The use of organizational profiling in the prevention of accidents

The traditional role of root cause of failure investigation is to prevent the recurrence of organizational accidents. The goal of these investigations is the reactive correction of negative performance shaping factors, and the strengthening of failed or missing barriers. More recently, trending, common cause analysis, and the identification of mitigating factors have been promoted to correct higher level weaknesses in organizational processes. While the identification of root causes provides a method to prevent a repeat of similar events, expanding the analytical framework outside of its usual confines to include organizational profiling, provides a proactive approach to predicting and preventing dissimilar accidents.