Building Capacity in Fire Safety: Lessons for the Waste Industry

Anyone familiar with the Bowtie risk assessment methodology will understand that despite the best preventative controls, mitigation controls are equally, if not more, important. Building the ‘capacity’ to fail safely through mitigation, that is, implementing robust fire controls that can limit the spread and impact of a fire once it starts, is critical in ensuring that fires do not escalate into catastrophic events.

Building capacity, resilience, or as Finch Consultant Dr Stephen Cowley calls it elasticity, refers to an organisation’s ability to anticipate, prepare for, and recover from unexpected disruptions while maintaining operational functionality. In the context of fire safety and risk management, this means that when preventative measures fail, systems and structures are in place to mitigate the impact, prevent escalation and allow the organisation to seamlessly return to normal operations.

According to David Woods, a leading expert in resilience engineering, resilience is not only the ability to “bounce back” from disruptions, but more importantly, it is about “bouncing forward”, taking the learning from events to adapt and evolve so you are better prepared for future challenges. Another leading contributor to this topic, Erik Hollnagel, emphasises that organisations should focus not just on preventing things from going wrong (the traditional safety approach) but also understand why things go right.

In the context of fire safety and implementing effective mitigation strategies, site operators must think about how to build ‘capacity’ in , avoiding expensive clean-up costs and potential fines. Finch works with its clients to build capacity in their safety systems through the adoption of some practical techniques that will ensure your organisation is ready to mitigate risks when prevention fails. Our approach moves beyond traditional safety methods and focuses on continuous learning, adaptation, and resilience.

Learning Teams

When fires or other safety incidents occur, traditional investigation methods like root-cause analysis tend to focus on identifying a single cause, often overlooking the complex interactions between people, processes, and systems. Instead, a technique developed by Ivan Pupulidy, known as ‘Learning Teams’ provides a more nuanced and learning-centred approach to investigating incidents.

In a Learning Team, frontline workers, supervisors, and safety professionals come together after an incident or near miss to analyse what happened. The goal is not to assign blame, so participants must feel safe to discuss all elements of their work without fear of punishment or reprisal, and to understand the complexities of the system and how processes function in practice. Workers share their first-hand experiences and provide insight into how they have to adapt to manage risks on a daily basis.

To take the Learning Team approach to the team would form not just when things went wrong, but also when things go right. Learning from success as well as failure is a powerful way to continuously improve your systems and processes. For example, Learning Teams could be especially valuable in addressing the frequent fire risks associated with materials handling and machinery operations. By forming a Learning Team following a fire, frontline staff would be brought together to analyse how the incident unfolded. Instead of focusing solely on what went wrong, the team would discuss operational challenges like fluctuating waste streams, human fatigue, or equipment maintenance issues. Workers could share how they adapt to varying material compositions or the speed at which they need to work, providing insight into how these factors contribute to fire risks.

Similarly, when a facility operates for a period without incidents, a Learning Team could examine what has contributed to this period with no fire incidents, considering factors such as how teams managed safe waste separation, efficient machinery handling, and fire prevention protocols, all offering valuable lessons to reinforce successful practices across the site.

Work as Done vs Work as Imagined

Not appreciating the difference between the way we think work is being performed versus how it’s actually being performed is often one of the biggest failings in risk assessments and operating procedures. Traditional risk assessments and procedures are often based on our perceptions of work, where everything happens in an expected order, without deviation (Work As Imagined), whereas in reality work is seldom that predictable, and rarely do things always go according to plan.

The reality of everyday work is that it’s often messy, and this is especially true when processing waste due to its innate variability with issues appearing suddenly and having to be resolved dynamically. Workers are skilled at adapting to unforeseen circumstances, making small adjustments as required to keep things running safely and efficiently (Work As Done). The gap between Work As Imagined and Work Is Done is often where things go wrong, as these small adjustments our workers have to do are seldom risk assessed or considered in the task design. For example, a risk assessment might “imagine” that waste piles are always stored according to exact protocols, however, workers may routinely adapt to operational pressures by stacking waste .