Don't Let SIFs Reverse Your Problem

September 01 2019
By: Terry L. Mathis

From the early 1970s to the mid-1980s, many organizations worked hard to improve safety. They improved workplace conditions, provided more sophisticated PPE, and created or expanded safety rules and procedures. The result was fewer accidents. The remaining accidents tended to be less severe but stubbornly continued. Safety efforts shifted directions and began to focus on worker behaviors and low-probability risks. Behavior-based safety in all its variations and other processes were developed to address those types of accidents. The problem was that the new emphasis on minor accidents often reduced focus on major, high-severity accidents that we now call SIFs. While minor accidents decreased, SIFs did not keep pace.

Now that most organizations are highly focused on SIFs, we could potentially reverse this problem by taking emphasis away from lower-severity potential accidents. We need to be able to expand our focus to address both ends of the accident spectrum and not continue to be one-trick ponies who simply traded tricks.