Many companies have implemented process safety management (PSM) systems, pursued continuous improvement strategies, adopted performance metrics, and audited themselves until they are exhausted - and their process safety performance is still not where they want it to be. Because accidents, near misses, management system failures, and unsafe acts all have a common denominator - they are the product of human action and inaction - efforts to fix these problems will continue to be imperfect until we understand and correct the underlying cultural causes that drive human performance and nonperformance.

This paper presents a way to correlate process safety technical performance results to cultural root causes. The basis for this groundbreaking approach is an extension of root cause analysis that directly correlates PSM performance dysfunctions to assessments of employee and management process safety culture using intermediate “cultural causal factors." Case history examples are used to illustrate the method. By connecting the dots between PSM (non)performance and culture issues, effective and long-lasting corrective actions can be implemented to treat the causes, rather than the symptoms.

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