Human factors in barrier management: Hard truths and challenges

Whether acting as controls in their own right, being relied on to ensure physical, hardware or electronic controls are in place and functional when needed, or as a threat to safe operations, human performance is central to the development, implementation and sustainable operation of barrier management systems. Many organisations however struggle to know how to ensure: (a) that the human performance they rely on can reasonably be expected to happen when and where it is needed; and, (b) that the controls they intend to have in place are as robust as they reasonably can be to the loss of human reliability. Drawing on real-world incidents, this paper examines some of the expectations that are widely held about human performance in barrier management systems. Those expectations are considered in the light of the reality behind how people think, behave and perform in real world tasks: what are referred to as “hard truths” of human performance. Drawing largely on the technique of Bowtie analysis, weaknesses in the way human factors are treated in current approaches to barrier management are reviewed, and improvements suggested. The paper illustrates how most human and organisational controls should be treated as safeguards rather than full barriers: they are critical to safety management, but are rarely able to meet the criteria necessary to be treated as full barriers. The equivalence of a Human Performance Standard to an Equipment Performance Standard is illustrated with a practical example.