Incident Investigations:

How well does your organisation understand the underlying causes of incidents?

While many investigations focus on the human actions or errors involved in incidents, they don’t always identify the factors within the system that affect human performance and contribute to error.

Incident investigations should mature beyond concluding that human error is a cause and instead uncover the contributing factors that provoked or permitted the error to occur or those that failed to mitigate the effects of that error on system safety.

Systems need to be able to reduce the conditions that make errors more likely, and be resilient to errors when they do occur.  This systemic view of accident causation leads to actions that support effective human performance and prevent incidents or accidents from occurring again.

Contact us to learn more about the integration of human factors and systems thinking in your safety investigations.

SystemiQ has extensive experience in completing human factors investigations and identifying human factors trends in safety data.  We help organisations and investigators to integrate human factors and systems thinking in safety investigations.  In the last few years, we have supported several organisations, including a power distribution company and a major Australian bank in reviewing and updating their safety investigation frameworks and processes.  We have provided upskilling for safety investigators in human factors and system thinking, and effective interviewing skills, to improve the insights gathered through investigations.  We recently worked with a rail operator to build internal capability in safety investigations for signalling incidents.  In addition to providing training for safety investigators, we have recently been involved in supporting human factors aspects of investigations for a rail operator and a mining organisation.

Contact us about how we can help you better understand how human performance influences safety at your organisation. We can provide human factors support to your organisation’s investigations as part of the investigation team, and support the development of capability among internal investigators.