A Question to Ponder

December 10, 2013 By Leave a Comment

In my previous Blog I talked about the America’s Safest Companies Conference in Atlanta, GA. There were about 400 people in attendance for the fine papers, displays and the awards to the 10 Safest Companies of 2013.

safety excellence processIt was fascinating to see the contrast between the usual, linear, mechanical approach to safety and The Complexity Leadership Process (CLP) that I discussed at my display table. A large number of people talked with me at my display table about The Complexity Leadership Process which was new to all of them. Many could not believe how quickly and dramatically the safety performance improved using the CLP. At one level the CLP looks like a simple employee involvement program, yet it is much more and also different at a deeper level than the usual employee involvement processes. One fellow, who recently wrote a book about changing the safety culture to excellence just brushed the CLP aside as something he’d already seen. The approach to safety excellence he’s written about involves 43 linear steps that take 3-5 times as long as the CLP and require a very high level of persistence and determination over many years.

In an example of a long, slow, linear process was in a presentation by one of the Award–Winning companies about their journey to safety excellence. The presenter showed a chart showing their progress from a Total Recordable Injury Rate (TRIR) of about 8 to about 0.5 over 12 years, one little step at a time. It is great that fewer people are being injured, but it took way too long, and too many people were hurt along the way. When I count the number of injuries they suffered over this 12-year period, they had about 36 more recordable injuries per 100 employees than we experience at my Belle, WV Plant when we went from a TRIR of about 6 to 0.3 in just 3 ½ years. If the average cost of an OSHA Recordable Injury is about $50,000, then the Belle Plant with 36 fewer injuries and the suffering, saved about $1,800,000 for every 100 people. At Belle, we had about 1,000 people so we saved closer to $19,000,000.

It is interesting to watch people try to reframe a new idea into their old paradigm. The evidence of the improvements doesn’t seem to have an impact.

I think that if people believe something, they will see it, but if they don’t believe it they won’t see it, and not the other way around.

The evidence of many fewer injuries and the large savings that this generates, while proven in real cases, don’t seem to have much impact.

So for you who are reading this Blog, here is my question for you:

How do we get people to see, to understand and to try this new CLP approach when it is proven to be so effective?

 

The photo above is a picture of Dick at his Display table at the America’s Safest Companies Conference, where he had the opportunity to speak with lots of managers about eliminating workplace injuries.

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

America’s Safest Companies gather in Atlanta, Georgia

October 28, 2013 By 1 Comment

The America’s Safest Companies Conference is being held in Atlanta, Georgia this week.

The America’s Safest Companies Conference is sponsored by EHS Today and will have about 350 company presidents, Vice Presidents, EHS directors and managers and others interested in helping the people in our facilities go home in one piece. There will be keynote speakers on safety and sustainability as well as four conference tracks relating to:

  • Safety and Risk Management
  • Environmental/Sustainability
  • Compliance
  • Safety Technology

The Conference begins on Monday, October 28th with a reception and then the paper sessions will run on Tuesday and Wednesday up to 2:30 PM.

This is an interesting mix of people and tracks with many papers presented by high-level people with an emphasis on integrating safety into the culture of the companies and leadership. One of the key sponsors is Fisher & Phillips, a large law firm specializing in environmental, health and safety issues among the rest of their practice relating to labor law. The lead EH &S person from Fisher & Phillips is Edwin G. Foulke, Jr. who was a former OSHA Director.

america's safest companies conferenceI’ll be participating as a sponsor for the Conference Program Brochure. I’ll have an ad in the Brochure as well as a display table. My tag line is “When safety gets right, everything else gets right”. Since I am not an official speaker, I am going to use my display table as an opportunity to talk with people about the Complexity Leadership Process that I wrote about in a previous.

While there will be papers about leadership and moving to safety excellence, I will be the only one talking about the three major areas of safety (occupational safety, occupational health and process safety) and showing how to use the Complexity Leadership Process to achieve sustainable levels of excellence and improved business performance. I’ll share my work from the DuPont Belle, WV plant, the New Zealand Steel, Auckland, NZ, and the CSR Invicta Sugar Mill in Ayr, Australia and powerful case studies.

