Shifting the Way We Look at Organizations

July 11, 2016 By Leave a Comment

On June 29, 2016, I presented a paper at the American Society of Safety Engineers 2016 Professional Development Conference in Atlanta, Georgia. It was titled “Partner-Centered Safety: A New Leadership Approach for Safety Excellence.”

Richard-ASSE-Conference2016

My message to those who attended my session was that the Bureau of Labor safety statics show the rate of improvement in reducing injuries in the workplace has slowed down since about 2009 and the rate of improvement for deaths has stopped; about 4,600-4,700 people are being killed at work each year.

The safety professionals and managers are putting a lot of effort into improving the safety performance in our workplaces, but we seem to be stuck. I think that the problem is that we are approaching organizations as if they are just complicated systems rather than as complex systems.

current-view-of-organizations

The complicated view of organizations has served us well, and a lot of progress has been achieved. Now we need to move forward in our thinking.

When we view our organizations as complex systems, a better description of the way organizations actually behave emerges.

more-realistic-view

While many people crave reliability, predictability, stability, and control for their organizations, this is rarely achieved. Our organizations are full of movement, feedback, changes, and surprises. Nothing sits still; everything is in motion.

When I learned to view my organization as a complex system, everything improved. Our injury rate dropped by ~97%, earnings rose ~300%, emissions dropped ~88%, and productivity rose ~45%.

My experience in leading the organization as if it was a complicated system was difficult and strenuous. I felt that I had to push everything to get the work accomplished safely, and we never achieved success. When I shifted to a complexity view of the organization, everything became easier to lead, my work was more effective and the improvements were dramatic. In working with the organization as a complex system, the people opened up, the conversations were more purposeful, and energy and creativity were released. All dimensions of the business improved and the people were pleased and proud of their achievements.

There is a lot in making this shift in perspective. I think that everyone can learn to work this way. I would be happy to talk with any of you about this and help you on your own journeys.

Filed Under: Safety Excellence, Safety Leadership Process Tagged With: , ,

Complexity & Change are the New Normal: Leading the Way

June 10, 2016 By Leave a Comment

Those organizations that are achieving safety excellence recognize that they must:

  • Abundantly share all information about their safety, environmental and business performance,
  • Engage openly and honestly with everyone building trust and interdependence and,
  • Help everyone to get a sense of their collective whole and see their part in achieving total success.

The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) in New Zealand is on the pathway to safety excellence. We worked with Carl Stent, the NIWA National Manager, Safety and Wellbeing, in a series of 7 full-day workshops involving over 100 managers and scientists to develop clarity and focus on the best ways to help their people working remotely, like in the Antarctic, to make the best possible decisions and work safely – every day, every task.

National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research

This (picture above) is their Operations Leadership Team who met with us in Wellington for two days at the beginning of our work with NIWA. We helped them to see that organizations are complex, adapting, self-organizing networks of people. Using the Process Enneagram©, our proprietary complexity tool for having the focused and disciplined conversations, they were able to effectively address their opening question, “How do we build and sustain an effective safety culture across our organization?”

The energy and excitement built during the day as information, ideas and breakthroughs emerged during the workshop. The Process Enneagram© map they created is serving as their living strategic safety plan.

We conducted workshops in six NIWA Centers across New Zealand, giving us an opportunity to meet a lot of outstanding people and to see a lot of their beautiful country. We also conducted one public and one private workshop which were also extremely successful in opening people up to the ideas of complexity and to approaching safety from this perspective. With Carl Stent’s ongoing, excellent support, NIWA is on the road to safety excellence!

Filed Under: Safety Leadership Process, The Process Enneagram© Tagged With: ,

Brother’s and Sister’s Keepers

May 11, 2016 By Leave a Comment

human-dominoesHardly any of us can do our best work all by ourselves.

We need teammates to help us stay focused and be fully present to our work. None of us can see all that is happening around us so someone to be our keeper is critical to our safety. We need someone to remind us if we are hurrying or preoccupied. We can do a much better take-two pre-start-up check if we have someone there with us looking, thinking about and talking over the work before us.

Here are some things that we need to be doing as a Brother’s/Sister’s Keeper.

  • We can keep alert about someone being in danger because we notice that they are preoccupied.
  • We can look for potential safety hazards, and talk about them with our teammates.
  • We can check to see if our safety procedures are consistent and adequate for the job we are about to begin.
  • We can talk with our brothers and sisters about looking for some really unexpected event or condition that could kill one of us.
  • We can talk with our teammates about the elephants that are blocking us and messing up our work.
  • We can help to check the OSHA rules and procedures to be sure we are in compliance.
  • We can stop the job if we see it is going unsafely.
  • We can help to be sure that we have the right tools for the work before us.
  • We can ensure that we (alone or together) do not take shortcuts.
  • There are lots of things we can do as a Brother’s/Sister’s Keeper and we can be open and receptive to the Brother or Sister looking after us.

