Interview magazine - Annual Offshore Safety Conference 2018

Annual Offshore Safety Conference 2018

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Interview with Jim Wetherbee

By Ole Brandt

It is all about knowledge, skill and attitude There are only two ways to get in trouble. The first is not to follow rules and procedures and the second is to follow them blindly. will work even in unexpected situations,” says Jim Wetherbee, the only American astronaut to have commanded five missions in space, and the only person to have landed the Space Shuttle five times.

Jim Wetherbee

These are the words of a man with 35 years of experience in high-hazard operational environments. First as a naval aviator aboard the aircraft carrier USS John F Kennedy, later as a test pilot, then more than 20 years with NASA and finally seven years in the oil and gas industry. The name is Jim Wetherbee who has spent 1,591 hours in space.

“If you follow all the rules, policies and procedures thoughtfully and to the letter, you will prevent most accidents, but not all of them.

If you want to prevent all accidents, you must supplement the rules with principles-based techniques of operational excellence. In this field, we have not spent enough time and emphasis on helping, training, teaching, coaching and mentoring the front line workforce. If we do this, we have the ability to prevent all accidents because these techniques are open-ended, adaptable and

Listen without reservation He emphasizes that the high performance teams that are successful in hazardous environments are very attuned not only to the systems and the hazards but also to each other.

They listen carefully to each crewmember during pre-job meetings, they concentrate and relate to the opinions put forward, and those who disagree will ask follow up questions in order to fully understand.

“When I, as commander, sat in the space shuttle on the launch pad ready for take off, I was acutely attuned to the instruments, the displays and the performance of the systems. But I was equally attuned to my crewmembers. I would listen carefully, quickly assess what they were saying and act accordingly.”

Jim Wetherbee finds, that many engineers think the answer is found in data, numbers, equations, facts, and objective analysis of information. And he agrees that this is important.

“But we make the best decisions, when we also understand the other side – relationships, communication, interpretation, intuition, judgments and human values. Not to mention trust between operators. In addition to the technical side of operations including a very disciplined approach to detail, if we can master

the social side, we really have a winning combination because it is humans who control the operations and systems,” he continues.

When we began to be successful “In my opinion, the winning combination is: Yes, you must follow the rules. But the rules do not necessarily apply to every situation. If you really want to be successful, survive and accomplish missions you must supplement rules with principal-based techniques of operational excellence. When we did just that, we began to be highly successful in space missions.

Let me give you an example: One principle is that at all times during an operation at least one crewmember should maintain situational awareness. I learned this on my first mission where we were to recover a satellite that was in a descending orbit and bound to enter the Earth’s atmosphere and burn up.

Normally we recover satellites in an altitude of 250 miles. We were only up at 90 miles and thus going faster around the surface of the Earth so our gorgeous view was even more incredible – and potentially distracting. The commander has much to think about while manually flying the vehicle during a rendezvous with a satellite. He or she is looking intently at the satellite, using information from the computers, the radar and crewmembers to understand precisely where we are. It’s a very challenging job where you cannot allow yourself to be distracted no matter how spectacular the view of the Earth is.

Certainly you must have technical knowledge, skill and attitude, but if you master the social side you can release the power, magic and wisdom of people working together Be where I’m not With him so focused on the critical operation, my job as his co-pilot was to have the wider perspective and maintain situational awareness to sense any emergencies that might be coming at us sideways.

The principle being: When one is focused, the other maintains a wider perspective. For situational awareness, our simple mantra was, be where I’m not. However, you will not see this in any of the rules.

You can apply this principle even if you are alone in a dangerous

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Even the best pilots and the best operators in the oil and gas industry can make the worst mistakes if they do not use a checklist

environment. If for instance you are doing a specific job on the drill floor of a rig, you have to make sure that you perform the task at hand without mistakes following the rules and procedures. But you must at the same time be aware of potential hazards around you.

It is a principle or technique that can be learned, but it is not easily written down in a rule because it is the way people operate.”

Inspiration to people in the oil & gas industry When talking to Jim Wetherbee from his home in the state of Oregon, we asked the man with six successful missions in space which factors he believes decide whether a space mission is carried out safely, and how these factors can inspire people in the oil & gas industry?

“First of all the people conducting the operation must have three things: 1. Knowledge, primarily technical knowledge of the system they are operating

2. Skill, the ability to put your knowledge into practice. Skill is not learned from a book or in the classroom. It is learned in the field during years of practice 3. Attitude, the mental attitude towards safety and operating excellence is the most important.

You will have a successful mission, if every member of your team masters the technical side and has the necessary skills and the proper attitude; if we are attuned to hazards, see them immediately, take corrective action, and share this knowledge right away and wisely with the other team members; and if we follow the rules thoughtfully, understand the principles of operating excellence and master the social side, we can work together as a high performing team.

The human factor The human factor is crucial. Certainly you must have technical knowledge, skill and attitude, but if you master the social side you can release the power, magic and wisdom of people working together.

That is exactly our strength as humans. If you did not need the social side, you could design automated systems or computers to do the work. And we see industry doing this more and more when it comes to routine operations. Often these automated systems perform better than humans,” Jim Wetherbee continues.

“An autopilot will land 99 times out of 100 with better performance than the human. The problem is that the one time it fails, just because of a minor systems problem, the autopilot will kill everybody with no fear of death.

The human performance may not be as precise as the system, but the judgment of the human is far better not to mention the human ability to act upon and deal with incomplete data during unforeseen and unpredictable events, which can happen at any time. During every drilling operation in the oil and gas industry, or every space flight operation, we will be faced with either unanticipated or unforeseen situations. That is why you want humans, working

together, who can find the best way to proceed.

Use a checklist As a pilot, I can land a plane on any runway in the world without having seen every one – a computer needs to be pre programmed with every detail in order to perform properly.

The human can be successful even with an incomplete database paired with knowledge, experience and social skills.”

Before we ended our call, Jim Wetherbee, wanted to add one final point: using checklists is not a sign of weakness in the frontline operator.