I’ll be working my display during the Monday evening Reception as well as at all the breaks so I am hoping to connect with a lot of the Conference attendees in one-on-one conversations and open up their thinking to complexity and the importance of learning to think and live this way. This will be a very difference experience for me compared to presenting papers that I have often done and expect to do in the future. I am very interested in meeting so many people who are focused on Safety.

In April of 2014, I will also be presenting the Keynote at the Chamber of Minerals and Energy of Western Australia SHE Conference – another gathering of great minds in this industry.

As you can surmise, I am very dedicated to getting the ideas about complexity and its importance in helping people and organizations in their journeys to excellence. More and more people are beginning to see the world as Complex and are more open to learning to live and work in this paradigm.  As readers of these Blogs, I hope you are one of these on the leading edge of our thinking.

If you are at the conference, please stop by and say hello!

Richard N. Knowles, Ph.D., The Safety Sage

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

The Process Enneagram©: Essays on Theory and Practice

September 19, 2013 By Leave a Comment

In my previous Blog on The Complex Systems Leadership Process© I’ve been thinking that it would be better to name it The Complexity Leadership Process© since it really is not a system as in systems thinking.

The Complexity Leadership Process is another name for Self-Organizing Leadership©. These are adjustments to my thinking relating to these ideas.

Self Organizing Leadership This Blog is focused on my new book, The Process Enneagram©: Essays on Theory and Practice. I am the editor for this book that was just published by Emergent Publications. It can be purchased directly from their website.

This book grew out of the call for papers for the Special Issue of Emergence: Complexity and Organization, Volume 15, Number 1, March 2013 on The Process Enneagram. In that call for papers I received 9 papers from the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United Kingdom. Since we could only publish four of them in the Special Issue of Emergence, for space reasons, Kurt Richardson, Director of Emergent Publications suggested that we publish all 9 papers in a book.

The book begins with a brief Introduction by me of the Process Enneagram. The 9 essays include two of an historical and theoretical nature by Tony Blake and Cameron Richards, one describing the use of the Process Enneagram at a Managing and Engineering Complex Situations Workshop to help a group of engineers get a better sense of the complexity paradigm and one paper is about using the Process Enneagram with groups of people in industrial organizations helping them to address their complex issues. There are two papers describing the use of the Process Enneagram with graduate students to help one class design their classroom experience for the semester and the other class to get a better understanding among a class of engineers of the flow of technology developments over the last few years from the perspective of complexity. Another describes the use of the Process Enneagram in helping to develop more cohesive, effective teams over a three-year period. Another paper correlates the energy flows in the Process Enneagram with those in an ancient Chinese cosmological, leadership model. The last paper uses a card trick by a famous magician to illustrate how one feels while moving through the work of the Process Enneagram.

These widely ranging essays open up a broad scope of richness in The Process Enneagram helping people to see and learn more about it from these widely ranging perspectives.

Sometimes I have referred to the Process Enneagram as a tool, but this is misleading in that it is not something like a wrench. I see it more and more as a series of nested processes that help guide important conversations and reveal the patterns and processes that are running within the organization. In using the Process Enneagram with people deeper understanding and better communications develop.

The importance of the Process Enneagram is in its use to help people work with complex, wicked problems, build the social connections they need and build the emotional energy and commitment to do their work.

One area where I have used The Process Enneagram is with people in organizations to help them improve their understanding of all their safety issues and develop a living, strategic plan for them to use going forward to sustain their work. Using The Process Enneagram is the first step in the Complex Leadership Process helping the people to get clear, focused, coherent and energized. As people develop and use The Process Enneagram they experience two levels of transformation. One is their own personal transformation and the other one is the transformation of the organization.

When the leaders from across the organization develop their strategic safety plan, and engaged in the transformations, they can take it to all the others in the organization to share and further develop it. If people are willing to be open to learning and growing The Process Enneagram always works in amazing ways.

