Risk Memory (Risk Has No Memory)
Consulting and Coaching
Memories
Chris Venn
Chris has worked in technical safety and risk for over 30 years and built high performing technical teams on three continents.
His experience includes over 15 years in Consulting then 15 years working for a major oil company, rising to Process Safety Manager for an LNG facility
He founded Risk Memory in 2021 to offer consulting, coaching and auditing focused on developing informed clients
RISK STUDIES DON’T MAKE US SAFE
It’s not the studies that make us safe, it’s the decisions we make and the actions we take.
Admittedly I’ve seen some safety studies thick enough to hunker down behind...but...any study done to tick a box is, at best, an opportunity lost. It is legally relevant data that can be used against the recipient at a later date in an internal audit or, in the worst case, a court of law.
Worse than tick-box exercises are studies used to justify a decision already taken. Classic examples are when it’s used to “risk-away” an issue such as the fitment of an expensive safeguard, or delaying intervention on a known operational concern.
Finally, if you invest in a study and trust the team, don't ignore the recommendations. Each one must be addressed. This doesn't necessarily mean they must all be actioned, but any decision to tolerate the concern that has been raised must be made visible.
Hence, my guidance is as follows:
1. Only do risk studies when a decision is required. When the answer is clear, just do it.
2. Agree how the results will be used before the study is undertaken.
3. Validate input data and select a balanced team
4. Trust the team, but verify the study before completion
TRUST BUT VERIFY
During my first year in Kazakhstan I outlined my approach to improving skills in Risk Management and Loss Prevention. A very smart translator responded “...ahh, you mean Доверяй, но проверяй- Trust, but Verify”. This old Russian proverb encapsulates so much that it became part of my vocabulary.
Nine years later I found it had similarly entered President Reagan’s lexicon when negotiating with President Gorbachev.
It is sometimes argued that the act of verifying precludes trust. In contrast, some things are so important they require verification. If used expediently I find it engenders a safe learning environment; however, over-application becomes “micro management” and fosters a lack of trust. When does over-application lead to a tick-box culture of checks, or an abdication of responsibility for self-verification? These are particularly pernicious, unintended outcomes that can hide in plain view during audit.
DON’T DUMB DOWN, DUMB UP!
One of my favourite tales as a consultant was a meeting between two colleagues and a client. One colleague was a true expert, the other was a little more like me; an information interpreter. The expert was trying to explain a complex issue to the client and after several goes, all met with a puzzled face he turned to his colleague in exasperation and said “I’ve dumbed it down as much as I can, could you try?”. Not a good image to give the client. A true story.
In my experience “dumbing-down” doesn’t work. It lead to loss of critical information and can also lead to the outcome being used out of context with further loss of fidelity. Equally, we all know that to impact busy people we must be able to describe an issue and make a recommendation in just a couple of slides. The answer is to “dumb-up”. Recognise that most folks are smart, so give them the outcomes with enough hooks to the analysis to answer questions. Equally, be ready to fully explain what sits behind the work in back-up material or pre-read.
Where the field is highly specialised, it can help to provide the decision-makers with some pre-training before presenting the outcomes. This helps ensure they will understand the context and the limitations of the information that will be available. Just don’t try to do it in the same meeting or assume they will understand….
Being an Informed Client is about learning to understand the experts and Dumb-Up where necessary
The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between
Sadly my musical talents are so bad I even play air guitar off key. I am jealous and deeply admiring of those with talent. The quote above is often attributed to Mozart, although Debussy similarly said “Music is the space between the notes.”
In exactly the same way, Process Safety Management is as much about the space between the elements as the elements themselves. In particular active management of the gaps, overlaps, and links between Asset Integrity, Risk Management and Management of Change is vital. Overlaps in areas of standards, processes and procedures can be as problematic as the gaps leading to confusion (different meanings for the same acronym), rework, and conflicting standards.
At leadership level we also need to manage conflicting requirements between Safety, Environment and Operations. 25 years ago I was fortunate enough to be involved in a mass transit rail project that adopted ideas from the defence sector to actively manage these conflicts. That approach is now well defined in the rail sector as Systems Assurance. What similar, active approaches are currently in-use in Oil & Gas?
THE METAPHYSICS OF QUALITY
A few years back a Facebook meme was the listing of your ten favourite books. I struggled to narrow a list down, with only one guaranteed entry. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig ISBN 0-09-978640-0). In his Author’s note Pirsig states…
“What follows is based on actual occurrences. Although much has been changed for rhetorical purposes, it must be regarded in essence as fact. However it should in no way be associated with that great body of factual information relating to orthodox Zen Buddhist practice. It’s not very factual on motorcycles either”.
This understated paragraph says more about what it isn’t than what it is. And that’s the crux – it’s hard to define a book that can be read as a road trip of discovery, as a relationship between father and son, a guide to studying (or to teaching), as a dialogue on mental illness, or as an investigation into the metaphysics of quality.
A fundamental question it raises is, ‘how can we express an idea before the words exist?’ Kahneman’s book "Thinking Fast and Slow" (ISBN 978-0374275631) explains this in immediate terms whereby our fast thought pathways give emotional response which may then be characterised, interpreted and if necessary overwritten by our slower, conscious thoughts.
However, Pirsig is digging deeper, back to when the words hadn’t been invented to externalise those thoughts. Through this he is also defining quality as something that cannot be defined without diminishing its meaning as – just like the fast pathway – it precedes conscious thought.
It’s easy to see why Pirsig focused on what the book wasn’t rather than what it was...And if you are wondering about its relevance to Technical Safety, then the answer is how isn’t it? How do we make decisions under stress, or with uncertain inputs; how do we explain those decisions after the fact, and, fundamentally, how do we teach others to explore concepts not easily placed in words especially in languages different from our own?
Informed Client
On January 17th 2024 I gave a talk to the Aberdeen branch of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers outlining my experience in developing Informed Clients for Process Safety Management, along with some examples. The embedded video runs the presentation, or you can click to download the slides as a PDF.
Once you have watched this, please visit my "Services" page for more details on my approach