What table tennis bats can teach us about accident investigations
Posted on July 27, 2026
By Steve Wallace
When an incident occurs, there can be an immediate temptation to focus on the person closest to the event. Who made the mistake? Who wasn’t paying attention? Who failed to follow the procedure?
Those questions are understandable, but they rarely lead to meaningful improvement. An investigation that stops at individual behaviour will often miss the wider factors that allowed the incident to happen in the first place.
A worker may have made an error, but why? Was the task planned properly? Were the risks understood? Were people adequately trained and supervised? Was the system itself creating the conditions for failure?
Good investigations look beyond the individual and examine the whole process.
The table tennis bat exercise
One of the ways I explain this during training is with a set of old table-tennis bats. Each bat represents a layer within an organisation. The worker, the supervisor, the manager, the director, the organisation itself. You could even add another layer for the client or host organisation.
Each layer has weaknesses. Nobody is perfect and no system is flawless. The worker may be distracted. The supervisor may be overseeing multiple jobs. Managers face competing demands. Directors make decisions with incomplete information.
In my demonstration, each bat has a hole drilled through it. An accident only occurs when those holes line up.
If any layer identifies the problem and acts on it, the chain is broken. The incident never happens.
That is why a good accident investigation looks at every layer. It asks not only what happened, but what opportunities existed to prevent it.
Why everything comes back to risk assessment
Almost every investigation eventually leads back to risk assessment. That shouldn’t be surprising. Risk assessment is the foundation of effective health and safety management, not because it is a document, but because it is a process. It is the process of asking:
- What are we doing?
- What could go wrong?
- Who could get hurt?
- What would the consequences be?
- What controls do we need?
- Have we considered everything that is reasonably foreseeable – and are we prepared to revisit our opinions and judgements?
Experience plays an important role here.
Ask a roofer about the hazards of working at height and they may mention aggressive nesting seagulls. Ask someone with no roofing experience and that hazard may never enter the conversation.
The more knowledge we have, whether from experience, previous incidents or near misses, the better our risk assessments become.
Accident investigations are also one of the most effective ways of testing whether our risk assessments were realistic in the first place. If incidents keep occurring that we failed to foresee, that tells us something important about the assessment process itself.
A good investigation does not simply ask whether a risk assessment existed. It asks whether it identified the right hazards, considered the right controls and reflected the reality of how the work was actually being carried out.
The importance of review
One lesson that frequently emerges from accident investigations is that risk assessments were never revisited.
A generic assessment might have been suitable at the planning stage, but circumstances change. New information becomes available, client requirements change, work methods evolve, unexpected hazards emerge.
The purpose of review is to ensure that risk controls develop alongside those changes.
Investigations also reveal the difference between how a job was planned and how it was actually completed. Risk assessments and method statements describe how we expect work to be done. Accident investigations show us what really happened. Where there is a gap between the two, some of the most valuable lessons can be found.
One of the most valuable questions organisations can ask after an incident is: “Why didn’t we identify this before?”
That question is not about blame – it is about learning, because every event provides information that can improve the next piece of work.
Making the holes smaller
The purpose of accident investigation is not to create perfect systems, because they don’t exist.
People will always have pressures, distractions and limitations. Organisations will always face competing priorities. Some level of risk will always remain.
The goal is much simpler – make the holes smaller.
Every lesson learned, every improvement made and every control strengthened reduces the chance of those holes lining up again in the future.
That is what a successful accident investigation looks like. Not finding someone to blame for what went wrong yesterday but understanding enough to make tomorrow safer.