Critical thinking and creative thinking are both needed in process safety management. Creative thinking was addressed in the previous blog post. This blog post addresses critical thinking.

Conventional thinking can be flawed in various ways resulting in beliefs, opinions, or judgments that are false. Important considerations may be overlooked and conflicting viewpoints ignored. People may be persuaded by emotion or the personal attributes of others such as their position or reputation, rather than logic. The discipline of critical thinking has evolved to address such flaws in human decision making.

Creative thinking is needed in various areas of process safety, for example:

• Identifying hazard scenarios in PHA
• Performing MOC reviews
• Identifying ways in which processes may be mis-operated
• Investigating the causes of incidents
• Planning for emergencies

Unfortunately, formal education usually discourages creative thinking and most people don’t need to be creative for much of what they do in daily life. Consequently, the ability to think creatively is not common. However, creative thinking is a skill that can be learnt. Guidance is available on ways in which creative thinking can be approached by anyone when the need arises.