In the previous blog I describe the Complexity Leadership Process and you can see the important role at the start of the work that it plays.

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

LEADERSHIP of Complex System and the Growing Interest in The Process Enneagram©

August 28, 2013 By 1 Comment

This blog-post is NOT about Safety, but rather it is about the larger arena of Leadership.  For those that know me, Leadership and Complexity are important to what I teach, what I apply in my Workshops, and what I often write about.  The focus today is on the growing interest that is developing around the Leadership of Complex Systems…and The Process Enneagram©, which is a tool of complexity.  Please read on….to learn about how this increasing interest is showing up!

There is a growing awareness of the science of complexity and how to apply the insights gained from this work in organizations. This is showing up in various places like the Linkedin Group discussion boards. There is also a growing awareness of the Process Enneagram© and its usefulness in helping people to solve complex problems, build the social connections they need to get the work done and create the emotional energy and commitment to do the work quickly and well.

The Journal “Emergence: Complexity and Organization” asked me to Edit a Special Issue of their Journal devoted to the Process Enneagram. This Special Issue was published in March, 2013. (Emergence: Complexity and Organization, Vol. 15 #1, 2013).

In the call for papers for this Special Issue a total of nine papers were submitted. This was too much for the Special Issue so all nine papers were recently published in a book. The Special Issue and the book, “The Process Enneagram©, Essays on Theory and Practice” are both available at Emergent Publications.

Beverly G. McCarter and Brian E. White in “Leadership in Chaordic Organizations”, (2013, ISBN 978-1-4200-7417-8) write a large section on the Process Enneagram and say that it seems to be the missing link between complexity theory and practical application.

International Top 100 Magazine just listed my biography in their “Who’s Who in Consulting” in their August 2013 Issue.

There is a growing interest in my book, “The Leadership Dance, Pathways to Extraordinary Organizational Effectiveness”. Even though it is 11 years old and has sold about 1,500 copies, Claire, my wife and partner, was able to do a book launch on my 78th birthday on August 8th and it became a #1 Amazon Best Seller and remains a Best Seller 15 days later as this is being written. This book is now considered by many people as a classic in organizational transformation.

The Process Enneagram is being used by many people around the world, especially in New Zealand and Australia where I have done a lot of work over the last 15 years. It is also being used by Datuk Mary Yap Kain Ching in Malaysia to study the leadership of head teachers in their most successful schools. Ms. Ching was recently elected to Parliament in Malaysia and is now the Deputy Director of the Ministry of Education in her Country.

A series of videos is being prepared for The Center for Self-Organizing Leadership website to introduce more people to this way of leading and to determine interest levels for developing a webinar on the Process Enneagram and its use.

Interest in Accreditation is developing in New Zealand, Australia and the US so I am now working with a number of people who are interested in becoming Accredited in the use of the Process Enneagram©. (If anyone reading this Blog is interested in becoming Accredited, please contact me.)

The Center for Self-Organizing Leadership website is being up-graded and many articles that I’ve written will be available and new products are being created.

My work in the application of complexity theory and The Process Enneagram to helping organizations achieve excellence in their safety performance progresses. My understanding of these tools and their application continue to develop. A description of my new Complex Systems Leadership Process© can be found in my previous blog.

This Process has three simple rules:

  • Share all information.
  • Build trust and interdependence.
  • Help people to see how they fit into the organization and the importance of their work to the success of the whole.

There is also a simple 4-step process for the people to use together to achieve and sustain excellence in their safety performance.

Having pursued this vision of the Process Enneagram and its value and importance, it looks as if things are beginning to come together. I thank all of you reading this for your help in this long journey.

 

Richard N Knowles, Ph.D.

Filed Under: Safety Leadership, Safety Leadership Process, Self-Organizing Leadership Tagged With: , , ,

Complex Systems Safety Leadership Process©

August 21, 2013 By 2 Comments

Our work in helping to create injury-free work environments is complex.

