Safety Case risk perception

Changes in technology also lead to shifts in perception as to what can be done to control risk. For example, the use of sophisticated, high-integrity safety shutdown systems has become more commonplace as instrumentation technology has developed and costs have come down. Such technological and economic shifts need to be reflected in updates to the Safety Case. 

When diagnosing stakeholder value it is important to understand that perceptions can be as important as scientific facts. For example, polyvinyl chloride (PVC) producers defend PVC on the basis of scientific arguments such as energy efficiency, low biomass accumulation, and product safety in normal use. Customers such as Nike, Sony, and Shaw Industries that have committed to eliminating PVC in their products as a precaution for their customers due to perceived health and environmental risks, are unlikely to change their perspective based on additional scientific facts provided by the chemical industry. As in the PVC case, manufacturers are vulnerable to value loss as a result of their customers perceptions of risks. 

Note, too, that this well-established type of risk management program has indirectly led to competitive advantage in at least one case. One manufacturer of a modem product for insomnia advertises in the United States that this drag is not a narcotic . Simplicity in prescribing and dispensing, and a perception of the relative safety of an unscheduled product, is attractive to physicians, pharmacists and patients with insomnia, alike. 

We believe in the need for the safety professional to not only be proficient in hazard and risk control, but to understand the impact of communications, social networking (not just the Internet), and the perception of safety when presenting a case for the safety culture to the leadership team. 

For example, a correlation of 0.30 between the results of a safety perception survey and other measures of safety, such as employees frequency of coaching sessions completed or percentages of at-risk behavior per observation period, sounds good until you realize that only 9 percent of the variance in one measurement device could be accounted for by the other (0.30 = 0.09 or 9 percent). In this case, 91 percent of the variance in people s safety perception scores could not be explained by the other estimate of a person s safety. 

Inspections are also the worst implemented part of a safety system. They can be perceived as time consuming, taking individuals away from productive work, and in many cases not adding any value to the operation. Inspections are not always utilized effectively because the organization has not experienced severe losses and a low perception of risk exists. 

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