When the suicides happened in the most elite high school, Henry M. Gunn High School, an affluent community, also in the heart of Silicon Valley, the home of the most brilliant and successful inventors, invention and companies, it raises a red flag and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is conducting an investigation and trying to find out the root cause of the invisible, mysterious and contagious disease, suicide cluster. I was informed more than 10 years ago in Oregon that parents in Palo Alto have organized patrol teams around the Caltrain tracks but obviously the suicide symptom is not alleviated after a decade later. Continue reading
#129 – RISK ASSESSMENT: WHAT FUTURE ARE YOU PLANNING FOR? – GEARY SIKICH
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There exists an overabundance of guidance for conducting risk assessments. Yet, it seems that we still have difficulty in getting risk assessments to reflect the appropriate level of concern for the identified risks that we are assessing. We also tend to view risk in relation to the place where we are employed and the industry that we work in. When we look at risk assessment from this perspective it should be clear that we are missing the point precisely, or at best, are being too narrowly focused, when it comes to assessing risk for our organizations. Continue reading
#129 – WHAT MAKES THE BEST RELIABILITY ENGINEER? – FRED SCHENKELBERG
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Formal education (masters or Ph.D) or design/manufacturing engineering experience?
Where do you look when hiring a new reliability engineer? Do you head to U of Maryland or other university reliability program to recruit the top talent? Or, do you promote/assign from within? Where do yo find the best reliability people?
What make a good reliability engineer? Continue reading
#129 – ELIMINATING BIASES THAT CONTRIBUTE TO SAFETY ISSUES – DAVID PATRISHKOFF
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As stated in our CERM article 127, highly effective safety initiatives are not a short list of “Do’s” and “Don’ts” but include a complex mix of integrated and interacting best safety practices as shown in Figure 1. In this article, we will focus on one of the 7 critical ingredients of an effective Cascading Safety Management System: The Elimination of Biased Thinking and Mental Blocks highlighted with the arrow in Figure 1. Continue reading
#129 – ISO 2015 – IMPLEMENTING RISK BASED THINKING PART 1 – DENIS DEVOS
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The most important new concept to emerge in Quality Management Systems in the past 15 years is the Risk Based Thinking requirements of ISO 9001:2015. There are two definitions of risk in the ISO family of standards, and since they are very similar to each other, you can choose either one, or use them both together. Continue reading


