Procedures and instructions can have a critical role to play for some tasks in some circumstances, but we do not seem to be very good at making sure they perform their main role, which is supporting competent people.
At the Hazards 34 conference in 2024 I presented my views on how procedures need to improve. The key messages are that they need to be written for competent people to follow (don’t include additional content for the convenience of others) and writers need to be totally ruthless with wording. The paper, presenation and example can be downloaded below.
https://abrisk.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Haz-34_031-Procedures-Brazier-00.pdf
Some previously published papers about procedures.
2018 LPB – Bias about procedures when investigating incidents
2017 LPB – Emergency procedures
2008 Tips Indicator – Better procedures
Whilst there is a lot of guidance about writing procedures, it tends to be focussed on format only with little about the content. I have generated a checklist that aims to assess the more important issues. Also, I have created a simple template to give some ideas of how procedures can be written. The key message is that the way the procedure is described is the most important factor, keeping it as simple as possible.