Friday, February 24, 2012

More BP

We have posted numerous times on the travails of BP following the Deepwater Horizon disaster and the contribution of safety culture to these performance results.  BP is back in the news since the trial date for a variety of suits and countersuits is coming up shortly.  We thought we would take the opportunity for a quick update.

The good news is the absence of any more significant events at BP facilities.  In its presentation to investors on 4Q11 and 2012 Strategy, BP highlighted its 10 point moving forward plan, including at the top of the list, “relentless focus on safety and managing risk”.* 

It is impossible for us to assess how substantive and effective this focus has been or will be, but we’ve now heard from BP’s Board member Frank Bowman.  Bowman is head of the Board’s Safety, Ethics and Environment Assurance Committee.  He served on the panel that investigated BP’s US refineries after the Texas City explosion in 2005 and then became a member of BP’s US advisory council; and in November 2010, he joined the main board as a non-executive director.  Basically Bowman’s mission is to help transfer his U.S. nuclear navy safety philosophy to BP’s energy business.

Bowman reports that he has been impressed by the way the safety and operational risk and upstream organizations have taken decisions to suspend operations when necessary. “We’ve recently walked away from several jobs where our standards were not being met by our partners or a contractor. That sends a message heard around the world, and we should continue to do that.”**

Looking for more specifics in the 4Q11 investor presentation, we came across the following “safety performance record”. (BP 4Q11, p. 12)


The charts plot “loss of containment” issues (these are basically releases of hydrocarbons) and personnel injury frequency.  The presentation notes that “Aside from the exceptional activities of the Deepwater Horizon response, steady progress has been made over the last decade.”  Perhaps but we are skeptical that these data are useful for measuring progress in the area of safety culture and management.  For one they both show positive trends over a time period where BP had two major disasters - the Texas City oil refinery fire in 2005 and Deepwater Horizon in 2010.  At a minimum these charts confirm that the tracked parameters do nothing to proactively predict safety health.  As Mr. Bowman notes, “Culture is set by the collective behaviour of an organisation’s leaders… The collective behaviour of BP’s leaders must consistently endorse safety as central to our very being.” (BP Magazine, p. 10)

On the subject of management behavior, the investigations and analyses of Deepwater Horizon consistently noted the contribution of business pressures and competing priorities that lead to poor decisions.  In our September 30, 2010 blog post we included a quote from the then-new BP CEO:

“Mr. Dudley said he also plans a review of how BP creates incentives for business performance, to find out how it can encourage staff to improve safety and risk management.”

The 4Q11 presentation and Mr. Bowman’s interview are noticeably silent on this subject.  The best we could come up with was the following rather cryptic statement in the 4Q11: “We’ve also evolved our approach to performance management and reward, requiring employees to set personal priorities for safety and risk management, focus more on the long term and working as one team.” (BP 4Q11, p. 15)  We’re not sure how “personal priorities” relate to the compensation incentives which were the real focus of the concerns expressed in the accident investigations.

Looking a bit further we uncovered the following in a statement by the chairwoman of BP’s Board Remuneration Committee: “For 2011 the overall policy for executive directors [compensation] will remain largely unchanged…”***  If you guessed that incentives would be based only on meeting business results, you would be right.

In closing we leave with one other comment from Mr. Bowman, one that we think has great salience in the instant situation of BP and for other high risk industries including nuclear generation: “In any business dealing with an unforgiving environment, complacency is your worst enemy. You have to be very careful about what conclusion to draw from the absence of an accident.” (BP Magazine, p. 9) [emphasis added]


BP 4Q11 & 2012 Strategy presentation, p. 8.

**  BP Magazine, Issue 4 2011, p. 9.

***  Letter from the chairman of the remuneration committee (Mar. 2, 2011).

Monday, February 13, 2012

Is Safety Culture An Inherently Stable System?

The short answer:  No.

