In addition to helping leaders be the best they can be at running both simple and complex incident investigations. Raeda Consulting can help by directly facilitating significant workplace investigations in many areas.
I have facilitated hundreds of workplace incident investigations along with 18 fatalities using a number of methods. In addition to ‘conventional’ safety related incidents, I have run investigations in the following areas:
Most commonly requested investigation methodologies
For the best way to understand the method I use for low level, simple incident investigations up to and including fatality investigations, refer to the guides:
Simple Timeline and 5-whys investigation guide
Facilitating ICAM (Incident Cause Analysis Method)
Facilitating Learning Studies
An aside on team composition
This is an area that we often fall down on and so I wanted to take this opportunity to stress the importance of a good team in order to get a good investigation and hence good lessons to-be learnt.
This is an area that we often fall down on and so I wanted to take this opportunity to stress the importance of a good team in order to get a good investigation and hence good lessons to-be learnt.
For example, let us consider a fatality in a workplace.
Investigation Leader: The leader must be of a level sufficiently high in the organisation that they think and work at a strategic level. This gives access to organisational findings that will extend beyond the incident itself and open up possibility for the lessons to-be learnt across the broader group or business. The leader must not be in the direct line of accountability for the ownership of the incident. You need to have a degree of independence in the leader. A couple of sayings come to mind: ‘You cannot mark your own homework’, and ‘You can’t have the fox looking after the hen house.’
Investigation Facilitator: A facilitator to drive the process is essential, especially for significant incidents such as near, or actual fatalities. They should be thoroughly expert at facilitating within the incident investigation method chosen,
Subject Matter Experts (SME): You need a couple of truly expert subject matter experts. This is especially important as the leader and facilitator are not necessarily expert in the topic associated with the work being undertaken at the time of the incident.
Real People: You need a couple of ‘real people’. These are front line operators, maintainers, nurses, doctors or whatever front line work the fatality relates to. For example, if the incident was in the construction industry and related to a forklift, then the real people should be forklift operators. These people give you access to the Work-as-Normal – how the work actually gets done, not how we think it gets done.
Different Thinker: Last, but certainly not least, you need what I call a different thinker. This is someone who, whilst definitely not being an expert in the field related to the incident, is not afraid to challenge the status quo – to ask questions that push back on common thinking by the experts in the field. In many ways this is the ‘Black Hat’ of Edward De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats.