Prevention Is Not Enough

Presented by Vallorie Hodges and Fiona McCarthy

What’s covered?

A strong prevention bias in safety thinking doesn’t offer a robust understanding of the complexity of high consequence events. Despite the best risk assessments, procedures, and people, we simply cannot prevent all incidents. We must instead balance prevention efforts with capacity to respond and recover when things go badly. But how do we operationalise this in our organisations?

This session offers a model and the backstory of how we are using it as a simple visual framework to stimulate dialogue and promote learning, shared understanding, and safety differently language.  The model is an adaptation of the bowtie… as a propeller. It includes preventive, operational and recovery elements placed in a dynamic mode, represented by turning blades – within a margin of manoeuvre sphere.

We use the model to highlight how prevention efforts deter threats, and to show how the capacity to respond to events may reduce the impact of events. But the real leverage comes when we conceptually shift from bowtie to propeller – the process becomes dynamic, demonstrating how learning creates a feedback loop to improve the entire system- including preventive, operational and response/recovery components.