“Stable” means that an organization’s safety culture effectiveness remains at about the same level* over time.  However, if a safety culture effectiveness meter existed and we attached it to an organization, we would see that, over time, the effectiveness level rises and falls, possibly even dropping to an unacceptable level.  Level changes occur because of shocks to the system and internal system dynamics.

Shocks

Sudden changes or challenges to safety culture stability can originate from external (exogenous) or internal (endogenous) sources.

Exogenous shocks include significant changes in regulatory requirements, such as occurred after TMI or the Browns Ferry fire, or “it’s not supposed to happen” events that do, in fact, occur, such as a large earthquake in Virginia or a devastating tsunami in Japan that give operators pause, even before any regulatory response.

Organizations have to react to such external events and their reaction is aimed at increasing plant safety.  However, while the organization’s focus is on its response to the external event, it may take its eye off the ball with respect to its pre-existing and ongoing responsibilities.  It is conceivable that the reaction to significant external events may distract the organization and actually lower overall safety culture effectiveness.

Endogenous shocks include the near-misses that occur at an organization’s own plant.  While it is unfortunate that such events occur, it is probably good for safety culture, at least for awhile.  Who hasn’t paid greater attention to their driving after almost crashing into another vehicle?

The insertion of new management, e.g., after a plant has experienced a series of performance or regulatory problems, is another type of internal shock.  This can also raise the level of safety culture—IF the new management exercises competent leadership and makes progress on solving the real problems. 

Internal Dynamics    

Absent any other influence, safety culture will not remain at a given level because of an irreducible tendency to decay.  Decay occurs because of rising complacency, over-confidence, goal conflicts, shifting priorities and management incentives.  Cultural corrosion, in the form of normalization of deviance, is always pressing against the door, waiting for the slightest crack to appear.  We have previously discussed these challenges here.

An organization may assert that its safety culture is a stability-seeking system, one that detects problems, corrects them and returns to the desired level.  However, performance with respect to the goal may not be knowable with accuracy because of measurement issues.  There is no safety culture effectiveness meter, surveys only provide snapshots of instant safety climate and even a lengthy interview-based investigation may not lead to repeatable results, i.e, a different team of evaluators might (or might not) reach different conclusions.  That’s why creeping decay is difficult to perceive. 

Conclusion

Many different forces can affect an organization’s safety culture effectiveness, some pushing it higher while others lower it.  Measurement problems make it difficult to know what the level is and the trend, if any.  The takeaway is there is no reason to assume that safety culture is a stable system whose effectiveness can be maintained at or above an acceptable level.


*  “Level” is a term borrowed from system dynamics, and refers to the quantity of a variable in a model.  We recognize that safety culture is an organizational property, not something stored in a tank, but we are using “level” to communicate the notion that safety culture effectiveness is something that can improve (go up) or degrade (go down).

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

VIT Plant Glop (Part 2)

(Ed. note: We're pleased to present an interesting take on the Vit Plant from Bill Mullins as a guest contributor.  We welcome contributions from others who would like to contribute leading edge thinking on nuclear safety culture.)

Bob Cudlin’s Jan. 24 post concludes, "Our advice for the Vit Plant would be as follows.  In terms of expectations, enforcing rather than setting might be the better emphasis."

From where I sit, in this simple piece of seemingly practical advice hides much of the iceberg the WTP Titanic keeps circling around to repeatedly encounter amidst the fog of Nuclear Safety Culture (NSC) and such.

The key word is "expectations” – this is because for DOE the definition of Quality is “performance that meets or exceeds requirements and expectations.” Importantly the DOE Quality standard embraces a “continuous improvement” criterion. This definition of Quality and its attendant context are considerably more expansive than the one found at 10 CFR 50 Appendix B – and there is a very necessary reason for that.

At the Program level all the DOE Mission portfolios are of the Discover and Develop type. DOE programs and projects are chartered to go where none has gone before (i.e. nor generally can afford the capital risks to go such places first).