There are three major areas of work that overlap to some extent. Depending on the work of the organization the emphasis may be different for the three areas of work.

Occupational Safety:  One area of our safety work relates to Occupational Safety. Here we experience acute incidents like slips, trips and falls. Some of these lead to deaths. This area of safety work has been around a long time and is well developed. The systems, process and equipment for this work are managed by those closest to the work itself. These are the operators and mechanics as well as the first-line supervisors and the safety people who are working with them. This work not only saves the people from injuries it saves the company about $40,000-50,000 per average OSHA Recordable injury. A powerful leading indicator I have found useful is the Safe Acts Audit which is a quick and simple way to asses the safety climate as it shifts around. This is not a punishment procedure.

Occupational Health:   A second area of our safety work relates to Occupational Health. Here we experience long-term, chronic problems. These can be related to low levels of exposures to toxic materials like asbestos, benzene and lead or repetitive motion problems like carpel tunnel syndrome and poor lifting positions. This area is newer than the Occupational Safety area and we are still learning a lot. As our workforce age, we will run into more Occupational Health problems. Often, by the time that we become aware of the problem, a large number of people have been impacted and the costs for remediation are very high, running into the millions of dollars. This work is best managed by those close to the work like operators, mechanics, clerical people, and health and safety experts. The leading indictors for this area of work are the discomforts experienced by the people doing the work, and also by researchers and experts who are studying large populations of people and can see trends and wider problems that are more subtle.

Process Safety:  A third area of our safety work relates to Process Safety. A lot of new work is developing in this area of safety. Here we have acute problems like spills, releases to the air and water, fires and explosions. There can also be chronic dimensions to this like very low levels of emissions to the environment that result in public health hazards. This area of safety work is best managed by the operators, mechanics, engineers, researchers and other scientists close to the work itself. When a Process Safety incident occurs the costs in terms of lives and money can be very, very big as British Petroleum can attest to. The leading indicators in this area of safety work are things like near misses and close calls. Leading indicators are also the adherence to standards like timelines to get things repaired, schedules, the reduction of backlogs on safety work orders, and timely inspections of relief valves and thickness measurements of vessels and pipelines.

leadership safety in the workplaceOverlap:  All three of these areas of safety are often lumped together as SHE, EHS or HSE. When we lump these all together we can miss things so I think it is useful to see these three overlapping, interacting areas of our safety and health work. There is some overlap between Occupational Safety and Occupational Health like the proper selection and use of respirators. There is some area of overlap between Occupational Health and Process Safety like preventing chronic exposures to toxic chemicals. There is some overlap between Process Safety and Occupational Safety like locating trailers and offices away from operating areas using large quantities of flammable and explosive materials.

There is also overlap among all three areas of our safety and health work. This is where the people issues and culture become important. Everything happens through people! We need to have strong, effective leadership in order to bring all the work together and do a solid job in this work. There are many safety consultants who are teaching leadership of safety using linear, top-down processes that do have a good impact. However, in my experience, these are hard to do, often cumbersome and very hard to sustain. This is because these people are trying to lead safety using linear processes that are suitable for complicated situations.

Interactivity:   All the interacting people and areas of safety and health are a complex system requiring different tools for successful leadership. Coming out of my studies of chaos and complexity science and my own experience in leading safety I have developed the complex Systems Safety Leadership Process©.

Complex systems often have a few simple rules that govern their behavior. The Three Simple Rules for The Complex

Systems Safety Leadership Process are;

  1. Share all information with everyone except private personal information.
  2. Build trust and interdependence among all the people.
  3. Help everyone see their part in and the importance of fulfilling the work of the organization successfully.

Building on these Three Simple Rules are the Four Steps to Safety Excellence which are:

  • Use the Process Enneagram© with the leaders of the organization to develop clarity, coherence and commitment to achieving safety excellence.
  • Together, walking around, openly talking and sharing information, listening, sharing and learning, fixing problems, improving the safety systems and processes and building on all the safety systems, processes and tools we already have to manage the safety work.
  • In doing this with integrity, we build trust and interdependence among all the people.
  • The result of this way of engaging with everyone results in having everyone pulling towards safety excellence and continuous safety performance improvement.

