eBook

Using Risk Bowties to Manage Risk

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Contents

Introduction.............................................................................................................3

A Comprehensive View of Risk..............................................................................3

But Aren’t Bowties Really Hard to Build?....................................................................................................................................................4
Bowties Improve Worker Safety Engagement.........................................................................................................................................4
The Perfect Training Tool for an Ever-Changing Workplace................................................................................................................4

Risk Bowties Easily Combine Information from Many Different

Risk Assessments.....................................................................................................5
A Multiplicity of Risk Methods.......................................................................................................................................................................5
The Tyranny of Tabular Data...........................................................................................................................................................................6

Risk Bowties Help Visualize and Manage Risk Controls...................................6

A Brief Overview of Risk Controls.................................................................................................................................................................6
Types of Controls................................................................................................................................................................................................7
The Simple Way to Manage Controls..........................................................................................................................................................8

Facilitating Risk Management at Multiple Facilities.........................................8

Challenges of Managing Risk at Multiple Facilities................................................................................................................................8
How Master Bowties Help...............................................................................................................................................................................8

How Risk Bowties Enable More Flexible, Resilient Risk Management..........9

Register Types......................................................................................................................................................................................................9
Base Controls.......................................................................................................................................................................................................9
Critical Controls Verification...........................................................................................................................................................................10
Escalation Factors...............................................................................................................................................................................................10
Layers of Protection...........................................................................................................................................................................................10
Modeling Resilience..........................................................................................................................................................................................11
The Big Picture....................................................................................................................................................................................................11

Additional Resources..............................................................................................12

Let VelocityEHS Help...............................................................................................13

© 2001-2022 VelocityEHS | Using Risk Bowties to Manage Risk 2 of 13

Introduction
Many EHS professionals know they struggle with managing workplace risks, whether it’s accurately assessing them,
controlling them, or getting employee buy-in. In this eBook, we’ll teach you how a risk assessment tool called bowtie
analysis can help.

Along the way, we’ll discuss how bowties can address a common pain point: training your workers in workplace
risks and the controls you have in place, and engaging them in your risk management practices. We’ll debunk the
misconception that bowtie analysis is an esoteric, difficult tool to use, and explain how it can combine information
from many kinds of risk assessments. We’ll also discuss how bowties enable better knowledge and management of risk
controls and make it easier to manage risks across multiple facilities. Finally, we’ll review how risk bowties work with
other key tools to give your organization a flexible risk management system that evolves with your operations, and
helps you model and improve the ability of your business to withstand major accidents.

A Comprehensive View of Risk
Let’s start our discussion of bowties with a thought
experiment. Imagine all the knowledge of your workplace
risks is saved in different formats, in different places. You
have spreadsheets and documents, checklists, and historical
records of various kinds of risk assessments, like hazard
studies, job safety analyses (JSAs), hazard and operability
analyses (HAZOPs), hazard identifications (HAZIDs), hazard
identification and risk assessments (HIRAs), and safe work
procedures (SWPs). In addition, you have the tribal knowledge
of those in engineering, operations, maintenance, purchasing,
etc. In reality, you probably don’t need to imagine this,
because it’s probably your situation right now, as it is for
many EHS professionals.
The limitations of this approach might become even more
apparent if we do a follow-up thought experiment, in which
our supervisor asks us to compile all of this information in the
aftermath of a major incident. The gaps in our risk awareness
would become painfully obvious, along with their contribution
to the incident occurring.
Now, imagine you can bring that information together in a
way that provides comprehensive views of your workplace
risks, at a glance — one that lets you map the connections
between causes of every type of safety incident to its
potential consequences, and show what controls are in
place to mitigate harm. That’s what a bowtie analysis does,
and why it’s so useful.

