The Tripod Toolkit is a set of internally consistent tools designed to support organisational learning from incidents. It consists of Tripod Beta, Tripod Lite and Investigation Insights.
Tripod Beta
The expert tool for analysing medium to severe incidents.
The method links barrier thinking (Swiss-Cheese-Model|Swiss cheese model)—an accident causation theory that assumes accidents only occur when barriers are missing or fail—with models of human behaviour. This is because barriers are disabled by human action or inaction, which constitutes the direct cause of an accident.
Tripod Beta contributes to developing a just and safety culture by shedding light on why the action that disabled the barrier was normal or right from the person’s perspective:
- Which circumstances relating to the person, the environment or the workplace made this action more likely?
- How did the organisation contribute to creating these circumstances or failing to control them?
The Tripod Beta guide has been revised and is now available in version 6.0—more detailed than its predecessor and supplemented with consequence management.
Tripod Lite
Tripod Lite is a free, pragmatic tool for investigating incidents with low risk potential and follows the same philosophy as its “big sister” Tripod Beta.
The method can be used by non-experts, e.g. managers, operational leaders and safety professionals, without any special prior knowledge after a brief introduction, to determine:
- Which chain of events led to the accident: What happened?
- Which barriers, i.e. protective measures that could have prevented the accident but failed: How did it happen?
- What led to the failure of the barriers: Why did it happen?
Investigation Insights
Investigation Insights consists of 4 independent modules which—depending on need and as a complement—can be used in different phases of a specific accident investigation.
All modules ensure the involvement of leaders before, during and after incidents in order to embed the insights gained within the organisation.
The modules Role of the leader and Role of the investigation lead are suitable when assembling the investigation team, the module Better insights during the investigation, and the module Better learning outcomes after the investigation.
Regardless of this, the guide supports learning from incidents, accidents and events.
Good to know
Over the past four years, the Tripod Foundation has further developed the Tripod Toolkit together with the Energy Institute: Investigation Insights and Tripod Lite have been published, and the Tripod Beta guide is now available in a revised version.
One small drawback: at present, the Tripod Toolkit is unfortunately only available in English.
Original photo by Milton Moreira: https://www.pexels.com/de-de/foto/menschen-wasser-explosion-feuer-9376150/.