This may sound rather strange to many of you yet this is the process to lead all aspects of safety to achieve sustainable excellence in our performance. The work I did with the people at the DuPont Belle, WV and with New Zealand Steel mentioned in earlier blogs, show that this way of leading safety is proven, robust and sustainable.

 

Richard N Knowles, Ph.D., The Safety Sage

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

When the Safety is Right, Everything Else gets Right!

July 1, 2013 By 1 Comment

I recently read a book by Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan, The Three Laws of Performance. They have studied leadership in many organizations and developed Three Laws of Performance and three Leadership Corollaries for these (P.212).

The First Law
How people perform correlates to how situations occur to them.
Leadership Corollary 1
Leaders have a say, and give others a say, in how situations occur.

The Second Law
How a situation occurs arises in language
Leadership Corollary 2
Leaders master the conversational environment.

The Third Law
Future-based language transforms how situations occur to people.
Leadership Corollary 3
Leaders listen for the future of their organization.

These three Laws and Corollaries are almost identical to what we do in Self-Organizing Leadership as we use the Process Enneagram© with the people. In using this tool in conversations with the people we co-create the future with everyone having a say in it. We spend a lot of time in the organizations talking with and listening to the people seeking new and better ways to do things.

For some people in leadership positions, talking with people, seems to be quite hard. Yet it is as simple as for example;

“Hi Mary, How are things going today? I hope everything is going well on the home front. You look like you really know how to do this task. I’ve never done it before, could you show me how you do it? What are the safety challenges and rules? Is there a better way to do this? Is there an easier way? Let’s talk about that. If I help you, can you take the lead to develop the idea and see if it really works as well as you think?”

This conversation shows how the Three Laws of Performance play out. Mary usually gets pretty pumped up as she is listened to, respected and asked for a better, safer way. This may be the first time she’s been treated this way by management.

As this simple interaction occurs, over and over throughout the organization, the culture shifts to becoming more positive, resourceful and creative. When the people see that management is really listening and trying, when they see the manager as real people things open up. Ideas about things beyond the safety arena emerge and big savings develop for the company.

When I was the Plant Manager at the DuPont Belle, WV Plant, working this way with about 1,200 people we made huge changes that endured for many years. For example, injury rates dropped >96%, emissions dropped 88%, productivity rose 45% and earnings rose 300%. Together we achieved world-class safety performanece with total recordable injury rates running at 0.3 or less. They maintained this excellent performance for 12 years after I left for another DuPont assignment.

Zaffron and Logan have a case study in their book about New Zealand Steel near Auckland, New Zealand. The mill was struggling and the management decided that they really needed to change the culture to survive and grow into their future. In just 2 years New Zealand Steel transformed themselves. Injury rates dropped 50%, productivity rose 20%, costs dropped 15-20% and return on capital rose 50%.

As I was reading the story I realized that I knew the people they’d named and that Tim Dalmau, my associate in this work, and I had led the transformational effort using the Self-Organizing Leadership approach. The Process Enneagram© was the key tool we used to help the people have the important conversations and discover their future.

These two stories of the transformations of the DuPont chemical plant in Belle, WV and the New Zealand Steel plant in Auckland, New Zealand clearly show that the work with the people to shift the safety culture is the leading edge of change for the entire organization.

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

The Case for making Safety a Priority in Business

June 4, 2013 By 2 Comments

In my interactions with companies I often hear the people saying things like:

“If only my management really supported safety we would really get a lot better. If they say safety is number 1, then why don’t they behave that way?”

The people at the top probably know that they can have big losses, lawsuits and bad publicity if there is a serious injury, toxic chemical release or explosion. They may even wake up at night thinking about these things.