Sometimes the events can roll out like a string of dominos. Some little thing at the beginning tips over, bumping into the next domino and so on until we have a big, ugly event. Brother’s and Sister’s can help us to see these little events and avoid the big one that comes like a snowball rolling down a hill.

Being a brother or sister goes both ways – I look after you and you look after me. This is a deep responsibility for us to be doing so that no one gets hurt or killed and we all get the job done to the highest standards.

Brothers and Sisters are really important when we dig more deeply into the real issues behind an observed hazard. Two or three people who are looking for and thinking about the deeper issues are much more likely to find the real, basic problem behind the hazard and be able to eliminate or minimize it. They can also help to find the best ways to circumvent a hazard; two minds are better than one!

Being our Brother’s and Sister’s Keepers is a deep responsibility we all have. None of us have a right to work in a place where it is okay for someone to get hurt. Taking on the roles and responsibilities of being our Brother’s and Sister’s Keepers is a big step in moving the organization’s safety performance beyond compliance towards excellence.

Filed Under: Safety for Business, Safety Leadership Tagged With: , ,

Buddy Benches

May 10, 2016 By Leave a Comment

buddy-benchThere was a video on Facebook a few weeks ago about Buddy Benches being placed in schoolyards. The video explained the importance of the communication and training that is essential to their use and effectiveness.

The essence of the Buddy Bench is for inclusion and safety. Kids who feel alone and have no one to enjoy their recess time with are encouraged to sit on the bench – as a signal that he/she is in need of a friend, a buddy, a playgroup to join. Conversely, when the Buddy Bench has a person sitting on it, the kids who are enjoying their recess time, are chartered to practice being a Buddy…by sharing friendship, to invite the person into their group, to ask what might be troubling the bench-sitter, to provide protection from a bully; the list of helpful acts extended from the community of kids towards the person in need of a buddy is heartwarming.Buddy Benches serve as a safe place for kids who are feeling bullied or for kids to make new friends.

In exploring Buddy Benches, I learned that they are multiplying; they are in many school districts across the country. Some Boy Scout troops are now making Buddy Benches for schools for their badge-earning credits. The Buddy Bench is a simple idea to lessen loneliness, to counter bullying, and to foster friendship and a sense of belonging. Buddy Benches provide the symbolic learning space for both asking for help and, in return, receiving the extended hand of friendship.

After learning about this uplifting idea, I thought about inclusion within our workplaces and about being our brother’s/sister’s keeper – simply because it is the right thing to do – ensuring we have each other’s back. I thought about OSHA’s workplace bullying guidance, the connection to the General Duty Clause, and knowing that escalating workplace bullying, harassment, and intimidation is linked to poorer safety performance as well as employee mental and physical wellbeing. And, of course, I thought about employee accountability – we are each accountable for our behaviors. I thought about the culture of our workplaces being strongly related to the worst behaviors we are willing to tolerate. I thought about that old book, “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten,” by Robert Fulghum. Remember those simple truths?

How our work worlds would be improved if we all adhered to the same basic rules as children: sharing, being kind to one another, no hitting, cleaning up after themselves, learning together, etc. Maybe we need to place something like Buddy Benches in our workplaces. What do you think?

Filed Under: Safety Leadership, Safety Leadership Process Tagged With: , ,

Caring: Displaying Kindness and Concern for Others

April 18, 2016 By Leave a Comment

A few days ago, I had the opportunity to hear Mark Breslin, a professional speaker, author and strategist (Breslin Strategies), talk about his approach to going beyond compliance in safety performance.

He made the point that the two most important things to people in the workplace are:

  • to be sincerely praised and recognized; authenticity is key
  • to be given the opportunity to make decisions; autonomy

People need to know that management cares. These important ideas are quite consistent with some of our ideas in Partner-Centered Safety.

construction safetyIn our Partner-Centered Safety realm, we go beyond this to having everyone (the people on the floor, the supervisors, the managers, and all the others) feel they are cared about. Caring means helping each other, listening to each other, sharing information, being respectful, asking for help and receiving it, looking out for each other, saying we are sorry when we make a mistake, and treating each other as whole persons. Just what caring means for people is something on which they should all agree. Management, alone, should not do it for their approach can often be quite patronizing – treating the people in the work place as if they are children. All the people, at all levels, together, need to come up with their ideas about what caring is for them. Management should not try to dictate the answers, but management needs to open up and lead this discussion about caring or it will not be addressed. Caring is visible; as is non-caring. Partner-Centered Safety is visible caring. Mistreatment of people is non-caring.

