Latent Conditions and Active Failures

Tripod Beta rests on the insight that incidents result from latent conditions created long before the event, which lie dormant until combined with local circumstances and an active failure at the workface.

The distinction

• Active failures — acts or omissions at the sharp end with immediate consequences. Visible, easy to identify, and where most investigations stop.
• Latent conditions — decisions about design, resourcing, procedures, maintenance, training, scheduling and organisation, taken by people remote from the workface, sometimes years earlier. They create the conditions in which the active failure becomes likely and consequential.

The implication

Removing an individual removes an active failure but leaves every latent condition in place, ready for the next person. Tripod is designed to make the latent conditions visible and therefore fixable, and it deliberately structures the analysis so that stopping at the individual is not possible.

The trio

The basic building block of a Tripod tree is the trio: a hazard, an event, and an affected object — where the object is a person, the environment, an asset or reputation. Every incident is described as one or more trios, and barriers sit between the hazard and the object.