“Even the best pilots and the best operators in the oil and gas industry can make the worst mistakes if they do not use a checklist,” says the former Director of Flight Crew Operations in NASA, specifically selected for this job to improve the flight and ground safety in the astronaut corps. “In a dangerous business, the best operators know the checklist will help them stay alive – and achieve out-of-this-world goals.” •

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Interview with Sidney Dekker

By Ole Brandt

The many rules make organizations dumber and dumber Drop your life saving rules and get rid of the “zero harm”.

I am not saying this to provoke. The data behind this statement is quite strong.

We all know that there is a lot of peer pressure.

Everyone wants to have a great safety record, but we have created a very bad safety culture

This was the very immediate response from Professor Sidney Dekker, when we had him on the phone from Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. We had asked him why safety progress in the oil and gas industry seems to have slowed to a crawl and what specific actions he would recommend that companies take.

“Zero incidents are a good moral commitment to have. But to make it a statistical target against which you are holding people – and in particular managers, boards and companies – accountable is the stupidest thing the industry could ever have done to itself. Furthermore, the oil and gas industry is unique when it comes to the sanctions it is willing to impose on evidence of non-compliance to these rules.

Initially introducing these “golden safety rules” - where non-compliance could result in losing your job - was like taking a sugar hit. The numbers at once began looking really good. Everyone behaved like boy scouts and you recorded “golden years” of supposedly incident free performance,” Sidney Dekker notes.

A climate of risk secrecy “But the sugar hit wore off because it slowly and surely created a climate of risk secrecy. In other words, you now have organizational climate

where most people are not willing to disclose their involvement in a near miss or an incident. They will not disclose that they could not both follow the rules and get the job done with the given time frame and the tools they had available.

The result of all these rules is that the organization gets dumber and dumber. It loses its safety intelligence and the authentic stories from the front line,” Sidney Dekker finds.

He concedes that rules often are based on a collection of experiences and thus help people avoid doing stupid things that have been done before – and rules are therefore necessary.

“But the last 20 years have seen an incredible addition of self-imposed stuff that does nothing to improve the bottom line. The interesting question being: Since we reached the present plateau of safety performance, how many rules have been added? My guess is a whole bunch. Yet we are still at the plateau: so clearly adding more rules is not helping. It may help some people feel better about themselves, but it makes life more difficult and miserable for those who actually have to get things done.

A very bad safety culture A rig manager told me that he stayed

in the shack and never went out on the deck anymore. When I asked him why, he said: ‘When I go out I will see at least one person violating a rule, and then I have to fire him. But I cannot afford to lose my people.

Besides, it is impossible to get the work done and at the same time follow all the rules.’ The real world is too complex, too messy and too resource restraint for that,” Dekker continues.

“It shocked me that we have created a climate of such repression of honesty, authenticity, of learning from each other and of an unwillingness to stand up and say: This is working against us.

A climate of risk secrecy ultimately becomes a climate of risk incompetence. It gets nourished in an environment in which the boss cannot hear bad news because it means that he has to fire you.

We all know that there is a lot of peer pressure. Everyone wants to have a great safety record, but we have created a bad safety culture as a result.

The Looking Good Index A good colleague in the industry once said to me: 'Everyone is talking about LTI, TRIF and MTI, but there is only one number that matters, LGI – the Looking Good Index.'

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The amount of window-dressing that goes on the whole time in order to achieve the best Looking Good Index is dramatic in the oil and gas industry compared to others. And it leads to a climate of inauthenticity and dishonesty where you constantly try to make your numbers look better.

It is THAT which I find one of the most vexing and worrying aspects and I think this is the main reason why safety progress seems to have reached a certain safety performance plateau and come to a stand still.

The big bang of Macondo We need someone with the courage to stand up and say: we should be measuring and finding indicators for completely different things. We should stop holding each other accountable for the absence of negatives because all we do is fraudulently making evidence of negatives go away. And then we get into all kinds of trouble, which show up later as in the big bang of Macondo, which over night killed 11 people – even if they supposedly had not hurt anyone during the previous six years.

I would have thought and hoped that this accident had been sufficient to spark critical thinking, to make the industry take a long hard look at itself and begin to acknowledge that the way things have been done must change. Declaring zero harm actually leads to harm and creates death because you have not been honest but been hiding incidents and accidents and thus, you have not learnt anything.”

Stop counting negatives So, what can the industry do about it, we asked Sidney Dekker, the founder of Safety Science Innovation Lab at Griffith University?

“First and foremost acknowledge honestly that you have a problem of your own making. It is really the chickens coming home to roost.

The problem is not “the dumb” people who are not following the rules or who should be trying a little harder. The problem is the lack of authenticity and the lack of willingness and courage to take a long hard look at yourself and understand your role in creating the problem that you now have.

Initially introducing these “golden safety rules” - where noncompliance could result in loosing your job - was like taking a sugar hit, but the result of all these rules is that the organization gets dumber and dumber

Step two is to stop counting negatives as a measure of your progress.

The idea in the industry is that if you have zero incidents you have been doing something really well.

However, the only thing that has been going very well is hiding stuff, not being honest about stuff, being secretive. And the other certain thing is setting yourself up for some pretty serious trouble ahead.

More incidents means you kill fewer people TRIFR etc. is not measuring safety at all. In fact the science of this shows very clearly that sites with more incidents are the ones killing fewer people. This goes for oil and gas, construction, healthcare, aviation, shipping… If you are more honest about things that go wrong or could go wrong you will end up killing fewer people. The figures speak for themselves,” says the professor and author who has flown as First Officer on Boeing 737s out of Copenhagen “Step three involves all the statistics and bureaucracy that have become a regular part of everyday life. It has blinded us all, and given us a false

assurance of being on the right track. We have put overwhelming bureaucratic accountability requirements on line managers disabling them from spending enough time out in the real life on the rig or platform.

I have met managers who told me that they easily spend 80 per cent of their time on paperwork – feeding statistics to head office, filling out forms etc. instead of being out there where the work goes on and where accidents might happen, they are typing away on their computers 10 hours out of 12.

