, recognise it when it occurs and then be unable to deal with the situation by making the right decision and taking the correct action.

People can often make these disastrous decisions even when they are fully aware of the risks and the potential consequences.

We must study the decision-making processes taken by many individuals and, through understanding these, we can then focus on the multi influencing factors which lead to these poor decisions being taken leading to potentially catastrophic consequences.

We have known for some time that human failures can directly cause accidents however, individuals tend not to make these errors deliberately and are often set up to fail by over-complicated processes, poor equipment and controls design, inadequate training and a misguided safety culture.

Prevention of these disastrous decisions must remain a high priority and GLOMACS has developed a training course to give you the skills and confidence to recognize, assess and effectively manage these situations when poor decisions truly can be the difference between life or death.

The following are the highlights of this training course:

• The importance of human factors
• How to manage human reliability and human failure
• The importance of key decision-making
• The relationship between decisions and consequences
• The impact of a successful safety culture on achieving good safety management