Last month I wrote about the successful experience that GE is having with their Human and Organizational Performance (HOP) approach to safety. During my conversation with Kurt Krueger, GE’s health and safety programs leader and who serves as the leader of GE’s HOP initiative, for that column, I asked him how GE became interested in the HOP approach.

Kurt noted the focus on human performance initiatives gained attention after the March 28, 1979, partial meltdown of the Three-Mile Island Nuclear Reactor in Dauphin County, Pa. Coincidentally, Thomas Gilbert, known as the father of human performance technology, published Human Competence: Engineering Worthy Performance in 1978, in which he describes the Behavior Engineering Model (BEM) for worthy performance analysis.1 The following is a visual representation of Gilbert’s BEM from a Crossman, Crossman, and Lovely article.2