Process Safety: Another Opportunity to Translate Behavior Analysis into Evidence-Based Practices of Grave Societal Value

Our society often turns to engineering when the stakes are high and human lives are in the balance. The vehicles and railroads that cross our continents, the buildings that we live and work in, and the instruments used to heal are all highly engineered products that enhance human existence. To produce these, we rely on engineering related to the extraction of raw materials from our earth and the refinement the materials construct and power our modern world. As our society exploits these engineering feats, we are also frequently made aware of how these industries can cause great harm through environmental releases, explosions, and work-related fatalities. This is the new world of Process Safety.

Industrial equipment is engineered to control and transform highly hazardous materials. To ensure the integrity of this engineering, human work processes are adopted. Process safety is the management of processes that establish a multi-level system to assess, document, maintain, and inspect equipment and work practices integral in controlling highly toxic and/or reactive materials. In a highly engineered environment, any variance can set off a chain of events that increases the probability of a process safety incident as violent as an explosion. Human behavior is often the biggest source of this variance, but it can also be the biggest asset for process safety management.

Predictably, the growing field of process safety management is dominated by engineering practices such as equipment design, operating procedures, preventive maintenance systems, and quality assurance. These engineered systems are highly dependent on human behavior. Thus, engineers and managers are looking to the behavioral sciences to help them design better systems to reduce, and in some cases actually increase, human variation within their processes.

This special issue of the Journal of Organizational Behavior Management (JOBM) was instigated by the petrochemical industry who reached out to the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies (CCBS) in search of behavioral solutions to their process safety challenges around constructs such as normalization of deviance and complacency. Process industries are looking to understand sources of behavioral variance and build better processes based on sound behavioral science. Because of this clear link between behavior and process safety performance, the behavior analytic community has been challenged to: a) research the behavioral root causes leading to variation that threaten process safety, b) create and evaluate behavioral interventions to mitigate this variation, and c) identify the system factors that would influence the behaviors necessary to promote process safety (Bogard, Ludwig, Staats, & Kretchmer, 2015).

The contents of this Special Issue are a first step in translating behavior analysis into practical systems that can help reduce human suffering from catastrophic process safety events. In other areas of public health there is much discussion of translating basic research to practice to institutionalization (Davis et al., 2003; Geller, Winett, & Everett, 1982; Green & Glasgow, 2006). At the beginning of this pathway basic research is first applied through efficacy interventions to test and adapt basic principles in the uncontrolled environments of the real world. The Journal of Organizational Behavior Management has been producing this type of research since its inception. What we hope to do with this special issue is to generate applications of basic behavior analysis to test the efficacy of initial interventions in impacting process safety variables. However, if we stop there we won’t answer the call. We need to pursue effectiveness research where we develop packages of interventions and prove their effectiveness with evidence of not only incident prevention but also sustained adoption.

Behavior analysis has done this before as we seek to reduce human suffering in all its forms. Most related is the effective and sustained application of behavior analysis to personal safety, those actions that help workers avoid and protect themselves from hazards. The resulting behavioral systems have been referred to as Behavioral Safety or Behavior-Based Safety. However, the behaviors and contingencies involved in personal safety are different from those involved in process safety. Personal safety behaviors occur in contexts characterized by repetitive work using active response classes (e.g., putting on protective equipment, maintaining posture) generalized across work settings. Behavioral safety systems that have worked in these contexts rely on applied research methodologies of direct behavioral observation, data collection, and analyses paired with social contingencies such as individual and group feedback.

The context of Process Safety is qualitatively difference. The work context is often unique, direct-acting contingencies absent, protective behaviors passive (e.g., observing gauges, inspections), and intervention success is mitigated by extensive interlocking behavioral contingencies from many other actors in complex metacontingencies. The interventions that may make up an effective behavioral system for process safety must deal with behavioral constructs such as fluency, extinction, and stimulus control.

The collection of papers assembled begin by attempting to translate basic principles of behavior analysis to the challenges associated with process safety. Cloyd Hyten and Timothy Ludwig apply numerous behavioral processes such as habituation, extinction, unprogrammed reinforcement, and rule-governed behavior to a pattern of behavioral variability colloquially termed “complacency”. In the second paper, Timothy Ludwig offers a description of different behavioral classes contributing to process safety before providing a behavioral systems analysis to highlight the metacontingencies and interlocking behavioral contingencies impacting process safety performance. Then Angela Lebbon and Sigurdur Sigurdsson add a discussion of risk discounting to the behavioral decision making involved in behavioral variation leading to risk taking.

The second series of papers attempt to set up the models within which behavior analysis’ applied researcher can build effective and sustainable interventions. Terry McSween and Daniel Moran enhance a decades-old safety model (i.e., Heinrich’s Safety Triangle) to account for the precursors of the serious incidents targeted by process safety and describe how they might lead to better analysis of causal system failures that drive behavior. Manuel Rodriguez, John Bell, Michelle Brown, and Donna Carter introduce the behavioral audience to the field of Human Factors where human errors are the focus of process safety as a pathway to integrate these two behavioral science methodologies. Finally, most of the papers in this special issue identify leadership behaviors as a target of intervention for successful behavior analytic interventions. Nicole Gravina, Bob Cummins, and John Austin describe a tested leadership intervention where those whose behavior create the powerful metacontingencies are taught behavior science techniques to evaluate the impact of their own behavior and modify the behavior of others that maintain process safety effectiveness.

We hope that readers of this special issue will follow up on the principles and tactics offered across the spectrum of translational research. We should endeavor to demonstrate once again the robustness of our science and reach of our application. We have another opportunity to translate behavior analysis into evidence-based practices of grave societal value.