If we want to solve this problem we need to look at the central organization and test if all they ask for from the managers in the field is really vital information? Or could we find a way of letting these managers be managers in the field and their work be field-focused and not spend feeding headquarters?” professor Dekker asks. •

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Interview with Monica Haage

By Ole Brandt

Good safety leadership is to challenge all assumptions If we take it for granted that we are safe given the precautions we have already taken, and we keep reinforcing that assumption, we are asking for trouble. earthquake had a magnitude of 9.0, and was a rare and complex double quake giving a severe duration of about 3 minutes. It caused considerable damage in the region, and the large 15-metre tsunami it created caused much more. It disabled the power supply and cooling of three Fukushima Daiichi reactors, causing a nuclear accident in which all three cores largely melted in the first three days.

Monica Haage

“The nuclear industry is very advanced and very strictly regulated, but any system can be challenged by an unexpected situation. The safety assessments cannot capture the unknown unknowns. Therefore it is key important to continuously question what is taken for granted. To be humble and inquiry our assumptions of safety.”

We are on Skype interviewing Monica Haage, Senior Nuclear Safety Specialist. Our topic is what we can learn about safety from the Great East Japan Earthquake that took place on March 11, 2011. The

“Many people have asked, why they had not taken this risk into account, and applied counter-measures before the tsunami hit,” says Monica Haage, and lets us understand that Tepco (Tokyo Electric Power Company), the Fukushima operator actually had reevaluated their tsunami preparedness at least five times before the catastrophe. In 2002 the protective wall towards the sea was raised from 3.1 to 5.7 meters and it was increased to 6.1 in 2009.

The unknown unknowns “Our conclusion based on our extensive research of events was, that their basic assumptions were not challenged enough by the regulator and the licensee. Actually they reinforced each other in the assumption

that the plant was technically sound and had the measures needed for facing any kind of event. They could not imagine the magnitude and complexity of what actually happened,” Monica Haage continues.

“There are risks we know we know, and there are risks we know, we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – they are the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

The unknown unknowns characterized the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster.

In hindsight, it’s much easier to see what should have been done. But in the present there are so many different options and ways to go that it is very difficult to take every aspect into account.

Looking back, we scrutinized both Tepco and the Japanese regulator and found many flaws in the system. I think that one of the lessons learned is that there are flaws in every system, and we have to be better in finding them before it is too late. Good safety leadership is to challenge, ask critical questions and reflect on all the assumptions that we base our contingency plans on in order to be much better prepared for the worst-case scenario.

There are risks we know, we know, and there are risks we know, we do not know.

But there are also unknown unknowns – they are the ones we don’t know, we don’t know

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Totally unprepared Japan and the Tepco staff were totally unprepared for such a complex disaster. Emergency drills had not been held in the required extent, the severe accident management guidelines were not in place, and most communication-lines broke down, as did control room instrumentation, as station blackout resulted in no electrical power which they depended on. Thus, communication between headquarters and the emergency center became virtually impossible - also because lots of the other infrastructure was destroyed.

The role of the regulator has also been scrutinized and one of the findings was that competence level was not sufficient in the regulatory body.

Even though “everyone” knows that it takes years to learn how a nuclear plant works, they had a structure of rotation where staff changed position after two or three years. Another finding was the lack of independence of the regulator. The regulator has an important role in nuclear safety infrastructure. A weak regulator can be devastating in protecting people and environment. It is the same principle for any industry.

There was also the fear of public opinion – if the regulator asked for

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further improvement of nuclear safety and design, the public might start thinking that ‘the plant is not safe’. A small example being that following an earthquake some time prior to the catastrophic one in 2011, an emergency drill was planned, but not carried out as it was thought it might create public anxiety.

becoming proactive in the systemic approach to safety.

The world is messy Another aspect is systemic. Every accident is different and when we have one we try to find the cause and fix it. But we do it in a comparta-mentalized way. We really need to work on the systemic approach taking both the technical, the human and the organizational issues into account and make them an integrated part of how we deal with safety,” Haage says.

“Tepco of course had a plan for station blackout, one for tsunami, and another for earthquake and so on, but there was no “master plan” for a situation where everything happened simultaneously. It was inconceivable and thus not part of the assumptions made.

Also there is the leadership issue. I wish leaders had more time to be both self-reflective and take time out to discuss and exchange insights with each other. If managers spend time being curious and thinking more out of the box across professional boundaries and expertise, we will be able to catch much more of the unknown unknowns before it is too late,” Monica Haage continues.

She emphasizes that it is important to be more aware of “the flow”, of how one incident may have its cause not just at one place but several different and thus influence many diverse areas. The world does not operate in boxes, it is much more messy. Therefore, it is important with the broad overview in order to break out of the “compartments” and look at the complexity of correlations between entities. This is possible to do through simple methods and we need to become better in

Managers and the real world “At the same time, working in teams will stimulate communication and the ability to share information among the various experts, thus making it easier for them to act jointly and more coordinated in every day situations, and this will foster better resilience in an emergency situation. They get to know each other much better and build mutual respect for each other’s professional qualifications, views and opinions.

We have to give up the notion that we can be in complete control. We cannot, but we should of course strive to be in as much control at humanly possible. It is important to acknowledge that we cannot create a perfect and safe system because there are always things we just have not thought of. Therefore, managers need to spend time out in the field, in real life, probing, inquiring, asking questions with the genuine wish to learn - without giving up on leadership authority.

Too often managers are busy with meetings, emails and all the administrative work that always seem to have priority. Thus, often there is a big gap between their conception and understanding of how things work out there in the real world. This is dangerous especially in a crisis situation.

A manager must know his/her plant/ rig/platform, and what their people do respectively. Knowing their strengths and weaknesses, is important so that it is possible to ask the right questions and make the critical decisions based on knowledge and facts and not just on a notion of reality,” Monica Haage says emphatically. •

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Interview with Jordan B. Peterson

By Ole Brandt

One of the most important Canadian thinkers On January 12, 2018 the daily British newspaper, The Guardian noted that professor Jordan B. Peterson’s YouTube videos had had 35 million views, and reviewing his book ”12 Rules for Life” author and journalist Tim Lott wrote: “He is fast becoming the closest that academia has to a rock star.” Dr. Peterson has also been called one of the most important Canadian thinkers.

The experiment involved recording two teams of basketball players and playing back the game to observers, who were asked to count the number of passes their team made.

