Human Performance Improvement (HPI):
A Useful Tool in Safety Management
When you think about your career in safety so far, you know you've been influenced by any pre-existing beliefs you had, as well as what you've learned in school or training, and the actual experiences you've had in your job. (Hopefully you haven't experienced a serious accident, but if you had, you can see how that would affect you, right?)After the Three Mile Island Accident, the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations (INPO) was established to improve the operational safety of nuclear power plants. The principles of Human Performance Improvement (HPI) came out of that work, and (much like Tang coming out of the space program) were an unanticipated benefit that is transforming the way we think about workplace safety. This article will introduce you to HPI. Put simply, HPI is "an individual working within organizational systems to meet expectations set by leadership". HPI is an understanding of individual behavior, organizations, and processes that either provoke or prevent error. Workers don’t cause accidents. Workers trigger latent conditions in the worksite. Accidents happen, not because a worker gambles and loses, but because the worker believes that what is about to happen is not possible, or that it has little if any connection to what he or she doing. The worker believes that getting the job done is well worth whatever the risk is.
If you want to understand how you could apply HPI to your work, you'll want to become familiar with 5 basic principles:
5 Basic Principles of Human Performance Improvement:
It's also important to understand these definitions:
Finally I want to introduce and define two new key terms:
If you understand these concepts, principles and definitions, the following series of articles on HPI will make a lot more sense to you. Eventually, the industries we work for will adopt error prevention techniques and defense in depth -- just as they have adopted behavioral self-checking. You can help make that happen, and make your organization a safer and more productive place to work.
Go to Part 2
If you want to understand how you could apply HPI to your work, you'll want to become familiar with 5 basic principles:
5 Basic Principles of Human Performance Improvement:
- People are fallible and even the best of us make mistakes. You and I are human and in every task we undertake, mistakes can happen. That’s natural and should come as no surprise.
- Error-likely situations are predictable, manageable, and preventable. We all have come across situations that, if left unattended, will ultimately cause an error to materialize into an event (an accident). Unsalted ice on a stairway comes to mind.
- Individual behavior is influenced by organizational processes and values. Look at your own organization. What does it value? The answer to that question is found by looking at what the organization rewards. That affects our behavior.
- People achieve high levels of performance based largely on feedback received from leaders, peers, and subordinates.
- Events (accidents or near-accidents) can be avoided by understanding the reasons mistakes occur and applying the lessons learned from past events. This principle is self-evident. From the employees' point of view, is the organization focused on learning and applying lessons learned, or is it focused on punishing error?
It's also important to understand these definitions:
- Error: something you did not intend to do.
- Active Error: an action that changes equipment, a system, or the state of a facility, triggering immediate undesired consequences.
- Error-likely Conditions: unfavorable conditions at the job site that increase the probability of error.
- Defense in Depth: successive layers of detection and prevention of errors, providing protection from the consequences of error.
Finally I want to introduce and define two new key terms:
- Error Precursors: existing conditions that are known to increase error rates. When error precursors exist, you have Error Likely Conditions (see above).
- Latent Organizational Weakness: undetected deficiency in organizational processes and values that create workplace conditions that provoke error or degrade the integrity of defenses.
If you understand these concepts, principles and definitions, the following series of articles on HPI will make a lot more sense to you. Eventually, the industries we work for will adopt error prevention techniques and defense in depth -- just as they have adopted behavioral self-checking. You can help make that happen, and make your organization a safer and more productive place to work.
Go to Part 2
