Root Cause Analysis or Risk Assessment?
Brian Hughes, Dennis Rygaard and I recently co-authored an article titled: "Strengthening Risk Management by Integrating Root Cause Analysis" which was just published in the February edition of the American Society of Safety Engineer’s Professional Safety Journal. Read the article here.
As the cartoon created by Sid Harris depicts, risk assessment (RA) is about quantifying and describing a hazard which is perceived to have the potential ability to cause harm to those exposed to it should the hazard be released. Risk management is the actions taken to eliminate or mitigate harmful consequences associated with that risk.
In the paper we describe how root cause analysis (RCA) can benefit the overall risk management process by helping define and quantify risk, understand the causes of risk, and identify effective risk management actions.
One of our premises for this paper is that risk assessment focuses on anticipating events and RCA focuses on reacting to them. Because of this attitude RCA and risk assessment are separate programs led by people from different disciplines with separate training and different tool kits.
It is our belief that RCA is fundamentally designed to minimize or eliminate risk by reactively and proactively solving problems and removing causes that contribute to risk.
What are your thoughts?
1) Are Risk Assessment and RCA separate entities in your organization?
2) Do you think RCA can be leveraged to help improve the overall Risk Management process in your organization?
3) What barriers would have to be removed to more effectively integrate RCA and Risk Management functions?
Or -
Do you think RCA, used proactively on identified hazards, could simply replace the effort duplicated by the risk assessment / risk management process and one could simply rely on hazard analysis and RCA to management risk?
Sincerely,
Mark Hall
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