Yet safety is not their core business. They have revenue and earnings goals looming over them. Quality and production problems may be pressing them. In this environment safety is a pain in the neck, intruding at the wrong times. It is seen as more costs.

I think that we may have the safety messages backward. Rather than feeling under-valued and not supported by management around safety, let’s turn the picture around so that excellence in safety performance is the path to total business excellence performance and enhanced profits.

Everyone can play an important part in this. We achieve safety excellence by shifting the culture. We share all information, build trust and interdependence and help everyone see how they are important to the success of the entire business. We engage each other, listen for all the ideas, help people to solve the problems and challenges that come up. We ask for help because none of us can do this alone.

As the culture shifts, injury and incident rates drop thus saving a lot of money directly, people feel more valued and interested in the total business. As the credibility around safety is built, people begin to see other things that can be improved to help the business and they do them.

As we shifted the safety culture at the DuPont Belle, WV plant where I was the plant manager in the 1980s and 1990s the injury rates dropped by about 97% and earnings went up about 300%. People felt a lot better about things and focused at really making improvements. Not only did we save money with fewer injuries and incidents, people went after things like lowering the demurrage rates (the rent we pay owners of tank trucks after their deliveries were made and the trucks were left on the plant) by 75% in just a few months. We also learned how to change our process control systems from pneumatic systems to electronic systems without running parallel—thus cutting the time and costs for the conversions by about 50%. We did this 16 times without failure.

As the culture shifted towards excellence everything else shifted towards excellence. When we turn the story around from safety being a pain in the neck to becoming the leading edge for shifting the total organization to high performance and excellence, then safety becomes a focal point for the organizational change efforts.

About 80% of the large-scale organizational change efforts fail to produce the desired results and are not sustained. Rather than beginning with a large-scale change effort, we can begin with a smaller effort, focused at safety and then spread the effort as we learn how to do it and gain everyone’s support. Success is much more likely and it is sustainable. At Belle the culture shifted! One measure of that was the injury rates dropped to world-class levels and were sustained for 16 years. Everything else we measured also showed significant improvement.

Let’s shift the safety message from being a pain in the neck to becoming the leading wave for total organizational excellence!

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

Update from the 9th Global Congress on Process Safety

May 7, 2013 By Leave a Comment

I recently attended the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) Spring Meeting and the 9th Global Congress on Process Safety in San Antonio, TX. About 2000 people attended this Conference. A lot of papers discussed the need to improve the safety cultures of our organizations. Others talked about the big safety challenges as the global demand for energy rises, as gas import terminals are converted to export terminals, the challenges of the complex technologies that are being developed and the difficulties of getting everyone, in big and small companies, up to speed and staying abreast of the exploding knowledge.

There were a number of papers on the Management of Change Processes and the more recently recognized Management of Organizational Change. These change process require skill, discipline and persistence to do all that is necessary. These Management of Change processes are a big challenge for the larger companies because of their complexity.

These are even more difficult challenges to smaller companies:

  • Many are privately owned
  • People function in multiple roles
  • There are not enough people to do everything
  • Money is limited
  • Information is often informally shared
  • Rapid decision making is common
  • They are unique and flexible.

All the papers I attended treated safety, its culture and the Management of Change as complicated problems; this is a big barrier. Complicated problems like an assembly line use linear processes; as each, in-specification part, arrives and is put into the assembly, a new product is successfully produced. Our training programs are linear in nature where each step is presented in sequence and the final result is a new skill that is to be used.

One author showed the Management of Change Process he was presenting as a sequence of 8 steps to be done one after the other with no feedback being shown. The presumption being that if each step is done correctly then things will be just fine. But usually things are not quite right, people forget, information gets misunderstood or lost, people don’t follow through as they are expected to do, so we have to train them again. This is all very hard and inefficient.

The linear tools of complicatedness are not the right ones to be using because the systems are complex systems.