During the game, a man in a gorilla suit walks on to the court, pounds his chest and then walks off. More than 50 per cent of the observers, astonishingly, did not notice the gorilla at all.

The 55-year-old professor of psychology at the University of Toronto received a degree in political science in 1982 before moving on to psychology. He earned his degree in this field in 1984 and wrote his Ph.D. in clinical psychology in 1991. Before moving to the University of Toronto as a professor in 1998, he worked as an associate professor in the psychology department at Harvard University.

He mainly studies abnormal, social, and personality psychology with a

particular interest in the psychology of religious and ideological belief, and the assessment and improvement of personality and performance.

You only see what you aim at “You only see what you aim at – not only metaphorically but also literally and physiologically. Your perception is adjusted to your aims,” Dr. Peterson says pointing to a 20-year-old experiment on inattention – the famous “Invisible Gorilla experiment”.

This experiment reveals two things, Dr. Peterson notes: that we are missing a lot of what goes on around us, and that we have no idea that we are missing so much. Belief colors perception. The gorilla experiment has become one of the best known in psychology.

12 Rules for Life In his recent book ”12 Rules for Life”, Dr. Peterson broadly discusses discipline, freedom, adventure and responsibility, distilling the world’s wisdom into 12 practical and profound rules for life. The book contains headings such as: −− “Treat yourself like you would someone you are responsible for helping”

−− “Make friends with people who want the best for you” −− “Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient)” −− “Tell the truth – or, at least, don’t lie” −− “Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t” “No one gets away with anything, ever, so take responsibility for your own life. You conjure your own world, not only metaphorically but also literally and neurologically,” is another quote from Dr. Peterson who in one of his YouTube videos also says: “Pay attention. Look around for something that bothers you, if something is in need of repair - fix it.

It will make your life a lot different.

Fix the things you do every day – the trivial, the routine stuff. They are the most important things that you do. However, do not try to fix every problem you meet. If you do not know how, you will only make things worse. Have some humility and stay within your field of competence”. •

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Interview with Rudolph Driessen

By Ole Brandt

Words are not enough - you need to show results When they came to us with an idea to improve safety, we had to show we were willing to put budget behind it.

This was part of the challenge facing Operations Director Rudolph Driessen. Welcome to Shell/ Gazprom NEFT Joint Venture, Salym Petroleum Development N.V. (SPD) in Western Siberia.

Rudolph Driessen

Imagine. You are in the middle of Western Siberia; marshland stretches out to the horizon dotted with drilling rigs. Temperatures range from minus 40 to plus 30 Celsius depending on season. You have 6,000 people and 70 + contractors working on a huge area. 90 per cent of the people working are contractors or sub-contractors. Living conditions are harsh and the cultural mindset is somewhat macho driven.

And you need to get everyone involved in a major drive towards creating an incident and injury free culture. Including the people at the head office in Moscow a 36-hour travel away. One way.

“We began by testing the current reality, and it showed quite a big divergence between what we heard from contractors, sub-contractors and even our own staff, and the perception that leadership had at the time. So, first of all we had to make the leadership understand and accept the current reality of too many incidents, too many accidents and even fatalities instead of believing that things were fine and everybody safe. Because they were not.

Based on this reality we had to create a dialog with the contracting community to make them understand and accept, that we intended to change this reality. And that really took personal, role modeling leadership,” Rudolph Driessen says.

100 or more workshops “We set up workshops with our top 70 contractors and their CEOs to start this dialog of how we jointly could change the present reality.

Simultaneously, my own leadership team started similar engagement campaigns setting up workshops with the frontline leaders on all the site locations. It was a huge job carrying out these 100 or more

workshops, and it was compulsory for all senior leaders to attend sessions.

The important thing throughout was to show that we were committed, that we firmly believed and practiced what we said so that we came across as being genuine. This was not just talk – we really care for their safety,” he continues.

“Of course we had a vision, a mission statement and a strategy statement, but we went back to the organization and the people working in the field, and together with the contractors and the leadership team we asked them to develop their own vision. How would they create an incident and injury free culture?

The bottom-up approach This bottom-up approach was a really thought provoking and unfamiliar challenge for everyone. But they worked at it enthusiastically.

And when they presented their vision statements, we as senior leaders did not change anything. This created ownership, they were not being told what to do - it was their own plan.

During this process it was also necessary to carve out time for the senior leaders – also those in Moscow - to show their commitment to the whole behavior change program and

The important thing throughout was to show that we were committed, that we firmly believed and practiced what we said

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show this in person and in the field.

If you want to win the hearts and minds of people, you must join them and be sincere in what you say. And most importantly in what you do,” Rudolph Driessen emphasizes.

I am sure this was the turning point, because now I had leaders by heart talking to “their own people” out there, where it hurts. They could do, what “an office leader” would probably never have been able to accomplish

Three major challenges He goes on to mention three other major challenges: First getting the company’s non operational business support services leader team – finance, contracting, HR etc. - who believed they had no role to play, as they were not accountable for production and operations, involved in this journey towards creating safer worksites, and convincing them that they did have a part to play. The case being that some of the unintentional

conditions they set up or maintained resulted in behavior that created both incidents and accidents.

The second one was the commercial market at the time, when the whole industry was going through financially difficult times. However, the real problem was the need for the management of contractors to demonstrate that they could make money and thus they had to keep their staff at a minimum. Making the senior leaders of our contractors realize that they had to be part of the change process was very difficult.

The third was time. “This whole process took a really long time, three years actually, and keeping this change effort in the front of my mind and being driven by enthusiasm the

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by an Incident, Injury Free working environment.

It took time because words are not enough. You need to also show results – and we did at this stage.

The results For the first time in its history SPD achieved 274 days without a Lost Time Injury (LTI),” Rudolph Driessen continues. ”The Lost Time Injury Frequency Rate for 2016 was 0.2 compared to 0.9, a breakthrough in results over previous years. This was a unique record over 13 years of Salym operations. TRIF fell from 1.2 to 0.8 and HiPo went from 23 events in 2015 to less than 5 in 2016 and Loss of Containment Events fell by 20 per cent.

