“The industry usually approaches safety issues from a technical point of view,” de Roos explains. “For instance, are the right tools and personal safety equipment being used, or, has the installation been secured. In my opinion, we should add a behavioral component to our risk analyses because it has been shown that human behavior and perception play a very important role in the prevention of incidents.”
Airplane crash During a flight, Gruber lost two fellow pilots. “They were very experienced, highly trained, they had been flying for 20 years and yet, one of the colleagues made one basic mistake resulting in this crash,” Gruber says. “He was doing his job as usual and he did the best he could. Nothing out of the ordinary happened and the plane was functioning well. I’ve been investigating to try and find out why this person still miscalculated something, leading to this accident. I came to the conclusion that safety is not only reliant on rules and procedure but also on observation and processing information – in other words, on perception.” De Roos tells us about his experiences within the Oil and Gas Industry: “What catches the eye in normal daily activity are the many differences between what people see, how they process information and which decisions they make. All this to their best ability. The level of experience is irrelevant. It proves that working safely doesn’t end with checklists, rules, procedures or processes. It is essential for us to understand how people behave and why they make the choices they make. If we can understand this we can subsequently teach people to consider those elements during their work.”
You can’t change human behavior within the limitations of an 8 hour workshop
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