BOWTIE ANALYSIS

Risk
Consequences

Risk Causes

© 2001-2022 VelocityEHS | Using Risk Bowties to Manage Risk 3 of 13

As you can see, a bowtie pulls together the relevant
information about possible accidents into one place, so
it’s easier to review and comprehend. Rather than hunting
through multiple documents and types of assessments
and then trying to assemble the big picture, bowtie
analysis creates the big picture for you. Bowties make it
easy to understand:
• t he linkages between risk causes and the risk
event, and between the risk event and subsequent
risk impacts.
•  ow systems/processes work and their propensity
h in risk management if they understand risks. Bowties make
to fail.
• what risk controls are in place.
•  ow those controls act to reduce risk, and why
h
they are only as effective as the person/process
verifying they will work when expected.
But Aren’t Bowties Really Hard to Build?
Not anymore, at least not if you have the right tools.
It used to be hard to do bowtie analysis. Much of the work was
done either manually or using standard desktop computer
applications to do things they were not specifically designed
to do and the information needed to make them was in many
different places, with no way to easily unify the information
or share it across different systems. That’s why many EHS
professionals still mistakenly believe bowties are hard to build
and use — they’re tools for someone else, not them.
The great thing about VelocityEHS’ s Risk Management
platform is it democratizes the approach to risk by making it
easy for companies and EHS professionals to perform bowtie
analysis. It’s as simple as hitting a button. Just select “Generate
Bowtie” in the software, then watch as it pulls information from
your hazard studies and other risk assessments, analyzes it,
maps tabular data into a bowtie, and displays the results.
Bowties Improve Worker Safety
Engagement
When you make bowtie analysis easy, you make it easy for
your workers at all levels to understand risks, and participate in
the process. This helps you get insights from those who know
risks better than anyone — the people who work with those
processes every day.
Direct participation from workers in safety management yields
obvious benefits. This is why an emerging consensus of global
safety experts, as represented by standards like ISO 45001,
see participation as being essential to a successful safety
management system. Section 5.4 of 45001 on Consultation
and Participation of Workers says, “The organization
shall establish, implement and maintain a process(es) for
consultation and participation of workers at all applicable
© 2001-2022 VelocityEHS | Using Risk Bowties to Manage Risk
levels and functions,” and specifically emphasizes the need
for participation of non-managerial workers in “identifying
hazards and assessing risks and opportunities.”
In the past, the fractured nature of risk data and the difficulty
of creating bowties made it difficult to actively involve
employees in the process. When you use VelocityEHS®
Risk Management to make the process easy, you boost
engagement in several ways:
Improved Understanding: Employees can only participate
that much easier. The visual organization of the bowtie helps
employees understand the connections between procedures,
policies, control devices and risk reduction.
Motivating Safer Work Practices: Because employees can
clearly see how unplanned events and potential consequences
extend outward from various causes, it motivates them to
more consciously avoid behaviors and workplace practices
that can set such events into motion. They’ll understand the
reasons behind workplace safety policies and safe operating
procedures (SOPs) and be more likely to model safe behavior.
Integrating Workers into a Single, Simple Process: Having one
overarching method for mapping and demonstrating risks
makes it easier for employees to participate in the process
compared to the old, fragmented approaches. Employees can
directly participate via “what if” scenario brainstorming and
easily adjust the bowtie to incorporate their own knowledge
of operations and controls. This improves the overall risk
management process by harnessing the collective knowledge
of the entire workforce.
The Perfect Training Tool for
an Ever-Changing Workplace
Bowties are the perfect training tool because they give
employees an easy-to-use “map” of workplace risks without
requiring them to hunt through multiple documents for the
information they need. Bowties also depict how the controls
interact to prevent and mitigate risks, and underscore the
purpose of carrying out the repetitive inspections and
observations required to verify control effectiveness. This
reinforces the value and purpose of risk management practices
in keeping us all safe and improves the effectiveness of our
employee training, giving us an easy way to keep employees
well-trained on current practices even as operations change.
Workplaces and the nature of work itself continue to evolve,
due to changing technology, changing work arrangements,
and changes necessitated by business or production goals.
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic accelerated trends
already recognized by initiatives like National Institute
of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) “Future of
Work,” forcing organizations to make quick pivots to protect
employees from exposure to the SARS CoV-2 virus. In some
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 With the bowtie analysis capabilities you get
with VelocityEHS Risk Management, you can
easily adjust your bowties or generate new ones