Safety culture and the Management of Change are complex processes. The tools of complexity must be used. When we shift the way that we engage with each other, everything changes. The Self-Organizing Leadership© process is a tool of complexity. Information needs to be shared freely, trust and interdependence built and people need to see how they and their work are a part of the larger whole. These tools are vital to make the transition from complexity theory to practical application. The most important tool is the Process Enneagram©. It is the only known tool that helps people to solve complex problems, make the social connections they need to do the work and releases the emotional energy and commitment to do the work quickly and well. Beverly G. McCarter and Brian E. White write on p. 152 of their 2013 book, Leadership in Chaordic Organizations, ISBN 978-1-4200-7417-8, that “Richard Knowles’ Process Enneagram seems to be the missing link between complexity theory and practical application.”

When the tools of complexity are used all the processes of change become easier and move more quickly. People co-create their future. Resistance to change almost disappears. The changes are more focused, relevant and comprehensive. While the system is full of ambiguity and feedback making things richer and more comprehensive, the on-going dialogue serves to bring things together. As information is fully shared and trust and interdependence are built, the people come together co-creating their shared future and accomplishing their goals. The whole system becomes more coherent and effective.

Richard N Knowles, Ph.D., The Safety Sage

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

What the West Texas Disaster Can Teach Us

April 23, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Wednesday evening, April 17, 2013, there was a terrible explosion in the West Fertilizer Company’s fertilizer plant in Texas. The latest reports indicate as many as 14 people were killed and over 160 injured.

The plant was located right in the middle of the town of 2,700 people and the explosion caused a huge amount of physical destruction in addition to the human devastation.

The plant handled ammonia and ammonium nitrate for fertilizer use.

These are well-known, hazardous materials that can be, and are, handled safely by most companies. There is extensive process safety technology regarding the handling and use of these materials. The technology applying to these materials as with many chemicals is strong and effective.

There are two major dimensions to using, making and handling hazardous materials. One is the process safety side, which is well known and effective, and the other side relates to the way the people choose to work with these materials, and choose to use the technology. The best process safety in the world is of no use if people don’t apply themselves and use the process.

In 2006, according to the Dallas Morning News, the Company was fined $2,300 for failure to have a risk assessment. In one EPA report they said that they handled anhydrous ammonia assuring them that no one would get hurt in the event of a release.

While we do not know specifically what happened, my many years of experience in managing chemical plants, would suggest to me that these are indications that the people side of their systems failed in some way. These are hazardous materials that need to be handled with professionalism, dedication and attention to procedures.

The lesson to be learned here is to rethink your situations in your own factories, plants and businesses where you handle and use hazardous materials. Think about questions like:

  • Do you talk together and share safety information?
  • Do managers get out of their offices and into the operating area to talk with the people on the floor?
  • Is the level of trust high enough that employees will freely report safety concerns and near misses?
  • Des everyone work together to solve safety problems?
  • Are your Material Safety Data Sheets and Safety manuals up to date and used?
  • Are employees properly trained and is the training schedule maintained?
  • Do you have high housekeeping standards and are your facilities properly maintained?
  • Do your employees have the resources they need to work safely?
  • Are you cutting corners to speed up the operation?
  • Do people have the proper personal protective equipment and do they use it?
  • Do you have a system of follow-up so that suggestions can be implemented quickly?
  • Are people able to shutdown a process on their own if it is unsafe?
  • Can people refuse to do a job if it can’t be done safely?

The questions can go on and on, this list barely hits the surface in what can be addressed when making a commitment to safety in the workplace and having a leadership team where safety is a priority. It takes discipline and hard work to stay on top of safety issues, but these are the kinds of responsibilities and burdens any organization working with and using hazardous materials must bear. If you use these materials, then you must accept the responsibility that comes along with the use. The people in your facility and those living around you depend on you to do your job well.

As a manager of plants handling and using hazardous materials, my mantra was “I don’t have a right to work at a place where it is okay for you to get hurt. Now let’s get the safety right and make money.”

What is your safety mantra, your deep, authentic safety message for your people?

