Adding a HOP Lens to your incident investigations

Question number 2 following my presentation on 27.07.2021 titled "Adding a HOP Lens to your incident investigations":

"What are your thoughts on the recent IOSH articles and subsequent debates regarding accident investigation interviews? [obviously if you prefer not, you don’t have to answer this one]"

I am aware that the recent debate that was ignited by Andy Farrall's article in the July/August issue of the IOSH Magazine (link below). In fairness to Andy he has subsequently stated that some of his comments were taken out of context and that the article was referring to a very specific element of an investigation, i.e. when there was a strong suggestion that someone involved in some form of criminal activity was lying. As always, context is crucial but I, like many others was tempted to respond immediately and shout about the injustice of treating workers this way. I refrained, others waded in. To give IOSH their due they have published two responding articles, both of which I have linked below offering their perspective and acknowledging their responsibility to present a balanced view of the opinions of all members - fair play I guess.

I am not in the business of openly criticising and calling out the work of other practitioners because I believe it to be extremely unprofessional. I also strongly believe that cognitive diversity is crucial and that everyone's opinions and experience add to the rich diversity of what we do as a profession. All I can do is speak from my personal experience and to what my team and I teach our clients and that is that 'Our Workers are not criminals so we shouldn't treat them like they are!'

The 5 principles of HOP which I shared in my presentation, when internally processed and embedded within an organisation, drive a new paradigm for the way we view our workers, i.e. as the solution to harness rather than the problem to be solved. It requires us to work from the assumption that our workers are good people, striving to do the best job they can, with the tools, training and resources we have provided them and despite our inadvertent attempts at setting them up to fail with our flawed procedures, confusing rules and often contradictory communication about what the real priorities are 'around here'. Taking this mindset approach to any organisational dilemma, not just interviewing workers involved in incidents, changes our world view and makes us ask different questions. It is this paradigm that is needed to create the just culture and psychological safety that high performing organisations are striving to achieve.

Focusing our investigation and our interview on 'the last person that touched it' is a waste of time; why? Because again in my experience, you never need to wait for an incident or accident to 'weed-out' bad workers. They stick out like a sore thumb, everyone knows them, all the managers are talking trash about then and very often, nobody wants to work with them; so why keep them in your organisation just waiting for the day that they screw up just badly enough for you to sack them? That's if they haven't been killed in the accident of course!

Many of Andy's techniques are actually spot on - reversing someone backwards from the point of the incident is a brilliant tactic, not because it highlights liars but because it actually helps the interviewee piece the events together more accurately so yes absolutely, this is a technique I use all the time and I am happy to explain to the interviewee what I'm going to do and why. In terms of observing the interviewee's behaviour and body language to gain a base-line I'm aware that this is a well established practice in surveillance activities and is an extremely powerful tool particularly in anti-terror and serious crime detection operations - observe normal behaviour to establish a base-line and then provide a stimulus and measure/observe the reaction or response. I'm not sure that it is an effective tool to use during an interview following an incident because I would imagine that normal behaviour has already gone out of the window and so establishing a base-line might not be possible, but I stand to be corrected.

I guess in summary my thoughts on this are that as a profession we must allow everyone a seat at the table and a voice in the debate and nobody should be shut down or locked out because their view and opinion seems to be an outlier compared to the rest of us, Andy clearly has a wealth of knowledge and experience which must be respected and should not be ignored and so to shoot him down or have a visceral reaction to his work and his opinion is the antithesis of courageous leadership, a core attribute that the best of us should strive to develop. Hold space for those with different experiences, views and opinions. Take the learning and use the bits that work for you. As a profession we need to have each others' backs; fighting in the ranks diminishes all of us. If you are investigating an incident which you believe was a result of organisational weakness and context you will want to use a HOP approach. If you're investigating an incident which you believe was the result of criminal intent, negligence, neglect, vandalism or violence then I suggest Andy might be the guy to have in the room!

Hope this helps. If you're wondering what this is all about I have attached below the links to the said articles!