as operations change.
cases, organizations may have added new production lines
for products such as hand sanitizer, that were in public
demand during the pandemic. All such change modifies the
landscape of risks in the workplace, and quickly can cause risk
assessments and risk management plans to become outdated.
With the bowtie analysis capabilities you get with VelocityEHS
Risk Management, you can easily adjust your bowties or
generate new ones as operations change. Even better, you can
involve your employees in the process, and keep them aware
of the components of your current risk management system.
It’s the simple way to effectively train your workers on
workplace risks and maintain their awareness level, no
matter what the future of work may hold.
Risk Bowties Easily Combine
Information from Many Different
Risk Assessments
So far, we’ve learned how risk bowties can help train workers
on workplace risks and the controls you have in place, and
keep them engaged with your safety management system.
We also explained that risk bowties are easier to do than
you probably think. The next benefit of risk bowties is their
ability to synthesize data from many different types of risk
assessments into a single, intuitive view of risk, and overcome
the limitations of tabular risk data.
A Multiplicity of Risk Methods
There are many ways of assessing workplace risk. These
include methods of root cause analysis to determine
underlying causes of an event after the fact, and methods
used to prevent the occurrence of unplanned events.
Here is a survey of some of the methods commonly used:
Failure Mode, Effects & Criticality Analysis (FMECA): A
quantitative failure analysis method that shows links between
potential failures (failure modes) and consequences, and the
relationship between the probability of different failure modes
and the severity of outcomes.
© 2001-2022 VelocityEHS | Using Risk Bowties to Manage Risk
Fault Tree Analysis: A top-down analytical method showing
an unplanned event at the top, and all the independent
contributing events below it, which are broken down into
distinct causes.
Event Tree Analysis: An analysis showing all possible
consequences of an unplanned event, or loss of control,
including estimated probabilities of different outcomes.
Five Whys: A method of identifying a root cause by asking why
it happened, then asking why that happened in a series of five
questions, each time going deeper than the time before.
Hazard Identification Study (HAZID): A way to break down
workplace processes to identify hazards and controls, and to
assess the effectiveness of controls at reducing risk.
Hazard and Operability Study (HAZOP): A systematic
assessment method that breaks down an existing process to
look for places where deviations from original plans occurred.
While each of these methods have their strengths and
limitations, a collective limitation of using so many methods
is that it’s harder to view risk holistically. It takes work to
dig through documents and assessments and synthesize a
comprehensible view of risk that you can share with everyone
in your workplace.
Or at least, it used to be difficult to do that. With a solution
like VelocityEHS Risk Management, you can select the
assessments you want, then just hit the “Generate Bowtie”
button. Within a few minutes, the software will:
•  xtract the hazard and top event details from
e
the available data in the selected assessments.
• identify causes and associated preventative controls
for each unplanned event.
• identify consequences and associated mitigative
controls for each event.
• a ssemble all the elements and create a new risk
scenario in the current risk register.
• s et all the cause likelihoods, consequence severities
and control effectiveness values, and calculate and
generate the risk bowtie, with all the risk ratings.
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Now you have a risk bowtie that combines all the information
from individual types of risk assessments. The data is still
there, it’s just easier to understand and use. For example, the
left side of the risk bowtie is a streamlined version of a fault
tree, showing how different causes interact with preventative
controls and escalation factors, which increase risk by reducing
the effectiveness of controls. On the right side of the bowtie,
we have a version of an event tree, showing the possible
consequences of the unplanned event, the probabilities of
each consequence, and the corresponding mitigative controls
in place to reduce their impact.
Visually mapping this information in one diagram makes
it easier to train your workers on risk. Plus, you can easily
use the information as a foundation for further action,
such as identifying critical controls, or performing a Layers
of Protection Analysis (LOPA), or Probable Loss of Life
(PLL) calculation.
Risk Bowties Help Visualize and
Manage Risk Controls
Risk controls are one of the most important aspects of risk
pathways to understand. Let’s look at the ways risk bowties
simplify our ability to manage and verify the effectiveness of
our risk controls.
A Brief Overview of Risk Controls
Risk bowties help us gain an accurate view of our risk
pathways, helping us see (for example) that there are often
multiple causes associated with a single unplanned event,
and multiple possible consequences. The intuitive visual
organization of the risk bowtie gives us a more complete
understanding of the complexity of risk pathways rather than
viewing them as simple and linear as you might with tabular
risk assessments, such as spreadsheets.

