Why Good Teams Still Experience Incidents

By Walusimbi Deniswise, MHSE, MDICHA AEMT | ESG-ESHS Specialist | Humanitarian & Resilience Practitioner

For many organizations, incidents are often viewed as evidence of failure. When an accident occurs, the immediate reaction is to identify who made a mistake, what procedure was violated, or which control failed. Yet some of the most sobering lessons in health, safety, and risk management come from incidents that occur within teams widely regarded as competent, experienced, and high-performing.

The uncomfortable truth is that good teams can and do experience incidents.

Across industries such as construction, manufacturing, healthcare, transportation, telecommunications, humanitarian operations, and oil and gas, incidents continue to occur despite the presence of qualified personnel, established procedures, regular training, and robust management systems. This reality challenges the simplistic belief that competence alone guarantees safety.

The question, therefore, is not whether a team is good. The more important question is whether the systems surrounding that team remain resilient under changing conditions.

Success Can Create Blind Spots

One of the paradoxes of safety performance is that sustained success can unintentionally create vulnerability.

When teams consistently achieve production targets, complete projects successfully, and operate for extended periods without incidents, confidence naturally increases. Confidence is important, but when left unchecked, it can gradually evolve into complacency.

Tasks become familiar. Risks appear predictable. Shortcuts become normalized. Small deviations from procedures are tolerated because “nothing has happened before.”

Over time, these deviations become embedded in everyday work practices. What once seemed unacceptable slowly becomes the new normal.

This phenomenon, often referred to as the normalization of deviation, has been identified in numerous major industrial incidents around the world. Rarely does a serious event begin with a single catastrophic failure. More often, it develops through a series of small compromises that gradually erode safety margins.

Human Error Is a Symptom, Not the Root Cause

Following an incident, investigations frequently conclude that an individual failed to follow a procedure or made an unsafe decision.

While such observations may be factually correct, they often fail to answer the deeper question: Why did the decision make sense to the individual at the time?

People generally come to work intending to do a good job. Most workers do not deliberately choose unsafe outcomes. Their decisions are influenced by workload, competing priorities, time pressures, supervision quality, communication effectiveness, equipment conditions, and organizational culture.

When organizations focus solely on individual mistakes, they risk overlooking the system factors that shaped those actions.

Effective incident investigations, therefore, move beyond assigning blame. They seek to understand how organizational conditions, leadership decisions, and operational realities contributed to the event.

The objective should not be to identify who failed, but to understand how the system allowed failure to occur.

The Danger of Production Pressure

Another reason good teams experience incidents is the constant tension between operational performance and risk management.

Organizations must deliver results. Projects have deadlines. Clients have expectations. Budgets are finite. Teams often operate under significant pressure to achieve objectives efficiently.

Under such conditions, workers and supervisors frequently make trade-offs. Additional precautions may be perceived as slowing progress. Reporting hazards may be viewed as creating obstacles. Stopping work to address concerns may be interpreted as poor performance.

Even in organizations with strong safety programs, production pressure can gradually influence decision-making.

The most resilient organizations recognize this tension and actively manage it. They ensure that safety is not treated as a competing priority but as an integral component of operational excellence.

Strong Safety Culture Requires Continuous Maintenance

Many organizations describe safety culture as though it were a destination that can be permanently achieved.

In reality, safety culture is dynamic. It requires constant reinforcement.

A strong safety culture is characterized by open communication, visible leadership commitment, active workforce engagement, psychological safety, and continuous learning.

However, culture can deteriorate quickly when leadership becomes less visible, when concerns are ignored, or when lessons from previous incidents are forgotten.

The absence of recent incidents should never be interpreted as evidence that risks have disappeared.

Organizations that remain incident-free for extended periods are often those that continue asking difficult questions even when performance indicators appear positive.

Learning Before Failure Occurs

Traditionally, organizations learn from incidents after they happen.

While incident investigations remain important, mature organizations increasingly focus on learning from everyday work before adverse events occur.

This involves examining near misses, hazard reports, operational challenges, and successful adaptations made by workers in the field.

Employees frequently identify emerging risks long before management becomes aware of them. The challenge is creating an environment where these observations are encouraged, valued, and acted upon.

Organizations that learn continuously are better positioned to identify weak signals before they develop into serious incidents.

Leadership Matters More Than Procedures

Policies, procedures, audits, and management systems are essential. However, they cannot replace leadership.

Workers observe leadership behaviour more closely than they read procedures.

If leaders prioritize production over safety, employees notice. If leaders ignore concerns, employees remember. If leaders visibly engage with workers, discuss risks openly, and support safe decision-making, trust grows.

Safety leadership is ultimately demonstrated through actions rather than statements.

The organizations that achieve sustained performance are often those where leaders consistently reinforce the message that protecting people is inseparable from achieving results.

A Different Perspective on Incidents

Perhaps the most important lesson is that incidents should not always be viewed as evidence of bad teams.

In many cases, incidents reveal weaknesses within systems that were previously hidden. They expose assumptions that were never challenged, controls that no longer function effectively, and risks that have evolved.

Good teams experience incidents because they operate in complex environments where uncertainty, change, and human variability are unavoidable.

The goal of modern safety management is therefore not to eliminate human error, an impossible task, but to build systems that anticipate failure, adapt to changing conditions, and recover effectively when things go wrong.

Conclusion

The absence of incidents does not necessarily indicate safety, just as the occurrence of an incident does not automatically indicate incompetence.

Good teams still experience incidents because safety is influenced by far more than individual performance. It is shaped by leadership, culture, communication, organizational priorities, operational pressures, and system resilience.

Organizations that recognize this reality move beyond blame and focus on learning, adaptation, and continuous improvement.

Ultimately, the strongest teams are not those that never experience challenges. They are those who learn from them, strengthen their systems, and emerge more resilient than before.

The true measure of organizational excellence is not whether incidents occur, but how effectively we learn when they do.

Walusimbi Deniswise, MHSE, MDICHA, is an ESG-ESHS Specialist, AEMT, and Humanitarian & Resilience Practitioner with multidisciplinary experience across high-risk industries and development settings. His work focuses on protecting people, strengthening organizational systems, advancing sustainability, and building resilience through integrated approaches to health, safety, environment, social performance, and risk management.