THE APOLLO PROCESS

The Apollo process is a 4-step method for facilitating a thorough incident investigation. The steps are:

Define the Problem:
What do we want to prevent from recurring? When and where did it occur? What is the significance of the problem?
Analyze Cause and Effect Relationships:
Once the problem is defined, we need to understand the causes and how they interact with one another.
Identify Solutions:
Solutions are specific actions that control causes.
Implement the Best Solutions:

The best solutions are those that prevent problem recurrence, are within our control, and meet our goals and objectives.

In order to achieve proficiency, students must achieve the following objectives:

Recognize Cause and Effect Relationships:
The first objective is to help students recognize the interactions of cause and effect relationships. These interactions occur around us continuously, but much of the time they go unnoticed. Students learn to see the world differently. But more importantly, they begin to recognize interactions that would have normally been overlooked. It is within these interactions that the most creative and effective solutions are often found.

Solve Problems:
Once students learn to recognize cause and effect relationships, they learn to utilize this new understanding to find effective solutions to problems. Causes interact with one another in highly specific ways. Analyzing these interactions is crucial to creating an understanding of the problem that is accurate and complete. Only then can the best solutions be identified and implemented.

Facilitate a Group:
A fundamental characteristic of humans is that no two people see the world in the same way. While challenging in a group setting, if managed properly this characteristic can be extremely beneficial because the combination of different perspectives helps everyone see more clearly. The challenge is to get the group members to communicate with one another. The help of an effective facilitator determines whether the group succeeds or fails. The Apollo process helps people facilitate an investigation that involves a diverse group of people. Students learn to distill and organize information from the group such that each stakeholder develops a more complete understanding of the problem.

Institutionalize:
Over time organizations have many diverse groups working to find solutions to problems. This process helps create a learning organization that is constantly adapting to new, more profitable processes. Process improvement is problem solving on an organization-wide scale. Organizational improvement follows the same basic process of identifying and removing causes. But it also looks at the dynamics of multiple problems and how they interact with the rest of the organization.

These learning objectives build on each another. They start with a narrow focus in the form of simple causal relationships and zoom out to a focus that is organization-wide which includes multiple problems and their interactions. The result is widespread process improvement. This is achieved by people working at all levels in the organization to find solutions to individual problems.

Stability is a crucial element to the success of the Apollo method. It works the same way – whether the incident is minor or catastrophic. In most organizations, there are more problems of lesser significance than of greater significance. Because the Apollo process is easy to use, it is more likely to be used on the larger number of seemingly less significant problems that slowly rob organizations of time and money.

Many times, the difference between a near-miss and a catastrophe is simply timing. When people have the skills to analyze the causes of near-misses and less significant events, their solutions remove the causes of future events that range in significance from minor incident to catastrophic event.

There is no such thing as a problem-free organization. We need to recognize that problems in our systems show us opportunities for improvement. But they are only opportunities if we have the skills to capitalize on the lessons they teach us. Problems are like forced investments. When a failure occurs, it exacts a payment in the form of time, money, safety, environmental impact, public opinion, etc. Without the skills needed to understand and eliminate the causes of these "forced investments", they will likely exact their toll again.