Process Safety Management: A Wicked Problem (Part 1)

This paid post is the first in a series to do with Process Safety and Wicked Problems.

The Wicked Problem approach offers an alternative way of thinking about process safety — not as a replacement for traditional fundamentals, but as a way of understanding why certain classes of failures persist despite decades of technical and management progress.

Tame and Wicked Problems

In the context of this post, classic process safety problems are generally ‘tame’. (This does not mean that they are easy or trivial ― it means that they are well defined.) Actions such as the quantification of risk, the design of safeguards, the writing of procedures, and the management of changes (both to equipment and to the organization itself) are all well understood and defined.

However, process safety failures can also arise from characteristics that can be called ‘wicked’.

The following are some of the parameters of a wicked problem.

• No single agreed problem definition
  Are problems to do with cost pressure, aging assets, organizational drift, shortage of workers, the increased use of contractors, skills erosion, regulatory capture, or culture? Typically, all are partially true, and none is complete on its own.

• Multiple stakeholders with conflicting incentives
  Operators, maintenance, management, regulators, shareholders, and communities all have different goals. Hence they define ‘success’ differently.

• Solutions change the problem
  Introducing new safeguards, procedures, or digital tools alters work practices, creates new failure modes, and redistributes responsibility.

• No definitive stopping rule
  Safety can never be ‘good enough’. So, where is the stopping point?

• Coupling to external systems
  Energy markets, labor markets, supply chains, climate stressors, and political constraints directly affect safety, but lie outside traditional process safety boundaries.

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