Understanding why an incident took place is at the heart of an effective safety program.  Regardless of the severity of the outcome, as safety professionals we want to assess unplanned events based on their potential, and we want to inform our safety program, policies, procedures and engineering.  Our goal is to inform our risk mitigation and develop suitable failsafe’s.

However, incident investigation is riven with challenges, weaknesses and the potential to miss the real insights and learning. One significant element of this is the role ‘seeing’ plays in both the incident analysis process itself, and in how we go about understanding events from the workers perspective.

Here at COVE we have been looking into some of these challenges, and how Visual Literacy can play a role in bridging some of the gaps, creating a more robust and effective process by which we gain accurate insight, analysis and take the optimal corrective actions.  All in pursuit of learning and improving our safety efforts.

We invite you to download our latest white paper, which takes a look at how we might reframe our approach to Incident Investigation.