The Safety Leadership Process©

The Four Simple Steps to Safety Excellence

    how to improve workplace safety

  1. Get clear, focused, and determined.
    Co-create the Safety Strategic Plan© using the Process Enneagram©. Keep it posted, talked about, and used.
  2. Build trust and interdependence.
    Develop the shared, co-created Principles and Standards of behavior that are needed to achieve safety excellence. Live by them in doing the work on the Issues that need to be addressed to improve safety performance. Hold each other accountable. Let everyone know you deeply care about safety and everyone going home healthy and in one piece. Make this work open and visible for everyone to see and to model in his or her own work. Trust and interdependence emerge as people learn to work together this way.
  3. Talk with everyone, share information openly, and listen to each other.

    Walk around, talking and listening, every day. As people get to know you better and see you being honest and keeping your word, trying to improve yourself and admitting to mistakes when they are made, trust builds.

    (Since over 95% of all injuries and incidents are the result of the actions of people, go look at what people are doing. Do Safe Acts Auditing to see and keep track of how people are working. Show the people you really care about improving safety.

    These audits give a quick indication of what is happening in the safety culture, providing clues to changes; a drop in the Safe Acts Index (SAI) indicates a potential injury is about to happen. The patterns of behaviors that are seen indicate areas of strength and areas of weakness that need to be addressed. Perhaps there are bad habits or more training is needed, or there is a confusing mixed message or a deeper systems problem needs to be straightened out. When people see and become aware of what is happening, focused attention can be applied.)

  4. Quickly take the appropriate actions on new information that is created to correct the problems that the patterns of unsafe behaviors observed indicate. Remember that the information developed in these Audits is for learning about how to improve the safety performance. If this Safe Acts Auditing tool is used for punishment, the integrity and value of this process is lost.
    Evolve steps 1, 2, 3 and 4 all at the same time as the Safety Leadership Process™ develops. They are all interconnected and interacting all the time. Do them over and over again.

    • It takes the courage to hold each other accountable, to have the difficult conversations, to make decisions, and to act.
    • It requires the care to do every thing as well as you can.
    • It requires the concern for the impacts for all the changes on all the stakeholders.
    • It requires the commitment to stay the course in both the good and difficult times, day after day, month after month, year after year!
    • This is the essence of safety leadership.

Most companies and the people in them want to have a safe place in which to work. Cynics who exist, must be stuck in really poor companies, at the low end of the distribution curve. Life for them must be dark and gloomy. Come into the light with The Safety Leadership Process©.

Building the BOWL to Manage Organizational Change

Organizations are complex evolving systems. Just about all the things going on in organizations are complex interactions of people, changing technology and the changing environment. Change is happening all the time.

This idea is in sharp contrast to our more mechanistic thinking that is common in many organizations where change is seen as a nuisance and people just wish management would make it stop. When I was the Plant Manager people pushed me constantly to slow all the changes down and prioritize the things we needed to do. Yet changes were coming fast and furious. At one point I asked them how do I prioritize an avalanche? I could work on the stuff for today, but tomorrow brought a new set of changes and all the priorities would change.

leadership BOWLWhen I began to learn about chaos and complexity science, I saw that this was the way to handle the high level of change. As we shared more and more information, helped people to really understand the nature of the business and their important roles in its success, and as we built more trust and interdependence, people began to step forward to help us take on all the changes that poured into our organization. I did not have to do everything myself, which was a great relief.

One of the key ideas was the creation of the BOWL. Control of the organization shifted from edicts and directions just coming from me to building the BOWL which was our co-created mission, vision, standards, principles, and expectations. When people had internalized these ideas, they could operate with a lot of freedom as long as they stayed within the BOWL which they always did. We talked a lot about this and just about everyone had a good understanding of it and their responsibility related to it. With the BOWL we could have order and freedom simultaneously without the organization falling apart.

As you lead your organizations and struggle with all the changes you are facing, consider the idea of building the BOWL by learning more about this way of leading.

A Question to Ponder

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.

America’s Safest Companies gather in Atlanta, Georgia

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

The Process Enneagram©: Essays on Theory and Practice

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.

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

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.

Complex Systems Safety Leadership Process©

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

By continuing to use the site, you agree to the use of cookies. more information

The cookie settings on this website are set to "allow cookies" to give you the best browsing experience possible. If you continue to use this website without changing your cookie settings or you click "Accept" below then you are consenting to this.

Close