You can’t solve all human performance problems with discipline, training, and procedures.

You can’t solve all human performance problems with discipline, training, and procedures.

If you look at most industrial accident/incident investigations, you find three standard corrective actions:

1. Discipline. Which starts with the common corrective action: “Counsel the employee to be more careful when …”.

2. Training. This may be the most used (and misused) corrective action of all.

3. Procedures. If you don’t have one, write one. If you already have one, make it longer.

The misuse of these three standard corrective actions is the reason that so many accident investigations don’t really cause performance to improve. They don’t solve the real problems.

What do we need to get better results? First, better root cause analysis. Second, development of better corrective actions based on the root causes of the problems. And third, corrective actions that provide the strongest safeguards to future errors.