gary

Thanks so much for your comments. I hope to see more of your thoughtful perspectives in the Safety Thursdays postings.

I do think we can bring about a model of high reliability for construction projects. (I’m willing to be proven wrong.) Your question about the process of construction is on the mark. There is no repeatable process of construction. Of course we excavate before we go up. We tie rebar before we place concrete. But even when mile after mile of sound wall or Jersey barriers are constructed, the grade differs, the people differ, and aspects of the design differ.

The opportunity may lie in the process of the managing the project. We can bring reliability to the preparation of work. We can reliability to the conversations about the work. And we can bring reliability to the organization of work. None of that is attempted today on the usual safe work setting. I don’t see an impediment to doing so.

Thanks again. :+:

HROs tend to be distinguished by a number of factors, including:

- strong enculturation of personnel, in part through intensive training and repeated drills

- emphasis on learning from experience instead of punishment for mistakes

- commitment to minimizing error cost

- potentially powerful impact constituency (outside stakeholders)

- sufficient funds for training, monitoring, and redundancy

- relatively free flow of information up and down the hierarchy

- ability to rapidly devolve high-tempo and crisis decision making authority to the most appropriate levels

Not all HROs have all of these features, and the various scholars who have studied HROs categorize features in different ways, but this gives a sense of why HROs are considered to be special.

The industries you cite - nuclear, chemical, and airline - all have tremendous incentives to institutionalize high reliability. The potential negative effects of accidents include loss of highly trained personnel, loss of expensive facilities, loss of customer confidence, and catastrophic loss of non-operator personnel. The construction industry has similar incentives to create highly reliable products, but can the same be said for the process of construction?