Safety is now a value and a priority in everything the company does and the workforce routinely intervenes in unsafe situations with support from the leadership. The indifference is going away; people really try to help each other, a lack of cooperation between SPD representatives and contractors has been eliminated.

At the same time SPD has seen a number of improvements in the way it operates. IIF safety conversations are being regularly included in SPD business performance review meetings. The resulting alignment, collaboration and coordinated action has improved business efficiency and performance,” says Rudolph Driessen on the phone from Trinidad and Tobago, having had a great change of climate and now being General Manager for Shell Upstream in the area. whole time took a conscious effort not least in the many, many workshops and engagement sessions that we conducted. This was important for success – also not letting disappointments that occurred along the way take us off course, slow down the drive forward and/or fall back to ‘old’ ways of working and behaving.”

The turning point How did you choose the right people and/or leaders and place them in the right positions for contributing to this safety journey?

“When building this, bottom-up Incident, Injury Free (IIF) vision we used the insights from our workshops pointing out the people, who were the early followers – the people, who wanted this vision to

become a reality at their worksite.

We utilized these early followers as spearheads on our journey towards better safety. They worked together with our partnering consultant who was on site full time. These early followers weren’t simply limited to our own staff, contractor and sub contractor staff were equally enthused to take part.

The result was that more and more people joined up behind our drive.

They were not necessarily leaders by title or seniority, but they really became a driving force - the IIF ambassadors. They brought the vision they themselves had developed out into the front line. I am sure this was the turning point, because now I had leaders by heart talking to “their own people” out

there, where it hurts. They could do, what “an office leader” would probably never have been able to accomplish, and they created a fundamental change.

The Orientation Session After a year or a year and a half we saw, that contractors, subcontractors and our own people started to believe that it was possible to run an accident and incident free operation.

Primarily it was a long hard drive.

However, we did embark as part of our IIF journey, on a program we called the “Orientation Session”. It was a half-day engagement meeting with 20 people at a time participating, the target group being all 6,000 people. The task was simple: To talk to them about what we mean

“And let me just add,” he continues, “that in the course of the IIF program SPD has overcome internal resistance, prejudice and skepticism both among its own personnel and that of its contractors and subcontractors. Now the company observes a significant increase in contractors and subcontractors who are leading their own HSSE safety culture and making fundamental changes to their own approach.

Are we there yet? I don’t think so, it is an ever ongoing journey with only ZERO harm to people and environment as the end game.“ •

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Interview with Odd Oeen

By Ole Brandt

An engaged workforce is a safer workforce “No person anywhere in the world comes to work wanting to get hurt. No supervisor, manager or leader wants any of his or her people getting hurt. No corporation wants its employees getting hurt. Thus, if you have the best rules and procedures that are being followed thoughtfully by an engaged workforce, you have come a long way towards zero incidents. And that is what we are striving to achieve.”

Odd Oeen, Director of HSE Practices at Schlumberger attach importance on the word ‘engaged’ when we talk to him on the phone from London.

“Yes, accidents still happen,” he admits. “But we learn and improve constantly – and we do get wiser as time goes by. The safety guidelines that we have developed are good.

Thus, it is not a matter of developing new systems but rather looking at how people interact. We can see that people are very good at following rules and procedures and therefore, the human factor is becoming still more important seen from a safety perspective.

Involve families in safety The key issue is how we engage – really engage in safety – every single employee among the thousands of people who work everyday in hazardous environments. How do we get employees to connect with each other in their teams, and not only our employees, but also their families? Safety is not purely a “work-thing”. Safety is and should be an integrated part of our lives no matter where we are and what we are doing,” says Odd Oeen, who has spent 26 years with Schlumberger, including positions in

field environments and Operational Management, Human Resources, Training and Quality.

In their effort to increase employee engagement in safety, Schlumberger has for many years had extensive programs also engaging the families. Just recently, Schlumberger had an event in the city of Bergen in Norway. 42 kids worked on safety matters with topics like road safety, injuries, environment, how to give first aid etc. The goal was to engage and create a broad safety culture.

It is a program the company is strongly committed to and they see the benefit not only for the individual employee, but also in building common safety ground for the whole family.

Learn from the good example “In order to build and maintain a corporate culture where safety is understood to be, and is accepted as, the number one priority we need to engage everyone in the process, just as we must listen to and act on the feedback management gets from their employees. In Schlumberger we are convinced that if we can truly engage our people in safety it will result in safer operations.”

Many people question the realism in a goal of zero accidents/incidents, but we must have this clear goal. And I do believe it is possible to reach

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Quite a few people question the realism in a goal of zero accidents/ incidents, but Odd Oeen emphazises that “we must have this clear goal. And I do believe it is possible to reach. One of the things we do, in addition to looking at an incident and investigate what caused it and what we consequently need to do differently in order to avoid it happening again, is to look at the opposite, at exemplars. We have installations, locations, regions and countries where they have no incidents, and we try to find out and understand what they do in order for us to learn from their good example.

Rules and procedures are necessary.

They are – so to speak – experience

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gained over time, systematized and written down. However, it is not enough to point to, explain and tell people to follow rules and procedures even if everyone knows that they are there for good reason. We need to motivate, engage, involve and commit everyone to work safely,” Odd Oeen continues.

“The Me Me Me Generation” “Communicating in a clear and understandable language is also an important element in creating and maintaining a safe working environment. The better we know each other, the easier it is to communicate in an understandable way. Thus, in order to improve our communication, we started a study

in Schlumberger to find out: ‘who are our employees?’ When you understand to whom you are communicating, it is much easier to phrase, target and find the right method of communicating thus making it more understandable for the recipients.

What we found – among many other things – was that more than half of our 100.000 + employees belong to the millennials – also known as “the Me Me Me Generation”.

We then set out to pinpoint some of the personal characteristics of this group of people born after 1984.

Based on this new knowledge we were able to target our communication and the way we train these

people much more precisely to their needs and understanding.