Not every project in DOE is of comparable difficulty, but many (e.g., the Environmental Management Program) of the sub-portfolios (e.g., Hanford Cleanup) take decades of trial and error practice to create reliable Acquisition Strategies.

Even now the Hanford Cleanup work is pretty well partitioned between 1) things we now do reliably and with a modicum of efficiency (cf. River Corridor Cleanup contract), and 2) that Goop/Gorp unconventional uncertainty. Today the former goes well and the latter goes poorly.

The WTP is a full-blooded Discover and Develop enterprise - the high-level tank waste is vastly more subtle in its physical chemistry than DOE and its prime contractor have been willing to acknowledge to their stakeholders in the Tri-Party Agreement with EPA and WA State. The stakeholders seem reluctant to puncture the veil of schedule illusion as well.

Generally I conclude the River Protection Program (RPP), which governs the WTP development, is not sufficiently aware of its vulnerability to unconventional uncertainty. It is the more unpredictable behavior of the tank waste that should be the center of attention; not unrealistic schedules and life cycle budget estimates into the far future.

It is this (some would say “studied”) blindness that the DNFSB is ultimately getting at via its nuclear safety oversight charter – I’m inclined to doubt that the Board recognizes the blind spot any better than most in DOE leadership. Like the carpenter with only a hammer on his tool belt, the Board’s way of framing issues with progress at the RPP tends to make every unanticipated or unwelcome outcome seem like a “nuclear safety nail.”

At the end of most days this over-dramatization of nuclear safety significance has been a deliberate strategy of the Board since it began its Safety in Design “action-forcing” campaign about four years ago.

In broad reality, the situation of the RPP can be viewed as a matter of inadequate safety consciousness or poorly chosen Acquisition Strategy – the latter perspective has more traction precisely because in encompasses protection concerns without being dragged into the “good vs. bad” attitude debates – which tend to be the heart of NSC conversations - that are presently fogging the air of the Hanford 200 Area.

Later in Bob’s post he observes: “In fact, reading all the references and the IP leave the impression that DOE believes there is no fundamental safety culture issue.”

This conclusion is not without its supporting evidence: From the time that the Walt Thomasitus pushback on Bechtel Management began, DOE Office of River Protection project management has responded from a position that reeks annoyance and resentment. This has not helped with sorting out the key issues at the WTP, in fact when the Recommendation 2011-1 appeared the knee-jerk defensive response of the Deputy Secretary actually made things worse for a time.

There are now three prominent whistle-blowers feeding the maw of both GAO and the national press.*  Unfortunately, Thomasitus, Alexander, and Busche each raise concerns about whether the plant will work as advertised – not as matters of Acquisition Strategy, but as safety issues. That is unfortunate because it leads to this: “The treatment plant "is not a project that can be stopped and restarted," said Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash.”**

Just lately, we have a memorandum from the Secretary and Deputy Secretary that I believe finally puts a suitable Line Management framework around the 2011-1 IP and the WTP issue.  It will take a further post to elaborate the basis for my belief that this particular memorandum “answers the mail” about NSC in the DOE nuclear programs. At that point I can also suggest what I see as the barriers to this missive gaining the policy high ground against the wave of other “over-commitments” throughout the remainder of the 2012-1 IP.

(Mr. Mullins is a Principal at Better Choices Consulting.)


*  P. Eisler, “Problems plague cleanup at Hanford nuclear waste site,” USA Today (Jan. 25, 2012).

**  P. Eisler, “Safety at Wash. nuclear-waste site scrutinized,” USA Today (Jan. 27, 2012).

***  Letter from D.B. Poneman to P.S. Winokur transmitting DOE Memorandum dated Dec. 5, 2011 from S. Chu and D.B. Poneman to Heads of All Departmental Elements re: Nuclear Safety at the Department of Energy (Jan. 24, 2012).