The Tyranny of Tabular Data Once you’ve identified all potential risk causes and impacts,
you can begin developing and assigning the appropriate risk
Another problem with having many kinds of risk assessments, controls to eliminate or reduce them. Risk bowties are a big
other than the difficulty of consolidating information, is if the help here, too.
data is in tabular form. Tabular data can give us an inaccurate
perception of risk by making us think risk pathways are simpler Risk controls can include a variety of measures, such as
than they are. engineering and process design improvements, training, work
practices, administrative policies and any other measure that
Think about it. When we use a table, we have to fit information acts in some repeatable and reliable way to minimize the
about the causes of an unplanned event, the preventative likelihood and/or severity of risks.
controls present, the consequences of loss of control, and the
mitigative controls in place into a tight space spread across When planning which controls to use, we should refer to the
one or two rows. Because what we see influences how well NIOSH Hierarchy of Controls.
we understand, we then start thinking of risk for any specific
unplanned event in terms of simple, linear pathways. That’s Least
inaccurate, because unplanned events rarely result from just effective Hierarchy of Controls
one pathway, and rarely have just one consequence. It’s also
Protect the worker with
dangerous because misunderstanding our risk pathways PPE Personal Protective Equipment
undermines our ability to prevent major workplace accidents,
and places our workforce and business at risk.
Administrative Change the way
Controls people work
Risk bowties help us escape from the tyranny of tabular
data and gain a more accurate view of risk pathways. The
figure below depicts how easy it is to map out different risk Engineering Isolate people
Controls from the hazard
pathways and absorb information about multiple causes
and consequences at a glance.
Replace
Substitution
Path the hazard
Cause 1 way Consequence 1
1

Pathway 2 Physically
Cause 2 Consequence 2 Elimination remove
3 the hazard
way
Path
Cause 3 Consequence 3 Most
effective