We also carried out a company wide survey in order to investigate the level of engagement that the employees feel and how this correlates with the safety performance in the different business units. It showed quite clearly that an engaged workforce is a safer workforce. Maybe not surprising for HSEQ professionals, but now, what we thought we knew, has been supported by an extensive survey carried out among more than 100.000 employees in 87 countries,” Odd Oeen concludes. •

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Interview with Patrick Gilly

By Ole Brandt

We prepare for all “what-if” scenarios The Tyra Field 225 km west of Esbjerg, the largest gas condensate field in the Danish Sector of the North Sea, will be shut down from November 2019 to July 2022.

The project is actually first and foremost about safety – that is the reason why we are redeveloping Tyra in the first place

The Tyra Field is the center of Denmark’s national energy infrastructure, processing 90% of the nation’s gas production. The field was discovered in 1968 and production started in 1984 operated by Maersk Oil. Subsidence of the chalk reservoir has led to the platforms sinking by around 5 meters over the last three decades. The sinking has reduced the gap between the sea and the platform decks. The production will therefore be shut in from 2019 to 2022.

Maersk Olie & Gas – a company of Total, and the Danish Underground Consortium (DUC) have approved an investment of approximately 21bn

DKK in the full redevelopment of the Tyra Gas field.

We asked Managing Director Danish Business Unit at Maersk Olie & Gas – a company of Total, Patrick Gilly what he sees as the biggest challenges in regards to process safety and personal safety?

Substantial modifications “From a pure project execution perspective, the biggest challenge related to occupational safety is to build a generative safety leadership culture across the full project team hence allowing us to work safely and efficiently with all our contractors,” he says adding:

“When we onboard personnel for the various activities we make sure to have joint workshops with the participation of our own employees as well as contractors focusing on carrying out the work safely.

The existing facilities at Tyra will go through substantial modifications, and in order to mitigate process safety risks, production will be shut down in 2019 allowing a large number of activities to be done from a ‘cold platform’.

We furthermore front-end load as much work as we can and we have very detailed descriptions of jobs and activities in place. This way we

are truly prepared for all “what-if” scenarios,” Patrick Gilly says and continues: The main challenges “One of the main challenges present is that we will be carrying out several simultaneous operations. We will for instance be disconnecting the satellites and suspending wells while in parallel preparing the platforms to be depressurized and removed.

Managing the interface between production operations, wells and engineering is indeed a challenge and one that we are preparing for in great detail. For instance by making sure we have campaign leads present on the platforms and by applying our new electronic control of work framework.”

Are there any special safety issues that need to be taken into account when working on reconstructing and expanding the field - even if production is stopped?

“There will be a lot of checks performed to make sure we have as few surprises as possible throughout the execution of the project. We will furthermore preserve pipelines and satellites so that they are ready for safe and efficient operations when we restart production in 2022.

It is important to emphasize that safety is at the core of the entire Tyra Redevelopment project. The project is actually first and foremost about safety – that is the reason why we are redeveloping Tyra in the first place,” Patrick Gilly says. •

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Safety Conference 2018

Interview with Manfred Boeckmann

By Ole Brandt

Safety comes before profitability The firm belief that safety comes before profitability is anchored in our guiding principle.

Manfred Boeckmann, Senior VicePresident Exploration at DEA Deutsche Erdoel AG utters these words with emphasis and continues: “We encourage our employees to actively involve themselves in our relentless effort to continuously upgrade our safety standards and to build commitment in the organization.

Whether it is our own staff or contractors, everyone is called upon to identify, report and eliminate unsafe actions and behaviors. To that end, we engage our employees and contractors in hazard mitigation and risk assessment processes. For example, simultaneous operations on rigs and platforms are discussed daily and related briefings are held prior to performing activities.”

Based on the interaction with and learnings from their own staff and contractors DEA continuously update its work procedures.

4 years without LTI “However, it is important that we see through HSE regulations, inspections, and statistics. We must reach out to the hearts and minds of our people by ensuring that every individual employee has a visible and measurable impact on the health and safety of his or her co-worker, that they devote their energy and time for those left and right of them to make them feel safe - not because they have to but because they want to,” says Manfred Boeckmann, who has held various technical positions within DEA gaining experience in petroleum exploration, appraisal

and development from projects in Germany, Gulf of Suez, Nile Delta, Algeria and Morocco.

“At DEA’s Holstein base, from where we operate Germany’s largest oil field Mittelplate, we have established a comprehensive HSE database to document and share learnings from day-to-day operations. Moreover, we proactively make evidence and findings from hazard analyses accessible via regular briefings and instructions to all employees. It is important that we use multiple channels to disseminate health and safety messages and generate behavioral change. Our LTI track record at Mittelplate is a testament of the success of our approach: we had no LTI for more than 4 years,” he continues.

Take every near miss seriously “In Norway, the HSE record at our operated field development project Dvalin also supports this approach.

In 2017, there was not a single reportable accident, and not even one minor injury was recorded.

However, we do take even near misses very serious, so that we can continuously improve work procedures and avoid incidents also in the future.”

How do you integrate all QHSE aspects into day-to-day business operations?

“We hold daily safety meetings and briefings and regularly carry out job safety assessments based on hazard analyses. All findings are discussed at face-to-face events involving

We must reach out to the hearts and minds of our people

workers and representatives of HSE, medical, management, and works council to raise awareness and convert the same into action and change of worker behavior.

The importance of a sustainable safety culture is further supported by on and off the job trainings and seminars.

Furthermore, we continuously upgrade our regulations and procedures as well as the associated infrastructure and equipment to provoke improved health and safety practice, Manfred Boeckmann concludes. •

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Interview with Steen Brødbæk

By Ole Brandt

No Compromise – We Care Semco Maritime’s approach to safety is uncompromising, and procedures and instructions cannot stand alone. When the goal is zero accidents, attitudes and behaviours are equally important.

In short, it is all about culture.

“At Semco Maritime, zero accidents are not just an ambitious figure. It’s a real goal that we pursue relentlessly and without compromise year after year.”

So says Steen Brødbæk, CEO of Semco Maritime and the company’s staff of 1,200 employees, which is now rising again after Semco Maritime has recently won a number of major offshore contracts.

A number of new and less experienced employees must thus recieve the right prerequisites for working in an offshore environment with high safety standards. Semco Maritime takes a serious and uncompromising approach to this task.

