2018 HPRCT Conference

Organizations are responsible to protect their employees and the public from injury and death. Safety researchers (such as the authors of this session) seek to improve understanding of operational performance in order to strengthen systems safety.
     Safety pivots on understanding actual operations. Different fields of practice have developed different approaches to accomplish this. Various safety research methods including those from Resilience Engineering (RE) and High Reliability Organization (HRO) lead to insights that can be used to improve system performance and safety margins.
    This session will invite participants to consider approaches to learning from events with adverse outcomes. In order to provide enough time for interaction and discussion, we expect to cover two events:  a U.S Navy ship collision at sea, and a near-fatal extra-vehicular activity (EVA) at the International Space Station. We will briefly describe the two events, ask attendees what method(s) they would use to learn about them, then provide a RE and a HRO perspective. The audience will be invited to compare their own views on the value of the two approaches.
     The session is expected to enrich participant understanding of how different approaches yield different insights into safety, and obstacles that prevent learning from adverse events in their own organizations.