“Managing the risks of major accidents” – Andrew Hopkins, YouTube presentation

A 2024 YT video from Andrew Hopkins about managing the risks of major accidents.

This comes in the lead up to next week’s compendium of research dedicated to Andrew Hale & Andrew Hopkins.

Some extracts:

· He refers to the Safety Paradox where managers “honestly believed that safety was their top priority that they never sacrificed safety for production”

· For them, “safety is non-negotiable”

· While well-intentioned, the managers “were focused on .. personal safety and the answer is we need to distinguish very clearly between personal safety and major accident risk”

· Because of the rarity of major accidents, these risks are “simply beyond the field of vision of those managers who said safety is our top priority”

· There’s a focus on personal safety “because this the simplest and easiest measure of safety is injury rates”

· Injuries occur relatively frequently, so rates can be calculated and trends observed, in contrast to major accidents which cannot; he then talks about precursor events (which I’ve skipped)

· He asks “how could you modify your bonus system to reward the good management of major Hazard risk?”

· Penalising managers for major accidents isn’t enough because those are so rare, instead “they need to be incentivized on an annual basis on how well they are managing risks”

· Risk is also challenging – it means so much to so many people

· For safety people it often means safety risk, but for other stakeholders it means commercial or economic risk

· Next he discusses critical controls – which involves identifying the “most feared events”

· He says he prefers ‘feared events’ over critical or major/maximal as “it makes it a bit more realistic”

· Critical control approaches focuses on ensuring the controls perform as intended, and to do this means being very specific

· “General kinds of things such as plans [and] management systems policies are too general to be classified as controls because it’s … impossible to say yes it’s working or not”

· Even though this mine had adopted a CCM approach, it didn’t assign specific control criteria – e.g. using a plan as a critical control

· Prior methane exceedances, while investigated, also concluded that no controls had failed

· Hopkins is dumb-founded how this could be: “these uh exceedances demonstrated that the controls were not operating effectively … that’d almost a matter of logic but nobody … drew that conclusion”

· He prompts a question: “are you bow ties intelligible to all employees up to and including senior managers? Senior managers need to understand what why this is so important and what’s going on here and then are the performance standards for these critical controls”