Determining the root cause

Consider the three sides of The Safety Triad depicting environmental, behavior and person factors that affect safety performance. Environmental factors include tools, equipment, engineering design, climate and housekeeping. Then you have the behaviors, the actions of everyone relating to an incident. Finally, there are the personal internal feeling states of the people involved – their attitudes, perceptions and personality characteristics.

Given the dynamic interdependency of environment, behavior and person factors in everyday events, how can we expect to find the root cause of an incident? Analysis is needed to sort through this complex web or contributing factors.

Take a systems approach in your analysis of environment, behavior and person factors. Then decide which of these factors can be changed to reduce the chance of another incident. Environment factors are usually the easiest to define and improve, followed by behavior factors. Most difficult to define and change directly are the person factors, but many of these internal feelings can be affected positively by properly influencing behaviors.