See how teams reduce incidents and manage risk faster See It in Action →
Workplaces must be managed holistically, both to keep workers safe and ensure the continued resilience of the business.
This is where the bowtie analysis can help. It gives a broader perspective, allowing you oversight across the entirety of the business. This lets you prioritize actions with the full knowledge that you have a comprehensive grasp of the situation.
The risk management bowtie is a visual diagram that maps the threats, mitigative controls, consequences and preventative barriers for any given workplace hazard:
When all the elements are added, the diagram resembles a bowtie, hence the name.
To better understand this, let’s use an example of a fall from height. Using the risk bowtie for this scenario, the hazard would be working from a height, and the top event would be falling.
Threats to falling from height could include unsafe use of elevated work platforms, unsafe use of ladder, or faulty equipment. The preventative barriers for these threats could be a work at heights certificate, pre-use inspection, and an asset register for all equipment.
On the right hand side, the consequences of a fall from height could be injury, downtime, and compensation costs. To reduce damages, add harnesses, a trained emergency response team and insurance as your preventative barriers.
One of the biggest advantages of a bowtie is that it breaks down complex hazards into manageable controls. Instead of looking at controls separately, you can see all the different ways an incident could occur, what barriers are in place to prevent it and what protections exist if something still goes wrong.
Most importantly, using the risk management bowtie can help visualize which controls are deemed “critical” for preventing the hazard from leading to a serious injury or fatality. Once a control is considered critical, safety leaders know that that control must be verified, maintained and working at all times.
Other benefits include:
The bowtie analysis should be used alongside other risk management tools. Where a risk assessment and risk matrix helps you rank how severe a risk is, the bowtie method shows you why it’s severe and which controls are necessary. From there, it’s important to have a streamlined way to implement and check the verification of controls.
Want to learn more?
Download our free eBook and take action of your actions.
Share
Complete the Following Information To Request Your Resource
