Our special column focuses on a book written by Todd Conklin that aims to inspire our readers to ask the correct questions in case of an accident in order to create “real” safety in any organization.
In particular, Mr. Conklin’s book , titled “Pre-Accident Investigations: Better Questions”, is not a book about traditional safety. As the author eloquently describes, in order to predict incidents before they happen, an organization should first understand how their processes can result in failure. As a matter of fact, instead of managing the outcomes, they must learn to manage and understand the processes used to create them.
This is how science moves forward as well. Scientific progress has always been driven more by people’s ability to ask better questions that enable them to evolve, and not so much by answers. In this book, Mr. Conklin aims to challenge safety and reliability professionals to get better answers by asking better questions. For this reason, in his forward to the book, Professor Sidney Dekker says that questions such as “What rule was broken?” or “What should the consequences be?” are no longer good questions because they are short-sighted and elicit short-sighted answers.
On the other hand, asking better questions will lead to the kind of answers that will actually help show the way forward. Taking all of the above into consideration, Mr. Conklin managed to create a provocative examination of human performance and safety management, successfully delivering a thought-provoking discourse about how we work, defining also a new approach to operational learning.
“Pre-Accident Investigations: Better Questions” is the ideal book for use in safety, human performance, psychology, cognitive and decision making, systems engineering, and risk assessment areas, as it equips the safety professional with the tools, steps, and models of success needed to create long-term value and change from safety programs.
Human failure is not random and people’s actions are rarely malicious and usually make sense to them at the time. This is the second guiding principle for OCIMF actions on human factors, highlighting the importance of understanding why errors occur in order to develop effective controls.