Unplanned Event/
Loss of Control

© 2001-2022 VelocityEHS | Using Risk Bowties to Manage Risk 6 of 13

The key takeaway from this diagram is that the most effective
controls are those which remove the source of risk through
either elimination or substitution. Then the remaining
controls are used in descending order of preference to reduce
the residual risk to acceptable levels. Personal protective
equipment (PPE) is a last resort because it only creates
a barrier between the worker and the source of risk. The
effectiveness of PPE also depends on several factors, such as
proper equipment selection, its maintenance, and training the
employees using it.
Types of Controls
We classify controls based on the specific functions they play
within our risk pathways. The different kinds of risk controls
can be categorized as follows:
BOWTIE ANALYSIS
Preventative Controls
Unplanned Event/
Loss of Control
Risk Causes
© 2001-2022 VelocityEHS | Using Risk Bowties to Manage Risk
Preventative: These are controls we design and put in place to
prevent a specific accident or “top event” from happening. At
the point of “loss of control” where the top event occurs, we
now must rely on our next category of mitigative controls.
Mitigative: These are controls we put in place to control the
consequences of an unplanned event if it still happens despite
our preventative controls. Mitigative controls can be broken
down further into:
• Detective: These controls are used to detect failure of
preventative controls and the onset of a top event as
soon as possible, to give us the best chance of acting
quickly to reduce the severity of consequences.
• Reactive: These controls directly react to a top event
and attenuate its consequences.
Be sure to take sufficient time to evaluate potential alternative
controls for adequacy, reliability and other key risk indicators
(KRIs), to select the most effective controls for specific causes
and impacts. You should always consider the possibility of
implementing multiple controls for individual causes or
impacts. Doing so helps create additive layers of protection
against risks.
Many people who manage risk using tabular data struggle
getting the information on all risk controls in one place.
Risk bowties make that much easier to do, so the safety
professional can get a clearer idea of how to verify that
controls are effective. For example, the user can easily see
all preventative controls are on the left side of the top event,
and all mitigative controls are on the right side.
Mitigative Controls
Risk
Consequences
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The Simple Way to Manage Controls
Taking the time to configure these factors during risk analysis
sets the framework for greater efficiency down the line. If done
correctly, you can automatically generate inspection or audit
tools that target your critical controls or major accident events.
Setting up base controls also reduces the complexity of bowtie
diagrams, by reducing the number of seemingly unique risk
controls in play.
A risk management software solution like VelocityEHS Risk
Management lets us easily create and manage risk bowties
along with controls, helps us address risks across multiple
facilities, and improves our visibility and verification of critical
controls. It makes it easy to connect these key parts of your risk
management system.
Facilitating Risk Management
at Multiple Facilities
Now that we have some background about what risk bowties
are and how they help us visualize and manage risks, let’s
look at the ways a specific type of risk bowtie, called a
master bowtie, simplifies our ability to manage risks across
multiple facilities.
Challenges of Managing Risk at
Multiple Facilities
We’ve examined some of the ways traditional approaches to
managing risk, like using spreadsheets and tables, make it
hard to establish an accurate view of risk and share it with our
workers. For example, tables encourage us to oversimplify
risk pathways by viewing them too linearly, and they don’t
account for multiple causes and multiple consequences of an
unplanned event. It’s also hard to access the risk information
when we need it, or to use it to quickly get an overview of risks
at a facility.
The reality is, many of us are also responsible for managing
safety and risk at multiple locations within our company,
which compounds those challenges. These facilities might
have similar operations, meaning that many risk pathways and
controls will be very similar, but not exactly the same. Creating
risk assessments for each individual facility is a lot of work,
and there are many opportunities for errors. For example, site
operators assessing risks independently of each other have no
ability to build on existing knowledge which creates potential
for gaps in risk control.
We’ve seen how risk bowties make risk management easier
by helping users quickly map risk pathways and develop
a common understanding of risk across a facility. Can risk
bowties also improve the way we manage risks across
different facilities?
© 2001-2022 VelocityEHS | Using Risk Bowties to Manage Risk
The answer is “yes,” and is exactly why master bowties are
so important.
How Master Bowties Help
Master bowties are a kind of blueprint for risk pathways that
can be used for developing risk bowties for individual sites.
They can help cut down the amount of work and increase the
accuracy of your mapped risk pathways. Here’s how they work.
As a risk manager, you develop your master bowtie the same
way you develop any other risk bowtie. When using software
like VelocityEHS Risk Management, that’s as simple as clicking
a button. You then edit the master bowtie before finalizing it
and activating it. Once activated, a master bowtie is available
for generating individual site bowties.
It’s then a simple process to generate a site bowtie from
the master bowtie and select a specific site representative
responsible for reviewing and managing the site bowtie.
Once the site bowtie is created, the responsible party gets
an email notification that they have a site bowtie to review,
and they can access the bowtie via a link. At that point, the
user begins the review process, and essentially “owns” any
changes made to the bowtie. The figure below shows the
relationship between the master bowtie and site bowtie.
Note how changes in the master bowtie flow “downward”
to the site bowties.
During review, the user can select which causes, controls, and