For example, in one plant making large pumps to fracture gas wells, there was a serious injury when a guy tried to hoist a 3,200-pound pump with a 2,000-pound rated overhead crane. The pump fell onto the employee’s hand causing serious damage. When I was talking about this with another man on an adjacent work table about 10 feet away, I asked him if he had seen what was happening. He said he had. When I asked why he did not stop the work, he said that he was not the other guy’s boss. They had never talked about caring and what it meant to them. This is certainly not caring! Being your brother’s/sister’s keeper was a foreign concept.

In another example, when we have bullies in the workplace, they cause huge destruction in shutting down communications. How can there be an authentic and caring atmosphere with bullies contaminating the environment by picking on people when they speak up and try to contribute. Sometimes, the bully is in supervision, which makes matters worse. Management must deal with them for they are extremely destructive. The culture is set by the worst behavior that is tolerated!

However, when the people all come together to talk about the various ways they want to show caring, treat each other, and agree on ways to work together, the culture quickly shifts towards one that is open, healthy, and where the communications can flow freely. This is the environment where there can be good learning, growth and progress towards safety excellence. This is the environment where people can talk together about their ideas, share opportunities to improve the work, and have the opportunity for making decisions about some of the things going on and how they are cared about and treated.

Filed Under: Safety for Business, Self-Organizing Leadership Tagged With: , ,

We do “Safety” Because We Care

April 11, 2016 By Leave a Comment

Bok-Tower-GardensAt one of the highest geographical points in Florida, at Lake Wales, is a large, 205-ft high, carillon tower. It is beautiful, as are the gardens surrounding this tower structure, made of glistening coquina stone. The tower and gardens were a gift from benefactor Edward W. Bok, who cared deeply about nature, beauty and sanctuary spaces. Millions of visitors have traversed this place of solace since it opened in 1929. Edward Bok was all about CARING for future generations – to be able to enjoy peace and beauty. His tribute signature is this:

“Make you the world a bit better or more beautiful because you have lived in it.”
~ Edward W. Bok (1929)

Our safety work (at R.N. Knowles & Associates) has taken us to many places over the last few months. We’re reminded, as we’ve interacted with many people, and visited many workplaces, that Safety is about caring deeply. Likened to Edward Bok’s inspiration about caring about the world of beauty and leaving his legacy, let’s substitute the word safety for beauty, and leave our positive safety legacy for our respective workplaces. What if everyone in our workplaces chose to care deeply about safety?

What if this statement became your chosen signature phrase?

“Make your work-world a bit better and more safe because you have lived in it.” (2016)

We all make choices – every day – as we live and work in our workplaces. We do “Safety” because we care deeply – stemming from a core concern for others.

Filed Under: Safety for Business, Safety Leadership Process Tagged With: ,

Awakening the Third Force – In Safety – It’s time!

March 10, 2016 By Leave a Comment

No, this isn’t about Star-Wars! And it is not about following the Jedi Path. This is a way of thinking with roots going back to Maslow around unifying forces.

For our workplaces, this is about the way we think about safety, the way we engage around safety, and the way we bring a third unifying force to the whole culture of safety.It’s the missing link in our respective workplaces. Without it, we tend to stay engulfed in a culture of compliance, yet despite trying and trying, we never reach excellence. Without it, we keep repeating the same mistakes – round and round we go.

With it, however, we intentionally move forward. We establish the culture that is committed to safety, inclusively cares about and connects with everyone, continually learns, and develops a depth of safety.

With it, safety has a constant aliveness. Without it, safety remains a by-the-way.

Read on to learn more about this “IT”…the Third Force of Safety!

The Awakening of the Third Force

I spoke at the American Society of Safety Engineers, Region IV, Professional Development Conference in Tampa, Florida on February 27, 2016.

Dick Knowles with Pamela PerrichI spoke about Partner-Centered Safety™ and the importance of this as the quickest way to achieve sustainable safety excellence. As many of you know, I have written and spoken about this many times over the last several years. The information and data I share clearly shows that this approach to leading safety is very powerful, producing improved results quite quickly. Many of you have seen the terrific results the people at the DuPont, Belle Plant achieved. This approach has a very strong scientific basis in complex adaptive systems theory.

