Learning from the past and knowledge management: Are we making progress?

Learning from the past is crucial in making progress, certainly when it comes to process safety. Nothing is so obvious. Yet, there are obstacles of various nature such as Human Factors, technical complexities of how to store and retrieve information, restraints to knowledge management, and last but not least policy and decision making in view of cost–benefit. The paper elaborates the description of these obstacles, provides examples and explains reasons why knowledge obtained in the past by incidents is forgotten, not used or simply ignored. Possibility to improve and to close the cycle between experience gained and safer design and operation more effectively may be the creation of a safety modelling language consisting of a set of combinations of hazard, barrier and exposed target elements that can be computerised. However, a further feasibility study and development will require considerable effort and is beyond the scope of the present paper. Finally the crucial question: Are we making progress? The author's answer is neither full out yes, nor no. Our information society is not very active when investment has to be made in means of which you cannot predict they will pay-off tomorrow. There is some progress, but oh so slow…