consequences to include or exclude in the site bowtie. To limit
the possibility of mistakenly excluding master bowtie features
relevant to the site bowtie, you should consider ensuring
that software used for your risk bowties prompts the user to
provide an explanation for the exclusion.
What if, in the process of managing risk at the company level,
we learn new information about risk pathways, or decide to
make changes to controls that will affect every facility with
the same operations and same risk pathways? That’s another
advantage of using master bowties. With VelocityEHS Risk
Management, changes you make to the master bowtie
are applied to all the site bowties based on it. It also sends
notifications to the “owners” of those bowties, prompting
them to review the changes. The facility user can then accept
or reject the changes as appropriate, if they include an
explanation for any exclusions made.
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There may be times when a facility’s operations change
significantly enough that maintaining a connection between
the site bowtie and master bowtie no longer makes sense. In
that case, you can easily unlink the bowtie from the master risk
scenario, creating an ad hoc bowtie. Just remember this is an
irreversible process, so once the site bowtie is unlinked, there’s
no going back.
This process is much easier and more accurate than methods
based on individual assessment of risk across facilities.
The benefits of using master bowties include:
• S tandardized identification and control of risks
throughout the organization
• I mproved sharing of risk information and risk
management best practices
•  educed time and resources required to develop
R creating opportunities for mistakes.
and review risk bowties and perform other risk
management activities at individual locations/
worksites
•  educed administrative costs and increased
R
stakeholder engagement with your risk
management programs
Master bowties can help reduce the time to review from
2 hours to 15 minutes, cutting the duration of an annual
site risk review by nearly 90%.
How Risk Bowties Enable More
Flexible, Resilient Risk Management
At this point, we have a good baseline of knowledge about
what risk bowties are and why they’re useful. We’re now ready
to see how the pieces of a comprehensive view of risk work
together with risk bowties and understand the benefits to our
safety and our business.
Master bowties can help reduce the
time to review from 2 hours to 15
minutes, cutting the duration of an
annual site risk review by nearly 90%.
© 2001-2022 VelocityEHS | Using Risk Bowties to Manage Risk
Register Types
Let’s start with register types, which define master bowties and
critical controls present in that type of register. They allow risk
managers to link to a standardized set of bowties and critical
controls. Managers responsible for multiple facilities can then
present the facility managers with a list of critical controls and
the control assurance program they’re expected to implement.
The advantages of register types come into focus for risk
managers who are responsible for multiple facilities. Let’s see
how this works with a specific industry sector, in this case,
explosives distribution. This is a high-risk business, with many
facilities performing the same or very similar operations. It’s
not a good strategy to let each facility develop its own risk
register, or develop individual risk registers on behalf of the
facilities, because in both cases, we’re replicating work and
Earlier in this eBook, we shared how useful master bowties
are for just this kind of scenario. Now imagine you not only
give your individual facilities the standardization that comes
with master bowties, but also ensure that all receive the
same guidance on the critical controls to implement. It takes
chance out of the equation, which is what risk management
is all about.
Base Controls
Base controls are another important element. These are
standardized controls across multiple risk events or risk
registers. They can be used to standardize the practical risk
reduction you get from a type of control (pressure safety
valves, for example) in a bowtie or LOPA study. Risk managers
can use them to build a consistent library of controls for
developing your safety case.
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Here’s how you can streamline risk management through
base controls. Suppose you’re responsible for several different
facilities that have similar operations, and you want to figure
out a measure of training effectiveness that has the right
amount of “granularity.” Some of your facilities may have
training objectives that are too strict, while others may have
some that are too low. Others may have objectives that lack
the right amount of specificity, for example, employees will,
“understand the hazards of chemicals they work with,” which
while technically correct, doesn’t really help you know whether
you’ve met the objectives. How do you know employees have
understood the hazards?
This example helps us see two main advantages of using
base controls:
Ensuring controls are structured for maximum effectiveness.
You can structure your base controls to sharpen their
effectiveness, honing in on what matters most. You can also
ensure you’re putting thought into structuring the controls
for all your facilities in a way that allows you to confirm they’re
actually working. Thus, there’s a direct connection between
base controls and critical controls verification.
Harmonizing and reducing the overall number of controls.
Having a smaller set of harmonized controls makes it easier to
track their effectiveness. You’ve reduced variability from one
facility to another, so you know you’re comparing “apples to
apples” and measuring real trends. The smaller number of base
controls also means reducing unnecessary work, tracking a
larger number that brings no additional management insight.
And when an ad-hoc or non-standard (non-base) control does
appear within the context of a specific facility/operation/or
risk, you can be more confident about predicting how it would
impact a similar risk/facility within your organization.
Base controls establish a foundation for all our risk controls
making it easier to have a consistent and rational approach to
risk, and to choose our critical controls — which is where we’ll
focus next.
Critical Controls Verification
Setting up your base controls builds them into your existing
