Presenting on findings published in international journal Safety Science, Professor Hopkins’ presentation is set to focus on the role of managerial visits with front-line workers and what contribution these visits can make to securing safer working environments.
According to Professor Hopkins “Many companies understand that good management requires senior managers to spend time with frontline workers. Some companies build into performance agreements for senior managers a requirement that they conduct a certain number of such site visits each year. The challenge is to make productive use of these visits. Safety is often a focus for visiting VIPs, but too often safety is understood to be a matter of “˜slips, trips and falls’, rather than the major hazards that can blow the plant or the rig apart.”
Set to be elaborated on in his presentation, Professor Hopkins’ article examines the VIP visit made to the Deepwater Horizon rig by senior managers from BP and by the rig owner, Transocean, just hours before the explosion. It argues that, despite their best intentions, these managers fell into the trap identified in the abstract above. The paper also looks at strategies that senior managers can do to focus attention on the most significant hazards.
“About seven hours before the Gulf of Mexico oil well blowout of 2010, a group of four company VIPs helicoptered onto the drilling rig in question, the Deepwater Horizon“. Professor Hopkins says “They had come on a “˜management visibility tour’ and were actively touring the rig when disaster struck. The blowout resulted in eleven fatalities and the worst oil spill in US history. It has been exhaustively analysed in the report of the National Oil Spill Commission (2011) and is the subject of more than a dozen books. The four VIPs were among the survivors.
“There were several indications in the hours before the accident that the well was not sealed and was at risk of blowing out. These indicators were all either missed or misinterpreted by the rig staff. The touring VIPs, two from BP and two from Transocean, had all worked as drilling engineers or rig managers in the past and had a detailed knowledge of drilling operations. Had they focused their attention on what was happening with the well, they would almost certainly have recognised the warning signs for what they were, and called a halt to operations. But their attention was focused elsewhere, and an opportunity to avert disaster was lost.
“There is a tragic irony here. A major purpose of the visit was to emphasise the importance of safety, and yet the visitors paid almost no attention to the safety critical activities that were occurring during their visit. What were they doing? Where was their attention focused? How might their visit have had a happier outcome? “These are the questions this paper seeks to answer. There are lessons here for all senior managers who undertake management visibility tours in major hazard facilities.
“The information on which this paper is based came to light in the inquiry into the accident held jointly by the US Coast Guard and the US Department of the Interior, and most of the references here are to the transcript from that inquiry.”
Professor Hopkins’ paper concludes by stating “Management-by-wandering-around is a widely recognised and advocated activity (Buckner, 2008; Frankel, 2008; Peters and Waterman, 1982). Such walk-arounds are not always focused on safety. But where they are, as this one was, executives need to plan their strategies carefully. One very important activity is to talk to employees in such as way a to elicit from them information about what might be going wrong (Hopkins, 2008, pp. 116-119).
“Very often they are the ones who know best that something is amiss. But just as importantly, senior executives need to engage in their own informal auditing, making sure to sample the detail. Trevor Kletz puts it thus: After an explosion managers have often said, “˜”˜I didn’t know that the employees were not following correct procedures. If I had known I would have stopped it.
“But it is the manager’s job to know that correct procedures are not being followed. They can only do this if managers, at all levels, look at details from time to time. A helicopter view is bad management. All you see are forests. If you want to know whether or not the forest is healthy you have to land the helicopter and look at the twigs and leaves”, says Prof. Hopkins.
“The VIPs on the Deepwater Horizon were certainly sampling the details. But it was a biased sample – biased toward conditions rather than behaviours, and biased toward occupational safety. As a result, they failed to sample details of how well the rig was managing its major accident hazards. This paper has suggested ways in which they might have done that more effectively.”
Professor Hopkins will be presenting Management walk-arounds: lessons from the Gulf of Mexico oil well blowout at 9:15am on Tuesday 16 October at the Brisbane Convention Centre as part of APIA’s 2012 Convention.
