Positive Investigation Methodology

The safety profession has become obsessed with failure. We focus on why things go wrong, why incidents occurred and what disasters await us if we fail to proactively manage safety. The lessons from disasters, instructive as they may be, are entirely superficial. Traditional linear incident investigations have limited ability to impact incident prevention because lightning does not strike the same place twice. While these lessons have utility, we can extract more from our incident investigations.

It may be more useful to find out how a potential serious incident became a near miss, or how consequences of an incident were tempered, rather than just finding out what caused the incident. A better understanding of ‘what went right’ can assist in creating a more resilient system. The discussion will outline the practical tips and tools used to investigate success and also the challenges faced in initial implementation of these strategies.