Scott Stricoff is president of BST. Scott oversees BST's consulting and client partnerships in the transportation and utilities industries, government sector, and other arenas to enhance safety management and culture. Scott is a noted thought leader with demonstrated expertise in process safety and hazard analysis, occupational health and safety, and environmental and public health. Scott is co-author of the book "The Manager’s Guide to Workplace Safety," which was released in fall 2012.
In order to build (or strengthen) a safety culture, it’s helpful for managers to recognize pitfalls of leading in safety and understand how to remedy them.
Even though organizations may have a proper incident investigation process in place, often times the process is less than optimal in achieving its objectives.
Virtually all catastrophic events in man-made systems are related to technical failures made possible by organizational failures. This explains why catastrophic events continue to occur despite widespread implementation of sophisticated technical and management systems. Deepwater Horizon and Texas City disasters are examples of events caused by weak organizational safety—the context within which technical and management systems function.