“Under our safety motto No Compromise – We Care, we have been committed and dedicated to nurturing and improving our safety culture for many years. It is absolutely crucial for Semco Maritime and for me personally that our employees return home to their families in the same great shape as when they left,” Steen Brødbæk emphasizes.

How to establish a safety culture ...

To work offshore at Semco Maritime, an employee must conduct a screening interview that clarifies whether the employee has the right mindset in relation to safety behaviour.

Next, the employee is introduced to Semco Maritime’s safety policies and instructions.

“Before going offshore, the employee is welcomed by experienced colleagues at the airport to facilitate a good safety start. When arriving offshore, the new employees are always matched with experienced colleagues in work teams.

This has proven to be a good way to ensure the right safety behaviour,” says Brødbæk.

In parallel, the offshore foremen attend courses in safety awareness and specific courses targeting to coach safety leadership and responsibilities.

“On top of that, we have onshore management visiting our offshore personnel on a regular basis to ensure that everybody knows that

safety is top of mind throughout the organisation”, Steen Brødbæk says. ..and how to conduct it It is Steen Brødbæk’s clear experience that words and instructions cannot fulfil the goals when it comes to safety. Behaviour and culture have to be learned and taught to ensure that safety becomes part of all

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It is absolutely crucial for Semco Maritime and for me personally that our employees return home to their families in the same great shape as when they left

Safety Conference 2018

employees’ DNA. At Semco Maritime this includes, among other things, campaigns that speak to employees’ emotions to get their attention.

“Once a year, we conduct a safety culture survey with a high response rate, and the results have been very positive. At the same time, we run campaigns that illustrate employees in recreational situations such as hunting, playing football with their children and other activities that fully fit employees are able to do in their spare time – as a reminder of the deprivation of an employee who has suffered an occupational injury, “says Steen Brødbæk. Other campaigns focus on safety at home because accidents may occur at home as well during a moment’s inattentiveness. Good safety behaviour is always, everywhere.

“We also stimulate employees to talk about professional and private safety issues, which the individual employee has experienced. This has proven a good way of discussing safety and affecting the culture,” says Steen Brødbæk.

The results speak for themselves: Semco Maritime has registered no severe offshore safety incidents for several years.

“The zero must be kept, and at Semco Maritime it’s more than just an ambition. We are striving to establish the right culture, and is continuously working dedicatedly to sharpen the safety mind-set.” •

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Safety Conference 2018

Interview with Flemming Horn Nielsen

By Ole Brandt

A set of relatively simple, but very effective, HSE initiatives The backbone in the INEOS SHE approach to safety is a set of 20 Principles - 10 on behavioural safety and 10 on process safety - that every INEOS business must comply with.

“When it comes to safety, we should always be humble and curious to learn from others. And as an oil & gas company recently acquired by the INEOS Group, which has an impressive safety performance, we are of course very keen to see what we can learn from our new colleagues,” says Flemming Horn Nielsen, CEO for INEOS Oil & Gas Denmark. Up until a year ago, when INEOS acquired DONG Energy’s North Sea oil and gas, he was responsible for Operated Assets in DONG Oil & Gas. “If we look at safety performance data from official sources as IOGP or the US Department of Labour, the data tell us that downstream companies tend to perform better on safety than upstream companies (using the American OSHA incident frequency). This can among other things be explained by the variances in activities and diverse risk exposures, but other differences such as safety culture maturity and reporting culture also play a role.

7 Life Saving Rules INEOS, with mainly downstream activities, has managed to make a set of relatively simple, but very effective, HSE initiatives, which are implemented across all INEOS businesses. The initiatives come with a thorough follow-up process and clear accountabilities, so there should be no doubt about who is responsible for what, when it comes

A well prepared job is crucial for safety and that is the reason why we have a best practice of using a number of job preparation initiatives

to safety,” Flemming Horn Nielsen emphasizes adding: “The principles in the INEOS SHE approach have been developed after analysing what could have prevented serious accidents occurring both within the INEOS businesses and in the industry as such. The 20 Principles are further supported by INEOS Group Guidance Notes, which set the best practice for implementing the principles. The guidance notes also include a set of 7 Life Saving Rules applicable to all INEOS businesses.”

Simple and powerful follow-up methodology Bearing in mind that the INEOS group has more than 18,500 employees located at 181 sites in 22 countries, INEOS has managed to develop a very simple, and maybe therefore also very powerful follow-up methodology to ensure that all INEOS businesses comply with the 20 Principles and Guidance Notes.

“For INEOS top management, compliance with the 20 Principles is critical in keeping our operations

safe. Therefore, it is vital that we are able to accurately judge our compliance and focus improvements on the right areas. Each year all INEOS businesses are audited according to the 20 Principles to help ensuring continuous improvements and full compliance with the principles across the INEOS Group,” Flemming Horn Nielsen continues.

In your opinion, how great an impact does safety have on business efficiency and performance?

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“I would reverse the question.

Business efficiency and performance have a big impact on safety. You can only continuously run a safe, efficient and profitable business if you have an organisation with the right competencies – acquired through experience and training - and if you have created the right framework for the work effort to be performed. By framework, I mean anything from financial conditions, physical environment and leadership to management systems. And they are all interlinked.

Planning is crucial for safety If for example we take the management system, it is reflecting the company’s “corporate memory” and

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Business efficiency and performance have a big impact on safety

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defining best practice – a best practice based on legal requirements, relevant international standards complete with industry and company best practice - and based on learnings from past incidents. Thus, having an adequate management system in place with procedures and instructions defining relevant safety management processes typically will also have a positive impact on quality and efficiency and vice versa.

Planning is another example, where leadership and processes are particularly relevant when talking about both safety, quality and efficiency. A well prepared job is crucial for safety and that is the reason why we have a best practice of using a number

of job preparation initiatives such as the permit to work systems, safe job analysis and tool box talks. The better we plan a job, the better we can identify risks and mitigate them, and the less surprises we will meet performing a job, which potentially could lead to incidents. The exact same principle goes for quality and efficiency. The better we plan the job, the better and more efficiently we can complete it in the right quality,” says Flemming Horn Nielsen, who has 28 years of industrial experience and has held a number of technical and managerial positions offshore and onshore in Denmark, UK, Qatar and Holland. •

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Safety Conference 2018

Interview with Peter Hellsberg

By Ole Brandt

Facilitations ensure that we actually walk the talk Nobody should be at the risk of getting ill or injured while working at Novo Nordisk, says Peter Hellsberg, Vice President Corporate Occupational Health & Safety.

