Bridging the gulf: A practical framework for incorporating organizational factors into quantitative risk assessment to mitigate survival and confounding biases

In the oil and gas industry, quantitative risk assessment (QRA) often relies on generic failure‐rate databases, even though facilities operate with different levels of asset integrity and process safety maturity. These differences create operational “fingerprints,” so safeguards that perform well at one site may fail at another—leaving the question unanswered: “Why do accidents still happen?” This paper proposes a risk amplification factor (RAF) that bridges organizational reality and hard QRA frequencies using a “No size fits all” adjustment. RAF integrates systematically four auditable organizational factors—maintenance and inspection, safety culture, emergency response, and HSE management system robustness—mapped to both preventive and mitigative bowtie barriers. Factor influence is derived from 20 major accident hazard cases through frequency–severity weighting and normalized into exponents, yielding a transparent, multiplicative structure that is stable for decision‐making. The resulting RAF is calibrated to remain bounded (approximately 0.6–3.0), enabling consistent comparison across sites without destabilizing baseline calculations. A concise checklist converts documented practices (backlog control, reporting and training, drills and equipment readiness, and action closure) into 1–5 scores. By capturing escalation sensitivity—where “the first five minutes are the most critical”—RAF helps practitioners prioritize improvements and align risk controls with organizational capacity.