Can Regulators Use TapRooT® Investigation Tools?

I had a question recently from one of our friends who works as a regulator in his country. He was wondering about the advantages of using TapRooT® as a regulator as opposed to an industry user. I think this is a great question.  We often think about doing incident investigations for ourselves, but how do you help those you oversee as a regulating body?

As a government agency, you have great potential to affect the safety and health of both your employees and those you oversee.

• Just attending the TapRooT® training will give your staff the basic understanding of true, human-performance based root causes.  It gives your team a new perspective on why people make poor decisions, and just as importantly, why people make good decisions.  This understanding will guide your thinking as to why problems occur.   Once this perspective is clear, your team will no longer be tempted to just blame the individual for problems.  They will think more deeply about the organizational issues that are causing people to make bad decisions.
• The training will give you the tools to perform accurate, consistent investigations.  You can have confidence in knowing that your team has discovered not one or 2 issues, but all the problems that led to an incident.
• Your investigations and investigation report reviews using TapRooT® will be based on human performance expertise, helping to eliminate your team’s biases.  EVERYONE has biases, and using TapRooT® helps keep you focused on the true reasons people make mistakes.
• You will also have the tools to be able to more accurately assess the adequacy of the investigations and corrective actions that are submitted to you by those you oversee.  You can see where they are doing good investigations, and where they probably need to improve.  The corrective actions that are suggested by those you oversee are often poorly written and do not address the real reasons for the incident.  The TapRooT® training will ensure you are seeing effective corrective actions.
• If your agency conducts trending of the their results, you’ll be able to produce consistent, trendable data from your investigations.  If you ensure your industry constituents are also using TapRooT®, the data you receive from them will also allow for more accurate trending results.
• Finally, you can use the TapRooT® tools learned during the course to perform proactive audits of your industry partners.  When you perform onsite inspections, you can ensure you are looking for the right problems, and assigning effective corrective actions for the problems encountered.  Instead of just looking for the same problems, the tools allow you to look deeper at the processes you are inspecting to find and correct potential issues before they become incidents.

TapRooT® gives you confidence that the results of your investigations, and those of those you oversee, result in fixable root causes and effective corrective actions.