Millions of people all over the world use products from Novo Nordisk, and making them available to these people is what the employees at Novo Nordisk consider a key contribution in creating value for society.

Equally fundamental for their operation is a safe working environment.

Nobody should be at the risk of getting ill or injured while working at Novo Nordisk

Safety work at Novo Nordisk is based on the values that are expressed in the ‘Novo Nordisk Way’. It sets direction, applies to all employees and is supported by ‘The Essentials’, which are ten statements describing what the ‘Novo Nordisk Way’ looks like in practice.

“This is the credo of the company.

The quintessence in one of The Essentials being: −− We establish safe working conditions −− We support our employees in making safe choices Nobody should be at the risk of getting ill or injured while working at Novo Nordisk. The ‘Occupational Health & Safety (OHS)’, ‘Policy and Code of Conduct’ and ‘OHS Management System’ furthermore enforce this,” says Peter Hellsberg.

A differentiator from other companies We asked him how he makes sure that ‘The Essentials” etc. are followed both in research, manufacturing and distribution?

“The Novo Nordisk way applies to all parts of the company globally and

we use facilitations as a systematic approach to follow up on how the ‘Novo Nordisk Way’ is lived across the organization. This is an important aspect of the Novo Nordisk culture, and we see it as a differentiator from other companies. Facilitations are conducted by the Senior Facilitators. Put in a simple way, we use facilitations to ensure that we actually walk the talk.”

In which areas do you face the potentially most severe safety hazards? And what do you do in order to counter adverse events?

Exposure to hazardous substances “In Novo Nordisk we innovate, develop and manufacture medicines. The Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (API) are designed to affect the human body. Thus, we

have a potential risk of exposing our staff to API’s and chemicals. In order to mitigate any potential negative effects, limits of the acceptable concentration in the workplace air have been introduced. Depending on the risk, different levels of containment and protective equipment are used.

Due to the systematic work to reduce exposure to hazardous substances, other work related risks such as slip, trip and falls, ergonomics and transportation (mostly driving related) are now more predominant when it comes to accidents in the workplace. Programs to reduce these risks are under way or have been developed, and we also look into how behavior based safety can further improve our Health & Safety performance,” Peter Hellsberg concludes. •

Image: NovoNordisk

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Interview with Paul Robbins

By Ole Brandt

A safety culture starts at the top Implementing a safety culture throughout a worldwide business is a long distance journey - not a sprint.

Vestas Wind Systems is the only global energy company dedicated exclusively to wind, and so far it has populated the world with more than 59,000 turbines installed on behalf of customers in more than 70 countries across six continents.

When we talked to Paul Robbins, Global Subject Matter Expert Health and Safety at Vestas, we started by asking him how he promotes and maintains safety with an international and dispersed workforce of more than 23,000 people?

“We recruit, train and trust the integrity of our employees worldwide to follow the Vestas Safety Principles, Life Saving Rules and relevant safety documentation such as the Occupational Health and Safety Manual, Work instructions/Risk assessments. We also give every employee the authority to STOP any activity, which they feel may be unsafe to proceed with,” Paul Robbins says.

The special challenges In relation to hazardous energy, Vestas has a global Lock Out Tag Out (LOTO) initiative to control and mitigate the risk of hazardous energy. All technicians that may be exposed to this risk are specifically trained and Vestas Life Saving Rule #2– Always Lock Out Tag Out before work and test before touch, must be enforced and complied with.

Does working in a multinational and multicultural environment create special challenges when you want to create a culture of zero accidents/ incidents?

“Yes, definitely,” he says with emphasis. “The challenge is to identify where on the safety journey the country may be and to implement the appropriate safety initiatives/ tools in that area to encourage safety maturity through the Bradley curve. Leadership must maintain the same constant safety message to all employees to create clarity and remove ambiguity. Safety First.”

One size does not fit all Have you made some surprising discoveries along the way - something that others can benefit from, and if so, what?

“One size does not fit all, however the same global safety standards must be communicated, implemented and achieved. Safety perception in different parts of the world has a great disparity. As we move into new and emerging markets, the local perception is that they work safe. Local leading and lagging indicators would also support this theory, however when you scratch the surface and use experienced international H&S Auditors/ Inspectors a true reflection of their safety is revealed.

It’s important to analyze indicators and performance to identify where on the Bradley curve a country may be and what safety initiatives (tools) to implement at the appropriate time and level on their safety journey. A behavioral safety program such as ‘My Team My Responsibility’ may be considered too advanced for some countries/facilities to be successful so here focus should

Leadership must maintain the same constant safety message to all employees to create clarity and remove ambiguity

perhaps be placed on establishing good solid safety compliance foundations before introducing the more advanced programs,” Paul Robbins suggests.

Leaders must walk the talk How do you (strive to) create a corporate culture where safety is understood to be, and is accepted as the number one priority?

“It requires a dedicated leadership to encourage and raise safety awareness throughout the business. Leaders regularly carry out safety walks to discuss any safety related issues. We encourage every employee to openly discuss, communicate and promote safety. We expect every employee to look after their own safety - and their colleagues. We all have the authority to stop and question any act, which may be considered unsafe, discuss, brief and correct it if necessary. We

also appreciate and have the dignity to accept any safety intervention or question that may be pointed at us.”

What lessons have you learned in the process of creating a “safety first” culture at Vestas?

“A safety culture starts at the top and is promoted by all leaders in the company. Leaders must walk the talk, demonstrate and communicate regularly on safety initiatives and issues. This clear leadership integrity is key to implementing a safety culture throughout a business. It’s a long distance journey and not a sprint; don’t expect things to happen overnight. It takes time for the employees to understand and appreciate what you are trying to achieve,” Paul Robbins says emphatically. •