What are General Failure Types (GFT)?

General Failure Types are eleven organisational categories — Hardware, Design, Maintenance Management, Procedures, Error-enforcing Conditions, Housekeeping, Incompatible Goals, Communication, Organisation, Training and Defences — used in Tripod Beta to classify the latent failures behind incidents.

GFTs turn an idiosyncratic incident into a comparable data point. By mapping every latent failure to one of eleven categories, organisations can roll up findings across hundreds of investigations and target their highest-failure GFTs with strategic interventions — the basis of GFT advisory.

BY RiskoPilot Editorial Team · REVIEWED 2026-06-20

How it works

1. STEP 01

   Identify each latent failure

   From the Tripod Beta tree, isolate every underlying organisational weakness contributing to the incident.

2. STEP 02

   Match to a GFT category

   Use the GFT definitions to classify each latent failure into exactly one of the eleven categories.

3. STEP 03

   Aggregate across investigations

   Roll up GFT counts across recent incidents to surface the dominant organisational weaknesses.

4. STEP 04

   Target interventions

   Invest in the top three GFTs first — typically Procedures, Communication and Training in most operators.