Real leaders leave a legacy. They capture the hearts and minds of their teams. Their origin story puts the safety and well-being of their people first. Great companies ubiquitously have safe yet productive operations. For those companies, safety is an investment, not a cost. For the C suite, it’s a real topic of daily focus. This is the Safety Guru with your host, Eric Michrowski, a globally recognized ops and safety guru, public speaker and author. Are you ready to leave a safety legacy? Your legacy, success story begins now.

Hi and welcome to the Safety Guru. Today I’m very excited to have with me Leanne Lesford. She’s a professor and risk and innovation and Sustainability Chair at the University of Alberta. Leanne, you have quite an exciting and interesting background and amazing story. So really excited to have you with me today. So why don’t we get started with how you got your passion for safety and your journey in safety, because it was quite unique.

Yes. Thank you, Eric. So, yeah, I’m like many folks grew up in the 70s when things were wild and crazy. And I grew up on a farm. And what did we have? I had a pony and we had guns that we shot and pitchforks and machinery that we ran. And as it turns out, agriculture is one of the highest hazard industries and one of the least regulated, and it has one of the highest fatality and injury rates because it is kind of the wild west in terms of how people do work. And they tend to be a jack of all trades with very minimal training and very minimal supervision. And we were children growing up on the farm in that era, in that time. And there were a few rules like don’t go on the ice when it’s springtime and don’t stand behind the tractor when it’s backing up and don’t point a gun towards your brother and don’t ride your pony under the tree limbs. But other than that, there was very, very few guidelines in terms of what we were allowed to do. And so, I went into engineering after high school, followed my brother.

And one of my first jobs was working for BP Resources in Shava, Alberta. And I was a battery operator, summer job, co-op job. And that job was to not blow things up. Right. So, we’re looking at, you know, how do we meter and separate the sand and the water from gas and oil wells? Right. And you bring it into a central battery. Don’t blow things up. Okay, good idea. My next job was actually working for PCL construction in the Northwest Territories building roads. And that job was explicitly to blow things up. We actually blew up rock, and we need to straighten a road between it was Fort Providence and then up to the Northwest Territories into, into Yellow Knife, and then also up to Fort Ray and Fort Edsel, which are two dene dog rib communities. And they had this, this road that was quite curvy and they wanted to straighten it. So, then we were blowing up rock and then we were straightening the diamond of the road. And it made me realize, you know, just, you know, as we’re. We’re packing the dynamite into the holes, and then you put the, the blaster cord in, and then you roll the cord back and then you.

We laid underneath this dozer like a kilometer away from the blast site. And press the button. And that was before wireless, right? So, you press the button, you could feel the sound wave of the explosion coming through the ground, right? We’re laying underneath this dozer. And then a couple of seconds later, these rocks were being ejected from the blast site and thrown like a kilometer, kilometer and a half, raining down all around us as we’re laying underneath the dozer. And I’m thinking to myself, and if I were standing like one or two meters that way, I’d be dead, right? Like the size of your head that were blasting out of these holes. I thought, this is really interesting. And. But the blasters had, were, were very highly trained. They knew exactly what they were doing. And the safety controls around the site were, were quite impeccable, actually. You know, and, you know, similar to when I worked for BP Resources, very, very highly trained. They knew exactly what they were doing, right? Then after that, I did ice surveys on the McKenzie River. And again, it was a bit of wild west, because here we were on the river taking ice cores and samples on skidoos, and it’s minus 30.

And you’re like, okay, the biggest risk isn’t falling into the river at this point. It’s actually freezing to death, right? And so, it’s, you know, how do we. How do we manage those kinds of risks? And then we were out on the ice, you know, up to, you know, a day or two before it broke up, right? So, it was all these other very hazardous activities associated with taking ice course, right? And now there’s a bridge that goes across the Mackenzie River at Fort Providence. So, there’s no more ferry. You don’t need to worry about ice roads anymore. So that was the work that, based on the work that we did there. And then I started working with, in environmental engineering, looking at facilities, noxious facilities. So how do we take care of our waste? And I Ended up doing my master’s and it was with the US army and they were, had all these chemical munitions left over from the Cold War. And there was VX and sarin and mustard gas and various sorts of munitions and tonners, which is just that it’s a ton of chemical munitions and rockets and landmines and such.

And the problem with a lot of these, these, these chemical munitions is that as the, the VX and the sarin and the mustard gas age, they degrade and they become corrosive and then they corrode the outer case.

Lovely.

