Critical thinking and creative thinking are both needed in process safety management. Creative thinking was addressed in the previous blog post. This blog post addresses critical thinking.
Conventional thinking can be flawed in various ways resulting in beliefs, opinions, or judgments that are false. Important considerations may be overlooked and conflicting viewpoints ignored. People may be persuaded by emotion or the personal attributes of others such as their position or reputation, rather than logic. The discipline of critical thinking has evolved to address such flaws in human decision making.
Critical thinking is taught in college courses and various text books have been published on the subject. However, most practicing engineers are not familiar with the discipline. Process safety practitioners typically have learned the scientific method which applies logic to analysis but this is not the same as critical thinking which also addresses human and psychological factors that influence decisions.
Process safety management involves many decisions that influence the safety of processes. Undoubtedly, process safety management can benefit from the application of critical thinking to reduce the likelihood of incidents. Indeed, poor decisions already have led to numerous incidents. Thus, critical thinking has an essential role to play in process safety management and key facility personnel should be trained in the discipline.
Guidelines for applying critical thinking to process safety management are provided in the article:
A framework for critical thinking in process safety management, Process Safety Progress, Volume 35, Issue 4, pages 337–340, December 2016.