Quality Vs Safety - Ideas on (BBS) behavioural based safety tools

[The Doc - 2006]

In Reply to Parent Post by Greg B

Doc,

My only problem with this is that Quality Steering Committees tend to die of natural causes unless driven, backed and encouraged by management....whereas....Safety Steering committees are driven because of self preservation and legislation. IMHO a culture has to be developed or NO system will work. Please see my apes presentation below:

http://elsmar.com/Forums/attachment....tachmentid=709

It came from this thread "Teaching Quality"
http://elsmar.com/Forums/showthread.php?t=6074

whilst that may be the case in your experience, I have found that its the reverse in most cases. Companies tend to be more customer focussed and thus Quality orientated and will only do what is necessary to comply with legilation and safety requirements, wheras Quality is a customer requirement and therfore takes precedence over everything else.

a prime example is:-

BNFL quality control data falsification scandal in December 1999 :-

http://www.greenpeace.fr/stop-pluton.../JAPAN_MOX.pdf

The primary objective of the Steering Committee formed specifically for this process as I see it is to ensure the integrity of the organization's behavioural safety process. In support of this objective, the Steering Committee performs two distinctly different types of activities. Members use observation data to develop strategies to improve safety and use data about the process to enhance the process functioning. It has a two pronged attack, 1 on culture and the other on product thus ensuring an equal airing of both and combining the desired result with some stealth as Jen nicely puts it.

when my next piece is complete I will elaborate some more.

The Doc

[ben]

Systems dynamics posits that the behavior of a system (and the people in the system) arise from the system's structure.

For example, when the FAA provided immunity from prosecution for pilots who reported near-collisions, the number of reports tripled. When the immunity was retracted, the number of reports fell sixfold.

A paper by Marais and Leveson at MIT "Archtypes for Organizational Safety" might provide some good background on your approach. You should be able to find it on-line. Expect to see some causal loop diagrams and archtypes a la Peter Senge.

Ben

[flingwing]

Greg, just in case you're still following this thread, thanks for the PPT presentation about the three management systems. I'm going through the changes now trying to sort out the differences between and the need for SMS vs. QA. Thanks, I may use that presentation with my boss <grin>.