OUR SOLUTIONS
We at Reliability 4 Life consult, train, and speak on methods to improve your life.
Safety Culture
Whether starting a safety culture journey or continuing an ongoing journey or refining a robust safety culture – we have the next steps for you. Safety cultures are composed of sub-cultures. In the James Reason Model these are an informed culture, a flexible culture, a culture of reporting, a just culture, and a learning culture.
Reliability 4 Life develops content with clients to extend mission, vision, and values into behavior-based expectations. We then train leaders and teams on the behaviors of those expectations. And then we provide clients with accountability systems so those behaviors become practice habits.
Habit is the flywheel of the complex system. Improve safety culture using the power of the practice habits to reduce loss events by 80% in five years.
High Reliability Organizing (HRO)
HRO is the third of the three waves of reliability. Reliability 4 Life only builds HRO on the foundations of the first and second waves. The first wave is a foundation of technical knowledge/skills and tools to do the tasks. The second wave is standard work and processes to enable teams to cope with complicated work. Then the third wave – High Reliability Organizing. HRO enables teams to think and think together as a cohesive team to cope with complex work. Complex systems have messy details that are not always known or even knowable.
Reliability 4 Life draws from all of the evidence-based theories of high reliability organizing. Most rely solely on the Weick and Sutcliffe five principles. To start, continue or refine your HRO journey with us. We consult, train, and speak on HRO to reduce loss events by 80% in five years, loss events in safety, quality, customer experience, workforce experience, and efficiency. Performance does not improve with time – performance improves with reliability for life!
Human Factors Integration
Systems are made up of things that together provide functions. Human factors is not about the things – human factors is about relationships among people and the things. Reliability 4 Life uses the science and practice of human factors to improve the reliability of work systems. We educate and train leaders and specialists on human factors. We apply human factors for clients seeking human reliability solutions. We consult, train, and speak on human factors solutions for complex work systems.
Reliability 4 Life offers a full range of human factors solutions – heuristic evaluation, usability testing, and advanced usability testing. We do human factors integration so that your human factors solutions work…and stick….and do not sub-optimize your results. The solution must be integrated. Otherwise, an “improvement” in one part of the work system may actually result in problems in other parts of the work system.
Deming observed that we have three ways to achieve results. We can truly improve. We can suboptimize the work system to provide a better result for some at the expense of others. We can cheat. World-class reliability leaders do not cheat nor do they sub-optimize work systems. Experience true systems improvement with us.
Human Reliability
All complex work systems are socio-technical systems. There is a technical system composed of methods and machines. There is also a social system composed of people and relationships among the people and with the methods and machines. When technical systems fail, social systems are always running in the background for added reliability and resiliency.
Reliability 4 Life consults, trains, and speaks on methods to improve your human reliability. This is often done in learning from a loss event where we partner with you in performing a comprehensive systems analysis. This is more often done as proactively improving a high-risk work system. Reliability is an emergent property of a work system – so improving reliability is using insights of human factors to make change to organizational structure, job functions, organizational culture, processes, protocol and other guidance, and work environment.
Reliability is a success factor common to everything you do – safety, quality, customer experience, workforce experience, and efficiency. Everything improves with reliability. Let us help you improve anything you do – or everything you do.
Safety Management System (SMS)
All world-class safety organizations have a robust safety management system. Whether your safety management system is systematic and well-deployed with gaps or just the beginning with many gaps – we have the next steps for you. Safety Management Systems (SMS) are composed of four functional groupings: safety commitment, safety culture, safety promotion, and learning systems.
Reliability 4 Life provides content, training, and consultation for those who are just starting, provides content, training, and consultation for those who are progressing on their journey, and provides consultation and training for those who are refining their SMS. And, we partner with clients in improving their whole SMS or one part of their SMS. Most clients newer to a systematic deployment of SMS focus on safety measurement and learning from loss events. Most clients in the middle of their journey focus on safety culture and safety promotion (making safety real in the minds of the people). And those refining a systematic deployment of SMS focus on assessing, sustaining, and continuously improving the whole SMS. A systematic deployment with minimal gaps is the best way to sustain safety – and safety is the best way to lead for quality, experience, engagement, and productivity.
Derisking
Risk is a function of loss severity and loss frequency. In fact, the risk manager’s equation is Risk = Probability x Consequence. Traditional risk management seeks to derisk by reducing the probability of loss, insuring against the loss, and transferring the risk to another organization. Insurance and transference do not make systems better. Reliability 4 Life derisks work systems by applying high reliability principles to reduce the frequency of the loss event AND applying resilience engineering principles to reduce the consequences of the loss. We derisk by making work systems more error resistant and more error tolerant, ie systems cause fewer errors and the fewer errors result in less harm.
We consult, train, and speak on derisking. Most clients seek to reduce loss events that our harm or injury. But safety is protecting anything of value. So many of our clients seek to derisk loss events in safety or quality or customer experience or workforce experience or efficiency. Insurance and transference are taxes paid on your cost of poor safety (COPS). Our reliability approach to derisking has the capability to reduce loss events by 80% in five years. Why pay when you can derisk with reliability?