As we have seen from this indecent in Texas, the results can affect more than just your plant or business – entire towns can bear the brunt of accidents, explosions and the destruction that follows. My heart goes out to the town, the people, families and the plant workers. Situations like this are preventable…with Safety Leadership that comes from top down.

If you don’t have a safety mantra or message and follow the processes…I strongly recommend you get this in place and FOLLOW IT. Your business and the people that sustain it are depending on your leadership for their safety and the safety of many others.

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

Moving to a Safety Culture of Excellence

April 2, 2013 By 2 Comments

Most organizations seem to be comfortable with being at the level of safety compliance. This is a start, but is not good enough over the longer run. We have to meet the OSHA guidelines and train the people in how to work safely and use equipment properly. There are lots of people doing the safety training and the American Society for Safety Engineers (ASSE) has many, many resources for the safety professional. Most of the people in most organizations have some knowledge about how to do the work safely, know how to use the PPE and have some knowledge of the safety rules.

Reaching high levels of safety performance when working in organizations like these is very hard. Sustaining these levels of performance is even harder. Once the people have been trained, proven that they know and understand what they have learned and then actually doing the work as they have been trained often falls short. For a variety of reasons people don’t follow through; people take short-cuts, forget, are pre-occupied, feel pushed, don’t believe that management really cares, there are not enough people to do all the work, management does not listen, they hear the words about working safety but their supervisor ignores the words.

There is a powerful need for our organizations to shift to safety cultures of excellence. Way too many people are being killed (~4,600 in 2011). Most of these accidents are preventable. Our existing cultures need to shift from top-down driven processes to ones that are more self-organizing and sustainable. Yet many people resist change.

Being fearful of changing job assignments, bargaining unit challenges, abuse of the rules, not knowing what is going to happen to them and their jobs is one major reason for resistance to change. Another fear of change comes from the uncertainty of who the new people will be that they’ll need to work with if they are reorganized; they have a set of relationships in their current job and any change will upset these. Another fear of change can relate to their status as relationships and structure change. Another reason to fear change relates to the level of control that a person currently has in their job over their work and uncertainty about how that will change. Almost all of these fears come about because change is imposed with little input from the people who will experience the change.

However, change is with us all the time. It is not some unusual incident which is being shoved at us.

If the processes of Self-Organizing Leadership are used most people will not resist change. With Self-Organizing Leadership the people are co-creating the changes that need to be made. People do not resist changes that they create, but rather they push these changes. Most imposed change efforts fail; most co-created change efforts succeed.

The four-step, Safety Leadership Process we use enables the people in the organization to co-create their safety culture and transform it to one of excellence where injury and incident rates drop almost to zero. In this process the first step is to use the Process Enneagram© to work with a cross-section of the organization to co-create their Safety Strategic Plan. In using the Process Enneagram an important, compelling question is developed; one that the group feels is really important and one they want to resolve. Then the facilitator begins to move the group through the sequence of conversation relating to each point helping them to develop clarity and coherence relating to what they want to accomplish and how they will do it. Everyone makes inputs which are written down onto the Process Enneagram Map.

The space is created so that the environment is safe and open for honest conversation.

This part of the Safety Leadership Process usually requires about a day so that the issues, assumptions, Principles and Standards, and goals are understood and the energy required to accomplish their transformation is released.

In the next part of the Safety Leadership Process, the Process Enneagram Map they have created is taken out to those who were not involved to share the thinking and to seek improvements. In these conversations, trust and interdependence are built as people see what management wants to accomplish and are walking the talk.

The next part of the process is to talk with people about what they are doing, listen to them, discover ways to improve the work and help the people to make the needed changes. As we do this, people become more comfortable in talking together and opening up.

Another part of the Safety Leadership Process involves actually looking at what people are doing.

Systems problems show up as we make our observations. We often see very high levels of unsafe behaviors that are the result of people trying to work within the work environment and making mistakes. This is not an employee discipline process, but rather a process of discovery and learning. As the organization continues to make observations enough data is collected that the observations can become a predictor of a potential injury. Then we show the leaders how to react and avoid the injury.

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