Even the safest among us will occasionally veer off the road to safety excellence and encounter an incident. When this happens, the best management practice is to identify and correct the cause(s) so that you can get back on track and avoid future mishaps.

The essence of safety is preventing incidents from having the opportunity to occur. When they do occur, it is usually the result of one or more safety systems failures. Failures, however, are the seeds of opportunity. Incidents provide us with opportunities, albeit unfortunate, to improve our safety systems and prevent future incidents. The process used to identify what improvements are needed is called Incident Analysis.