AIHS Safety Conference Part 1
The annual conference hosted by the Australian Institute of Health and Safety (AIHS) was held last month on the Gold Coast with over 700 attendees. Our CEO, and Fellow of AIHS, Gary Rowe attended and provides some of his selected highlights.
Good Change Practices
The first session on good change practices explained how to move from resistance to acceptance, and the most important tip was don’t assume “they” have heard or understand your message, so you need to “say it 5 to 7 times”. Hopefully in different and interesting ways.
The Art of Presenting
Many safety presentations are boring, not because health and safety is not important but because they are delivered in a boring fashion. Andrew Klein warned not to blame the audience if they are not interested or motivated by your safety presentation.
The most common errors, below, will be familiar to most of us:
Too many slides with too much text.
Going off topic and not sticking to time.
Monotone, or speaking too fast or too slow.
Using jargon that alienates some of the audience.
Top tips for better and more effective presentations include:
Be authentic and proud of your unique skills and experience.
Make it a conversation, not a (1-way) presentation.
Keep it simple eg don’t try to convey to much.
Use Stories to help link ideas with their experiences.
Caution with slides eg minimise to essential information.
Respect More Important Than Harmony
A previous Antarctic team leader shared some lessons from her experience spending a long winter stint at one of Australia’s Antarctic bases. Some of key points were:
Respect beats harmony – every time eg traditional HR approach was to achieve harmony which left the underlying problem un-resolved.
Talk to people, not about them eg no rumours or gossip about others.
Employ people for personal attributes eg empathy & resilience, as you can more easily train most technical skills.
Celebrate regularly eg find reasons to acknowledge small local achievements.
Dreamworld Experience
Dreamworld were kind enough and brave enough to host 700 safety specialists to roam their park and rides as part of a safety challenge.
The safety challenge was followed by the key executives spending over an hour answering questions, mainly about the tragic rapid river ride accident that resulted in four guest fatalities back in 2016.
Most Australian families have at least one photo from Dreamworld, including on the rapid river ride, so felt let down and the business lost it’s social licence to operate as a result of the tragedy.
At the time of the 2016 accident they had a 160-page emergency plan, in draft as no one would approve it. Fearful to make decisions. It was too complex, almost incomprehensible for most workers and incapable of being operationalized.
Some ride operators only work there for about 6 weeks per year eg main holidays, so safety training is important including clarity of instructions.
Many safety instructions were not understood by workers eg didn’t know where a gravity powered roller coaster would stop if the emergency stop button was pressed.
Previously several operators were dismissed for not ensuring every rider was properly wearing the seat belt. Dreamworld took on aviation experts and asked why good team members are not ensuring full safety instructions. They changed the colour of the crotch strap to yellow to help eliminate errors and now achieve 100% seat belt use.
Theme parks now have to complete a Safety Case, similar to high hazard petro-chem facilities. The risk assessments include up to 500 items per ride.
Dreamworld’s water park now undertake 3 un-announced audits per year, and has retained platinum level certification for the last two years.
Dreamworld executives now spend a lot of time in the field including on rides and assisting the team, and their leadership is highly visible and if there are any problems they learn about it much sooner.
Analysis of Boeing 737 MAX Accidents
Highly respected and well-known author of many safety books and papers, Andrew Hopkins, delivered a provocative presentation on the Boeing 737 MAX accidents, which he attributed to “the perils of cost-driven engineering”.
Whilst Hopkins’s analysis is technically correct, as always, every machine ever designed and built was governed by financial constraints and commercial reality for buyers
So, the real problem is not that the business built the planes to a price, but they failed to correctly identify the existence of critical risks and or appreciate the magnitude of the risk.
The risk in this case was having one vulnerable device determine critical plane orientation information, which in turn forced the planes to descend rapidly and strike the ground, despite efforts by the pilots to maintain flight control.
Hopkins also believes risk assessments have been given far too much prominence, whereas our focus should be on the more important issues of identifying hazards and putting effective controls in place.
Hopkins has written a book about the Boeing 737 MAX accidents and how he believes they came about.
Next Month Gary shares more insights from the conference, in Part 2, including:
Legal Realities
Enforceable Undertaking Case Study,
Safety Culture and Safety Leadership,
Research on the reliability of AI References.