risk data. From there, you’re better prepared to verify
the effectiveness of your controls — a crucial step in risk
management. Once you’ve fully populated your risk bowties
with appropriate preventative and mitigative controls, you’re
ready to start planning for critical control assurance activities.
Critical controls verification capabilities within software like the
Risk Management solution from VelocityEHS give you the
accessibility you need to view all your controls throughout
your operations. You’ll also be able to confirm that controls
were installed as planned and are effective at delivering the
expected level of risk reduction.
© 2001-2022 VelocityEHS | Using Risk Bowties to Manage Risk
Setting up verification activities is fairly straightforward and
builds on the knowledge acquired during the risk analysis
process. The greater visibility and understanding of risk
pathways gained by creating our bowties helps get us primed
and ready for this step. You’ll likely get a good idea of which
groups of critical controls or “base controls” you’ll need while
you’re identifying and analyzing risk scenarios. At this point,
you’ll also probably be able to see which types of scenarios
would be catastrophic “major accident events,” deserving
special attention.
Configuring these factors during risk analysis sets the
framework for greater efficiency down the track. If done
correctly, you can automatically generate inspection or audit
tools that target your critical controls or major accident events.
Setting up base controls also reduces the complexity of bowtie
diagrams, by reducing the number of seemingly unique risk
controls in play. They can also be used to tag your critical
controls in preparation for an assurance program.
Escalation Factors
Escalation factors are another aspect of controls that risk
bowties can help you visualize clearly and manage easily.
Simply put, escalation factors are conditions leading to
increased risk by defeating or reducing the effectiveness
of controls.
For example, let’s say you have a risk control with a baseline
effectiveness of 0.99, or 99%. You identify a factor, in this case,
missing the scheduled maintenance date for a control, which
reduces the effectiveness of that control by an average of 30%.
Therefore, the control effectiveness when accounting for the
escalation factor is only 70% (100%-30%) of what it would
have been otherwise, so the modified effectiveness equals
69.3% (0.99 x .7).
You can add escalation factors to your bowties to get more
realistic views of risk, and help employees understand how
mitigating the escalating factors is essential to improving the
effectiveness of controls. This is especially useful for abnormal
or nonroutine operations where controls can be bypassed
or made less effective, especially because such operations
account for a very large number of major accidents across
multiple industries.
Layers of Protection
We touched on Layers of Protection Analysis (LOPA) earlier,
pointing out that it’s a specialized usage of Event Tree analysis.
Risk managers sometimes use this methodology to assess the
effectiveness of a combination of controls — a kind of “lines
of defense” model — to avoid serious loss. It helps us identify
the operations and processes lacking adequate controls, so
we can determine how to improve our controls to reduce risks
to tolerable levels.
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A common obstacle to wider adoption of LOPA is the lack of
easy tools available to build these types of risk models. Even if
you know your general industry sector risks and specific facility
risks well, you may be unable to translate that knowledge
into usable models for analysis. This is where having a single
platform for bowties, LOPA, and quantitative risk assessment
is a real advantage. A key benefit here is the ability to pick
the right type of model, without having to start over. It’s
even better to have a common library of causes, risk controls,
consequences, and other factors being drawn from all models
in one place.
Modern software, like Risk Management from VelocityEHS,
that includes risk bowties and other risk tools, allows you to
have a common library of causes, risk controls, consequences,
and other factors for all our risk analysis and modeling.
This benefits businesses that would potentially need to use
more than one type of model to manage all their risks.
For example, a mineral mining business might need to use
bowtie risk assessments for the safety of workers at the mine,
but then use LOPA to analyze risks at the refining plant that
uses toxic chemicals.
Modeling Resilience
The model of risk management you’re getting by combining
risk bowties with LOPA, risk registers and critical controls
verification not only provides common grounding for several
complementary risk assessment methodologies, but also
creates greater agility, and more confidence about the
continuity of our business. It provides a more holistic model.
Risk bowties help us visualize risk pathways and ensure a
common understanding of risks and associated controls. And
because capabilities to perform LOPA concentrate on defense
in-depth, they help you understand how well the business
can “absorb” and “bounce back” from threats. Each control
represents a point of elasticity at which a disruption can be
slowed, reduced, or stopped.
The Big Picture
As we near the end of this eBook, now is a good time to step
back and look at the big picture of how risk bowties help.
1. Risk bowties help visualize risk.
2. Risk bowties make it easy to train your workers.
3. R
 isk bowties combine information from many
different assessments.
4. W
 hen used in conjunction with risk registers,
master bowties, and base controls, risk bowties
help streamline and standardize approaches to risk
management across multiple facilities.
5. U
 sing risk bowties as part of a comprehensive risk
management approach helps build and understand
resilience, increasing the likelihood of maintaining
business continuity if a major accident or “loss of
control” event should happen.
Using risk bowties alongside other risk management methods,
gives you the tools you need to accurately assess risks across
your operations, keep your workers well-informed about risk,
and adapt your approaches when needed. You’ll build better
engagement with your workers by sharing responsibility for
safety and providing a safer and more productive workplace.

