Enhancing Your Bowtie Risk Assessments: The Power of Local and Industry Scenarios

When performing a bowtie analysis for your critical risks, it’s essential to go beyond the basics and consider both your own local data and the wider industry information. By integrating real world scenarios from your own incidents, as well as lessons learned from industry-wide events, you can refine your risk assessments and uncover hidden risks that may otherwise go unnoticed.

What’s a Bowtie Analysis?

At its core, a bowtie analysis helps you visualize the pathways that lead to an undesirable event (a “top event”), and it breaks down the causes and consequences of that event. Controls are put in place to prevent or mitigate those causes and consequences, but for this discussion, we’ll focus on understanding the causes and consequences.

Picture a basic bowtie for the risk of “loss of control of a vehicle.” You’ll see a variety of potential causes (e.g., speeding, mechanical failure) and consequences (e.g., vehicle collision, injury). This generic approach is useful as a starting point, but it’s far from comprehensive. What’s truly valuable is going beyond these basic elements and incorporating real-world scenarios that could lead to these incidents, as well as understanding potential contributing factors that might not be immediately obvious.

Going Beyond Generic Causes: The Power of Scenarios

One common risk factor in vehicle incidents, such as “speeding,” might seem straightforward at first. However, what if the speeding was caused by other factors, like poor road conditions, lack of signage, or even driver distraction? Or perhaps the incident occurred due to a specific local environmental factor, like poor visibility caused by the sun’s position at the start or end of the day? This is where your local data becomes invaluable.

Take, for example, a scenario where a driver was speeding down a haul road, lost control around a corner, and ended up off the road due to hitting a bump. This detailed scenario could be used to enrich your bowtie model, helping you identify additional contributing factors and improve your risk mitigation strategies. By digging into your own incident history and understanding how specific situations unfolded, you can add depth and richness to your risk assessments.

Sometimes, risks emerge from random or unexpected factors that may not be top of mind during the initial risk assessment. For instance, one person on a similar risk assessment once pointed out the potential danger of a sunstrike—where the sun’s glare temporarily blinds a driver, leading to a loss of control. While this might not be an obvious factor in many initial risk analyses, discussing it with the team or reviewing past incident reports could highlight this risk and help mitigate it moving forward.

The Importance of Industry Scenarios

Local data is crucial, but it’s also important to incorporate industry-wide information. There is a wealth of knowledge that can be drawn from incidents and near-misses that have occurred across similar operations in your sector. These insights can reveal gaps or emerging risks that might not yet be apparent within your own organization but could still pose a significant threat.

Consider a tragic incident that occurred in the industry—a fatality involving a young woman driving a light vehicle at night. She approached an intersection, saw a green light to her left, and assumed it was for the intersection on the prep plant, where crushers were operating. However, that green light was actually from a haul truck, leading her to turn directly in front of it, resulting in a fatal collision. This was a classic case of a miscommunication between signal lights—a risk factor that might not have been anticipated but was critical in the eventual incident.

This incident highlights the value of looking beyond your own organization’s data and considering industry-wide scenarios. By incorporating these scenarios into your own bowtie analysis, you can identify less obvious risks, improve your understanding of potential hazards, and strengthen your overall risk management strategy.

Strengthening Your Bowtie Process

So, what’s the takeaway? To make your bowtie analysis truly effective, it’s essential to integrate both local and industry-specific scenarios. Your local data provides insight into the unique risks and conditions that might affect your organization, while industry scenarios help you stay aware of broader trends and potential hazards that could also impact your operations.

By weaving these scenarios into your risk assessments, you can:

• Uncover hidden risks: Identify factors that may not be immediately obvious but could contribute to incidents.
• Improve control measures: Tailor your controls based on actual incidents and potential causes, rather than relying solely on generic controls.
• Enhance collaboration: Engage with colleagues, industry peers, and experts to gain new insights and continuously improve your risk management practices.

What Are You Doing to Strengthen Your Bowtie?

As you reflect on your own risk assessments, think about how you are using your local incident history and industry scenarios to improve your bowtie analysis. Are you digging deep enough to understand all the factors that could lead to a top event? Are you actively seeking out industry case studies or incident reports that could provide valuable insights?

We’d love to hear from you! What methods do you use to incorporate real-world scenarios into your bowtie analysis? How do you ensure that you’re capturing all the relevant data to improve your risk assessments?