It was exciting to see and hear one of the speakers at this PDC also beginning to talk about improving safety using a complex adaptive systems approach. This speaker had heard Sydney Dekker speak about this way of engaging the organization at an ASSE National PDC in 2014 and had gone to Australia to meet with Dekker. While they like the ideas of this approach, they do not have the tools to make the connections and bring the networks of people effectively connect with the physical work and come to life.

Several other speakers spoke about the importance of working more closely with the people, developing more trust and interdependence. There is developing excitement about this way of working together.

The Awareness is Growing!

There seems to be a growing awareness that working with the people makes a positive difference. While no one has developed the tools to actually engage and bring the people together into a highly focused and purposeful conversation as we do using the Process Enneagram©, a positive shift to fully engaging the people and achieving safety excellence appears to be starting to happen.

In my presentation, that was very well received, I introduced a new diagram about bringing the safety and business technology together with the people side of the enterprise releasing the Third Force (Partnering) to achieve Total Business and Safety Excellence. For over 100 years, the business, productivity, and the safety technology (the quantitative, rules, procedures, machines, etc.) of our work has driven our organizations. The people have often been pushed and driven to function like they were just parts of a great machine. When we shift our way of thinking and doing, we can effectively bring the people into the work using a complex adaptive systems approach and specifically the Process Enneagram Safety Excellence workshops, a whole new level of sustainable performance is created.

Total business excellence

In the Safety Excellence Workshops, using the Process Enneagram© (seeSafetyExcellenceForBusiness.com and RNKnowlesAssociates.com), the people discover and co-create new ways to work together and develop the excitement and commitment for sustainable safety excellence to be achieved.

The Third Force in Safety is Partnering – bringing the strengths of our business and safety knowledge and tools together with the goodness of and power of the people to achieve sustainable, excellent results. It is an active force, a compelling force – collaborative, focused, conversational, committed, and caring…and it works!

Filed Under: Safety Excellence, Safety Leadership Process Tagged With: , ,

Safety Culture…Is Yours Healthy and Thriving? How Do You Know?

February 17, 2016 By Leave a Comment

When the Safety Culture is right…what do you see? What does Excellence look like?

  • People helping each other;
  • People looking out for others;
  • People are committed to caring about people, the work, the success of the Business; Aligned, Cohesive.
  • Few injuries;
  • Full Reporting;
  • Learning from all incidents; Collaborative.
  • Safety is talked about all the time – integrated into the work and the conversation;
  • Process safety management is respected and rules followed.
  • People understand the need for enforcement of standards & rules.
  • Good People treatment principles apply. (No bullies tolerated)
  • Litter-free workplace; (people care)
  • Problems are discussed openly; Differences are discussed, resolved.
  • Training is fully completed;
  • Employees regularly input what training is most important to their success.
  • Improvements are made in timely fashion;
  • Communications are open…up and down organizational lines.
  • People fully understand that the success of the business is tied to making a profit. Safety excellence and business success go hand in hand.
  • Safety excellence for business means that people understand safety and the business – information is shared; relationships are built; and people know the importance of their role to the Business.
  • Processes for healthy discussion/communication are prevalent and used.
  • Leaders are involved, inclusive, and open.
  • People feel good about their roles, their coworkers, their business success.

How does your team, business, or organization measure up to these? It is worth doing a very simple analysis. On a straight line, along this measure, where does your team stand on many of the above items listed? What does that tell you about where your efforts should be placed?

Not too long ago, EHS Today had a neat article about Safety Culture and Training…worth a look. Here’s the link.

Filed Under: Safety Excellence, Safety for Business Tagged With: ,

Part 1: The Background on the Cruise Line International Association Conference

January 12, 2016 By Leave a Comment

On December 16-18, 2015, I was able to attend the Cruise Line International Association Safety Conference in Miami. The focus was on improving the safety culture and Bridge Resource Management. This is a very interesting business for me to learn about. I was there to give some perspective from the chemical industry.

This cruise line industry is doing a lot to keep improving their safety performance. Their safety challenges range from slips, trips and falls all the way to navigation, building effective teams on the bridge and crew communications challenges. Ken Koves from the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations spoke about safety culture from their perspective. The level of regulation in that industry is quite impressive. There is just no question about doing things safely, yet they still have their challenges.

I spoke about moving towards a stronger safety culture by sharing more information, building trust and helping people to see the importance of their work to the success of the whole effort. I showed the 35 attendees a slide about the layers of the safety process effort, which they found quite interesting. I also gave them some cards with tips that the officers at different levels could use to help them when they go out to talk with their people. These were seen as quite helpful as well.

The second day focused on training, bridge resource management and simulation so that the captains and their bridge officers could develop stronger skills relating to navigation, ship piloting and management skills.

