Behavior-based safety defining behaviors

The origin of the Domino Theory is credited to Herbert W. Heinrich, circa 1931, who worked for Travelers Insurance. Mr. Heinrich nndertook an analysis of 75,000 accident reports by companies insnred with Travelers. This resulted in the research report titled The Origins of Accidents, which concluded that 88 percent of all accidents are caused by the unsafe acts of persons, 10 percent by unsafe physical conditions, and 2 percent are Acts of God. His analysis of 50,000 accidents showed that, in the average case, an accident resulting in the occurrence of a lost-time work injury was preceded by 329 similar accidents caused by the same unsafe act or mechanical exposure, 300 of which produced no injury and 29 resulted in minor injuries. This is sometimes referred to as Heinrich s Law. Mr. Heinrich then defined the five factors in the accident sequence, which he identified as the Domino Theory. Heinrich s work is the basis for the theory of behavior-based safety, which holds that as many as 95 percent of all workplace incidents are caused by unsafe acts. See also Accident Chain Behavior-Based Safety. 

In its simplest form, behavior-based safety (BBS) can be defined as the programs, systems and resources dedicated to identifying and eliminating unsafe acts or human errors. While the establishment of OSHA and the development of BBS programs have changed the face of safety over the last four decades, recait safety results nationwide are flat. 

Careful observation and analysis of ongoing work practices can pinpoint many potential causes of safe and at-risk behaviors. Those causes external to people—including reward and punishment contingencies, policies, or supervisory behaviors—can often be altered to improve both behavior and attitude. In contrast, internal person factors are difficult to identify, and if defined, they are even more difficult to change directly. So with behavior-based safety the focus is placed on external factors—environmental conditions and behaviors—that can be changed upstream from a potential injury. 

As we begin here to define principles and guidelines for action plans, it is important to keep one thing in mind—you need to start with the conviction that there is rarely a generic best way to implement a process involving human interaction. For a behavior-based safety process to succeed in your setting, you will need to work out the procedural details with the people whose involvement is necessary. The process needs to be customized to fit your culture. 

The CBC examples described previously illustrate two basic ways of implementing the Define and Observe stages of DO IT. The driving CBC I developed with my daughter illustrates the observation and feedback process recommended by a number of successful behavior-based safety consultants (Krause, 1995 Krause et al., 1996 McSween, 1995). I refer to this approach as one-to-one safety coaching because it involves an observer using a CBC to provide instructive behavioral feedback to another person (Geller, 1995,1998). 

In this chapter we have gotten into the "nuts and bolts" of implementing a behavior-based safety process to develop a Total Safety Culture. The overall process is referred to as DO IT, each letter representing one of the four stages of behavior-based safety. This chapter focused on the first two stages—Define and Observe. 

Principle 17 Behavior-based safety is a continuous DO IT process with D = Define target behaviors, O = Observe target behaviors, I = Intervene to improve behaviors, and T = Test impact of intervention. 

In summary, selection processes can help to ensure new employee safety if they clearly define the knowledge, skills, and abilities that are required to perform a job, and obtain or develop accurate predictors of these. Put simply if an organization selects an individual for a job that does not have the knowledge, skills, and abilities which are necessary to perform the job in a safe manner, there will be an increased chance that the individual (the new employee) will be involved in an accident. Of course, working safely is also partly dependent on the new employee s attitude toward safety and on their personality (see Chap. 5). Unfortunately, attitudes and personality are not easy to measure in an error-free way. In this regard, an organization should not assume that they have very much ability at all to predict safety-related attitudes or to determine much in the way of safety behavior based on personality profiling. 

Perhaps the definitions we hear most about today are those that define behavior-based safety as a process of involving workers in defining the ways they are most likely to get hurt, thus getting their involvement and thus some buy-in, asking the workers to observe other workers to determine progress in the reduction of unsafe behaviors etc. [p. 2],... 

Behavioral approaches are based on years of research in the field of Applied Behavior Analysis. Geller (2001, p. 21) notes, Behaviorism has effectively solved environmental, safety, and health problems in organizations and communities first, define the problem in terms of relevant observable behavior, then design and implement an intervention process to decrease behaviors causing the problem and/or increase behaviors that can alleviate the problem. The behavior-based approach is reflected in research and scholarship.. . . ... 

In addition to a formal specification, we need a technique to analyze the fault tolerance behavior of a component in a formal way. Approaches such as [19] verify formalized fault trees against formal implementation models. Furthe-more, several fault injection analyzes that rely on model checking like [3] and [9] have been presented. In this paper we focus on a fault injection based-technique [16], [10] that is called model-based safety analysis MBS A. The MBS A processes functional requirements and provides complete results as cut-sets and allows to define custom faulty behavior in the implementation model, which is specified using Matlab/Statefiow. Cut-sets are unique combinations of malfunctions occurrences that can cause a system failure. A cut-set is said to be minimal if no event can be removed from the set and the combination of malfunctions still leads to a failure[ll]. 