This ability to model and mold your resilience has huge

implications for your business. It informs your emergency
planning and gives you an active role in planning for business
continuity. Studies have shown most facilities that don’t come
back online after a major accident lacked a continuity plan.
By giving yourself the right Risk Management tools, you
improve your approach to business continuity and help ensure
the future of your business — and the confidence of investors
and stakeholders in that future.

© 2001-2022 VelocityEHS | Using Risk Bowties to Manage Risk 11 of 13

Additional Resources
ON-DEMAND WEBINAR
Major Chemical Safety Incidents – A Review of
Common Causes
Check out our webinar on chemical accidents to learn more about common
risk management failings identified in major chemical facility accidents, and
how the kind of mature risk management capabilities we’re talking about here
can help prevent similar incidents.

DOWNLOAD INFOGRAPHIC

Risk Bowties: A Tool for Risk Management

and Training
Looking for more information about how to improve your risk management?
Download our risk bowties infographic to learn how risk bowties can help
you develop and share an accurate view of risk pathways with your workers.

DOWNLOAD INFOGRAPHIC

FIVE WHYS HAZOP

HAZID

FMECA
Bowties: A Unified View of Operational Risk
We've seen that there are many ways of assessing workplace risk and preventing
Risk Causes
FAULT TREE ANALYSIS

Preventive Controls &

Escalation Factors
Top Event
EVENT TREE ANALYSIS

Mitigative Controls Risk

Consequences
the occurrence of unplanned events. Download our infographic to see how
different risk assessments tie into bowtie analysis.

BLOG AND RESOURCES

Stay updated
We’re always adding more content to our blog and our Resources page, so be
sure to check there often!

© 2001-2022 VelocityEHS | Using Risk Bowties to Manage Risk 12 of 13

Let VelocityEHS Help
Our customers consistently report that our bowtie analysis capabilities have
helped them achieve dramatic improvements in workplace productivity,
knowledge sharing and risk management program performance.

Bowtie analysis is just one of many tools within our Risk Management solution,
which also includes risk registers, qualitative and quantitative risk analysis, layers
of protection analysis (LOPA), critical controls verification and much more!

Ready to see more? Visit our Risk Management page to request a demo with
one of our customer solutions consultants today!

Contact us, today! Request a Demo

Toll Free: 1.866.919.7922
Or visit us online at: www.EHS.com

www.EHS.com