Incident Investigation Training

ICAM, PEEPO, and Bow Tie methodologies that cut through bias and expose the systemic failures that actually cause incidents.

Under the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015, an ineffective investigation process or a superficial report is a direct failure of your due diligence. IMPAC's incident investigation courses equip safety professionals, supervisors, and executives with the uncompromising skills required to conduct legally robust, root-cause investigations — and to refuse "operator error" as a final answer.

Our Courses

IMPAC Training

Category overview

When an organisation treats an incident investigation as a frantic exercise in assigning blame, they guarantee the exact same disaster will happen again. Accepting "human error" or "re-train the worker" as a final conclusion is a lazy cop-out — it serves only to cover up a broken organisational system that allowed a fatal decision to be made in the first place.

At IMPAC we are practitioners, not theorists. We completely reject the blame game. Driven by the brutal realities of high-stakes investigations, our expert trainers demand that your personnel look past the frontline worker and identify the missing or broken organisational barriers hiding in the background.

We equip your people with the most advanced analytical frameworks in the industry — ICAM, the PEEPO data-gathering framework, The Defences Model, and Bow Tie Risk Analysis. Whether your supervisors are learning to lock down a scene, your safety professionals are reconstructing complex timelines, or your executives are interrogating final reports in a Governance Workshop, your team will step back into the business equipped to engineer systemic solutions that actually prevent recurrences.

Key Focus Areas

What this training covers

The ICAM Methodology and the Defences Model

Move beyond surface-level mistakes. Analyse multiple causation and identify exactly how and why organisational barriers, safeguards, and administrative controls failed under pressure.

The PEEPO Framework

Dismantle the overwhelm of complex investigations. Use a structured method (People, Environment, Equipment, Procedures, Organisation) to systematically gather data, separate hard facts from assumptions, and reconstruct accurate timelines.

Bow Tie Risk Management

Visually map the exact pathway from a hazard to a disaster. Anticipate brutal escalation factors and force your team to confront what actually happens when their primary safety controls fail.

Objective interviewing and bias recognition

Recognise how human bias distorts witness recall. Master the interpersonal skills required to conduct high-stakes interviews that extract critical, objective information without assigning guilt or triggering defensiveness.

Available Courses

Our Risk and Incident Management courses

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Working with New Zealand's legal framework

Applicable Safety Regulations & Standards

High-stakes investigations demand strict legal compliance. Our training ensures your organisation confidently applies these critical standards:

Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 (HSWA) — The primary legislation dictating the absolute duties of PCBUs to accurately investigate incidents, identify root causes, and implement effective systemic controls to prevent recurrences.
Health and Safety at Work (General Risk and Workplace Management) Regulations 2016 — Specific duties for risk assessment, hazard management, and notifiable event response.
AS/NZS ISO 31000:2018 Risk Management — The international standard for risk management principles and guidelines underpinning Bow Tie analysis and systemic control design.
WorkSafe NZ Notifiable Event Guidance — Regulator expectations for preserving incident scenes, reporting notifiable events, and conducting due-diligence investigations.

NZQA Unit Standards

Our risk and incident investigation courses align with nationally recognised NZQA Unit Standards covering competency in incident reporting, investigation, and workplace risk assessment.

US 17601 — Incident Reporting and Investigation.
US 30265 — Workplace Risk Assessment.
[Additional unit standards to be confirmed — pending input from training team]

Who Should Enrol

Industries and Roles

ICAM Investigators and H&S Professionals

Personnel responsible for leading complex investigations, managing conflicting evidence, and drafting the legally robust final reports that drive systemic change.

Line Managers and Supervisors

Frontline leaders who are first on the scene. They must understand how to secure an area, preserve untainted evidence, and actively support the root cause analysis process.

Executives, Directors and Senior Leaders

The governance layer that commissions investigations and signs off on recommendations. They must know how to ruthlessly interrogate a report and refuse to accept "operator error" as a conclusion.

Project Managers and Engineers

Leaders responsible for designing the physical work environment who need Bow Tie and risk assessment methodologies to build verifiable barriers before an incident ever occurs.

FAQs

Frequently asked questions

Because humans operate within the systems, environments, and pressures that management builds. If a worker makes a mistake that leads to a catastrophic incident, it means the organizational controls failed to prevent or mitigate that error. Blaming the worker fixes nothing; fixing the system prevents the next disaster.

The Incident Cause Analysis Method (ICAM) forces investigators to look past the immediate event. By utilising tools like The Defences Model and the PEEPO framework, it systematically breaks down complex, chaotic data to reveal the underlying organisational and systemic failures that actually allowed the incident to occur.

If the executive team blindly signs off on a superficial report that simply blames a contractor or a frontline worker, they are officially endorsing a broken system and violating their due diligence requirements under the HSWA 2015. Executives must know how to scrutinise reports, manage legal privilege, and demand systemic accountability.