Safety Performance Indicators System (SPIS) : A methodlogical framework for safety indicators conception

Managing high risk systems is closely tied to the ability of continuously reviewing the potential gap between managers’ representations of their system’s strengths and weaknesses with its actual state. This gap can result from both natural systemic evolutions and the very consequences of previous decisions adopted and implemented. The deployment of performance assessment and reviewing to overcome, or at least reduce, this gap becomes therefore a key step of every safety management policy. Process Safety Indicators (PSI) are widely used to achieve performance assessment thanks to their synthetic and action oriented characters. However, they also bring simplifications and reduction of reality’s complexity which may become misleading for decision makers. It is therefore of upmost importance to ensure these PSI conception or selection results from a rationalized and contextually grounded approach. This paper suggests a new methodology for conceiving/selecting context adapted PSI. It differs from existing approaches in the sense that it does not assume a predefined theoretical safety model; it rather invites organizations to explore their own vision of safety so to deduce out of it the adapted PSI. The way these indicators are used is also discussed by acknowledging the need to move from a posture where achieved performances are simply compared to predefined norms to a more investigative process where performances assessed are used as basis for discussion so to achieve collective learning and trigger required changes. This paper is organized in four sections. After introducing the importance of performance assessment in safety management, the second section presents and discusses the set of funding hypotheses behind the methodological choices of the SPIS methodology. The thrd section will then be further detail the SPIS methodology before discussing in the last section the foreseen developments