Sponsored by DEKRA

Catastrophic incidents that have the ability to cause serious injuries or fatalities aren’t the norm, making it easy for leaders to feel overly confident instead of vulnerable, ultimately creating organizational blind spots. It takes a different kind of organization to develop leaders who, instead of asking, “Can it happen here?” ask, “How can it happen here?”

Some organizations have been successful in avoiding catastrophic events, even in environments with high-risk factors and complex operations. Known as high-reliability organizations, they have successfully eliminated their blind spots by significantly improving how they detect and respond to early warning signals and manage overall operational risk.

How do they do it? DEKRA organizational process safety expert Mike Snyder, human performance reliability leader Rajni Walia and executive consultant George Bower will explore practices that improve HRO culture within any organization. These approaches drive a new way of thinking about using holistic safety assessments to identify and respond to early warning signals, reduce human error, and enable improved decision-making.

Key learnings:

• Interventions to guide you toward a culture that promotes high-reliability thinking and reduced exposure to SIF potential
• Using unbiased, holistic assessments to evaluate how well safety programs are managing operational risk
• Practical, ready-to-implement actions to help teams improve risk-based decision-making

Speakers

Rajni Walia, Ph.D.
Vice President, DEKRA North America

Rajni leads the Human Performance Improvement practice at DEKRA North America. She’s a highly sought-after thought leader with more than a decade of experience leading performance management, organizational assessment and development, as well as providing human error-reduction consultations. Her methods foster strong performance reliability through a systemic approach to designing and enhancing workplaces and processes, all deeply embedded in applied neuroscience.

George Bower
Vice President, DEKRA North America

George is committed to helping organizations achieve sustainable safety and health excellence through accountable leadership, detailed planning, effective training, clear and concise policies and procedures, systems-based auditing, and the completion of corrective actions. He’s an expert in many fields of safety and health management, including industrial hygiene, safety management systems, safety auditing and corrective-action development, SIF prevention, leadership development and employee engagement, root-cause analyses, safety policy and procedure development, and job hazard analyses.

Mike Snyder
Vice President of Operational Risk Management, DEKRA North America

Mike leads the Operational Risk Management practice at DEKRA North America. He previously was the global director of safety and loss prevention for the Dow Corning Corp., responsible for leading the company’s occupational and process safety programs. Mike is a retired fire chief and fire marshal from the Auburn-Williams Fire District, where he developed expertise in the practical application of the Fire Code for construction and operational projects. He currently serves on the Center for Chemical Process Safety governance board.

Moderator

Kevin Druley, Associate Editor, Safety+Health magazine

Kevin is associate editor of Safety+Health and serves as co-host of the magazine’s “On the Safe Side” podcast.