This chapter began with a review of three basic principles that define a behavioral science approach to improving the human element of mining safety, including a rationale for using a behavior-based approach. Then a basic firamework for implementing a behavior management system was introduced. It was called DO IT for the four basic processes of behavior-based safety ... 

The second approach to the Define and Observe stages of DO IT involves a limited CBC (perhaps targeting only one behavior) and does not necessarily involve one-to-one coaching. This is the approach used in most of the published studies of the behavior-based approach to safety (for example, see reviews by Petersen, 1989, and Sulzer-Azaroff, 1982, 1987). This was the approach used by my students years ago when they observed, recorded, and graphed my safety-belt use as my vehicle entered and departed the... 

From a behavior-based perspective, you can see that these different need levels simply define the kinds of consequences that motivate our behavior. When we are at the first stage of the hierarchy, for example, we are working to achieve consequences—or avoid losing consequences—necessary to sustain life. We need money to buy food and pay the rent or mortgage. Then, consequences that imply safety and security are reinforcing. Money is needed to buy insurance or feed a savings account, for example. At the social acceptance level, we perform to receive peer support or to avoid negative peer pressure. 

The basic method of distillation (ASTM D-86) is one of the oldest methods in use because the distillation characteristics of hydrocarbons have an important effect on safety and performance, especially in the case of fuels and solvents. The boiling range gives information on the composition, the properties, and the behavior of petroleum and derived products during storage and use. Volatility is the major determinant of the tendency of a hydrocarbon mixture to produce potentially explosive vapors. Several methods are available to define the distillation characteristics of petroleum and its various petroleum products. In addition to these physical methods, other test methods based on gas chromatography are also used to derive the boiling point distribution of a sample (ASTM D-2887, ASTM D-3710, ASTM D-5307, ASTM D-6352). 

Abstract. Component-based architectures are widely used in embedded systems. For managing complexity and improving quality separation of concerns is one of the most important principles. For one component, separation of concerns is realized by defining the overall component functionality by separated protocol behaviors. One of the main challenges of applying separation of concerns is the later automatic composition of the separated, maybe interdependent concerns which is not supported by current component-based approaches. Moreover, the complexity of real-time distributed embedded systems requires to consider safety requirements for the composition of the separated concerns. We present an approach which addresses these problems by a well-defined automatic composition of protocol behaviors with respect to interdependent concerns. The composition is performed by taking a proper refinement relation into accoimt so that the analysis results of the separated concerns are preserved which is essential for safety critical systems. 

One of the main challenges of applying separation of concerns is the later (application specific) composition of the separated, maybe interdependent concerns [5]. In general, we can distinguish between structural, data, and behavioral composition. In the area of structural composition, approaches exist for example, that consider the software architecture as well as architectural patterns [6,7]. For data composition approaches like [8] support the generation of suitable translators. In [9,4] approaches for the behavioral composition are presented. The overwhelming complexity of embedded real-time systems, however, requires to also consider safety and bounded liveness requirements for the composition which is not included in these approaches. On the other hand, component-based approaches for embedded real-time systems (e. g. [10,11]) suffer the support for interdependent concerns for the well-defined composition. 

As mentioned previously, ISO 26262 defines functional safety as freedom of unacceptable risks based on hazards, which are caused by malfunctional behavior of E/E-systems. However, interactions of systems with E/E-functions are included as well and therefore also mechatronic systems. Whether pure mechanical systems really show not any interactions with E/E is doubtful. Furthermore, the introduction chapter of ISO 26262, which describes the scope of the norm, excludes hazards such as electric shock, fire, smoke, heat, radiation, poisoning, inflammation, (chemical) reactions, corrosion, release of energy or comparable hazards, as long as the failure was not caused by electrical components. Such hazards are caused more by the battery as well as the poisonous electrolytes in the capacitors. Whether a motor winding is an electrical device or a mechanical component is also questionable. 

Our discussion group did, however, agree that we should try to develop objective, process-based measures for our quality—or safety—objectives. Although we cannot measure every important process directly, defining and tracking desired actions or behaviors guide proper procedures and motivate continuous improvement. In other words, the quote from Hansen (1994) at the start of this chapter is accurate, but it does not say it all. Many factors affect performance. Not only is it impossible to monitor all of them, it is often impossible to identify the specific change in performance that led to an improved system. 

The concept of contract is not uncommon in software development and it was first introduced in 1988 by Meyer [12] to constrain the interactions that occur between objects. Contract-based design [3] is defined as an approach where the design process is seen as a successive assembly of components where a component behaviour is represented in terms of assumptions about its environment and guarantees about its behavior. Hence, contracts are intended to describe functional and behavioral properties for each design component in form of assumptions and guarantees. In this paper, a contract which describes properties that are only safety-related is referred to as a safety contract. 

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