Towards a higher safety culture in the process industry

In short: An organization focused on the management and maintenance of pipelines for the process industry has the question: how can we increase our safety and reliability even more? Apollo13 has guided this culture change process.

What are we doing: After an assessment phase, the organization decided to focus on several themes: reinforcement and alignment of the management team, learning from everyday things that go wrong (DABs or unwanted events), improvements in the way of working at operational level through small action teams and breaking the patterns between departments. The way of working was always tested against the characteristics of a level 4/5 reliability culture: focus on the operation, respect for expertise, collective ownership and continuous learning. Within a year, a number of patterns were effectively broken and the negative spiral that they were in had been reversed.