There is some very sophisticated work being done with large simulators being used by several companies. There are also several institutes providing skills, refresher training and qualification for the officers. Their training loads are very heavy.

Two test pilots from Boeing spoke about their training and the use of simulators. Their simulators are so advanced that, after a month of simulator training, a person could fly an airplane even though they never had seen it before. The basic ideas about the way simulators help them are quite alike even though the differences between a single seat jet fighter and a cruise ship are huge.

Part 2 – Integrating this Learning into all Safety Leadership

There is a big need to be sure the managers of chemical plants are qualified so that their employees and neighboring communities do not suffer the consequences of chemical releases and spills. Many manufacturing businesses that do hazardous work, aside from chemical manufacturing, should heed this thinking too.

As I was listening to these talks, I got to thinking about my chemical industry experiences. When I was a DuPont Plant Manager 20 years ago, we were very strong in operating discipline and safety. Managers were carefully selected and a lot of attention was paid to doing safety and everything else right. Training and integrating safety into every task, every day, was paramount.

Over the years, since I retired in 1996, a lot has changed, with the terrific pressure on cost control and efficiency. The safety standards fell terribly and accidents occurred like the four LaPorte, Texas deaths that DuPont had in October, 2014. In reading the reports of that accident it was sad to see that standards had slipped so far that even their company fire truck broke down on the way to respond to the incident.

This isn’t just a DuPont problem. Many companies are being broken up and purchased by finance and fund managers who know nothing about manufacturing and the high standards that need to be met. Just look at the First Chemical Company spill in West Virginia, when their poorly maintained storage tanks failed, spilling chemicals into the Elk River near Charleston shutting down the city water system for weeks. The people who owned this facility had no idea about their safety responsibilities. Their tanks were leaking for some time, yet the owners ignored them; the size of the leaks increased over a considerable period of time, then the dikes finally failed.

I am beginning to think that the people who manage facilities using highly hazardous materials, like those on the TSCA list, should have some sort of licensing requirements to certify that they are qualified and that their companies know how to fulfill their safety responsibilities. Ship Masters have licenses and certifications. Nuclear plant people are certified. My barber has to have a license. Professional Engineers must be licensed.

While this may sound like just more red tape, I think it is time to open the conversation about this. Plants that handle chemicals like chlorine are hard to run, can fall into a backwater and not receive the attention and support they need – yet a big chlorine spill would be a disaster.

There are lots of questions related to getting this going, but we, as a society, need to address it. What are your thoughts? What areas in your specific business, (chemical or not), are such that being certain that your managers and owners know what they’re doing and have the required knowledge and demonstrated operating discipline, are paramount? Where do you need to put some marked attention in 2016?

Filed Under: Safety for Business, Safety Leadership Tagged With: , ,

Are Your Fingers Crossed…hoping that December will be a good safety month, and that you’ll finish the year in the “good stats” column?

December 16, 2015 By Leave a Comment

I’m reminded about the organization that thought their safety performance was always good, because they were primarily an office environment. They scoffed over how bad could a paper cut be? Or, what’s the worst that could happen if someone fell off their chair? Little did they expect that one of their office workers, when on a healthy outdoor walk during her scheduled break time, tripped over some roped off tape that had been blown by the wind. She actually walked into it – not paying attention to her surroundings – got caught up in it as it wrapped about her feet. She fell, twisted her knee, required surgical repair, etc., etc. Try to explain that office worker lost-time injury! (The good: healthy walk; The bad: not paying attention; The ugly: lost time injury).

Here’s another real example. A guy stood up in his desk chair and reached over his desk to open a window. The chair rolled out, the guy fell and suffered a severe back injury. Or, what about the guy standing in the office doorway talking with his boss? He was leaning against the doorframe when someone tried to close the door – severely mutilating one of his fingers. The thoughtless – the unexpected – the unobserved – these can happen in any environment.Stay aware!

Want to “get it right?” Get Out of Your Office and into the Workplace. Walk your Safety Talk!

We see organizations as complex adapting networks of people who are the vital keys to its success. When the people in the various parts of the network are sharing information and helping each other, all aspects of EHS Performance rapidly improves, resistance to change disappears and the energy bubbles up spilling over into all other parts of the work lifting the organization to new, higher levels of performance.

The quickest way to make this shift happen is to get out of your offices, go into your organization and talk with the people. Listen, learn together, treat them with respect, ask for their help, offer your help to support their work and together, explore creative ways to achieve the sustainable performance we all need.

Filed Under: Safety for Business, Safety Leadership Tagged With: , ,
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