Really worried. I know, really lovely. So, they were really worried about auto ignition of these munitions, and they said what do we do about it? So, then my master’s research was actually looking at how do you design a facility using inherently safer design principles so that you can take care of the problem, which is the chemical emissions and not auto, not auto igniting and then also protecting the community around. So, I just, I did that. I worked with the US Army, I did a bunch of surveys, and it was really in the, again in the 90s looking at how do you engage stakeholders in design of a facility to recognize what the hazards are and to design the hazards or design the risks out of the system. Right. So that’s really what we were doing. We’re designing the risks out of the system. How do you eliminate substitutes, minimize, moderate, like how do you get it right out of the system entirely? So that was really super interesting. After that I didn’t want to have much to do with the US army anymore. And so, I went to work for the railroad for seven years.

I’m trained as a locomotive engineer and a conductor and I was cleaning up derailment sites, rock falls, landslides. I know. So, it was a lot of super fun work. And it made me realize that, you know, in the time in the 90s, a lot of companies, they would just budget for, for incidents, right? At the time, CN would put aside, you know, $200 million for derailments. It was inevitable that there would be these derailments and they were effectively self-insuring for the inevitability of derailments. And crazy worked. I know, crazy, right? But it’s, but it wasn’t uncommon and some companies still do that. They set aside a certain amount of contingency every year expecting to have a certain number of incidents. And it really struck me as being this, this trial-and-error approach towards risk. I thought, my gosh, this seems kind of crazy. You think that we should be able to prevent a derailment like we’ve been railroading for 100 years. We know what the hazards are, we should know how to control those hazards. Right. So then after that I went to work for a regulator, which is the association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Alberta.

And I wrote practice standards, practice reviews, environment committee and continuing professional development. Because I was really wondering, like, how can we better regulate the practice of engineering? Because engineers are embedded in all these companies everywhere, right. They’re supposed to be the ones who ensure that protection of the public is paramount. It’s embedded in who we are and what we do. And it made me realize that a lot of regulation is an act of faith. Like you put the laws in place, you presume that companies or people are following them and you in some cases will audit them and try to see if they’re following. But an audit isn’t. Outsider. It’s really hard to see what’s really going on, right? Really, really going on. You know, unless you’re embedded in there for extended period of time. Even then, you know, if you’re a Transport Canada person or a Transportation Safety Board person doing a ride along on trains, it’s still really hard to see what’s really going on. People are often on their best behavior. You don’t see the worst.

No matter how you do it, you’re going to get the best face because they know the risk if they truly surface what’s going on.

Yeah, exactly right. So, you always get the best face. Exactly right. So then after working at the rail, sorry, at the regulator, I did my, my PhD in business strategy because I wanted to understand organizational decision making and how do companies see risk, understand risk and then become better motivated to manage risk.

Sure.

So, I did that, my Ph.D. and then I went to University of Michigan for a couple years and then I was recruited back to University of Alberta in, excuse me, 2015 to be an assistant professor with the David and Joan Lynch School of Engineering, Safety and Risk Management, University of Alberta. So that’s where I’ve been for the past 11 years, doing research, working with a bunch of industry partners and really interested in corporate decision making. And how do we better equip companies to see those hidden hazards? Right. To understand their blind spots and then to better manage it. So, it’s not like companies want to hurt or kill things. Not at all. Not at all. Not at all. Not at all. Right. Heaven forbids. My gosh. You know, they all want to make sure everyone goes to work and then goes home safe at the end of the day. Because it’s a safe company, is, is a better run company, is a, is a more profitable company. Right. So, it’s, how do we help them see those hidden hazards, see those blind spots and then improve their operations as a result. So that’s kind of my passion.

My father’s still on the farm. He’s still got a bunch of scars, of course, because he’s a bit of a danger, danger guy himself. And I was just there last weekend and he’s like; I think I got a chunk of metal in my eye. I’m like, dad, where are your safety glasses? Like, you know, I’ll get you some new ones with the things on the side so that you don’t have to worry about stray splinters. So, it’s very personal for me from a, from a family perspective. But then, you know, I’ve, I’ve seen enough across different industries and worked with, you know, doing investigations and workplace fatalities and working with next Akin and again working with companies. It’s like we all want to solve this problem of how do you better see hidden hazards, how do you better improve blind spots and how do you make work the workplaces a safer place? And we all are in this together. It’s my passion and, and I love connecting with people who, it’s also their passion. So, I appreciate being on this podcast. Thank you.

Absolutely. Great background, great story. One of the areas you work in is around safety through design. It’s something that’s being talked about more and more in industry. What does it really mean from your standpoint?

It basically relies on the principle, and folks have probably heard this too, of hierarchy of controls. Right, right. So, the purpose of a hierarchy of controls is that there’s, you know, that, you know, it’s an inverted triangle. At the top of the triangle are the most effective things. And the most effective are to eliminate, you know, and then the least effective is the sharp end of the triangle. The bottom is personal protective equipment. Right. And if a company or an individual is relying only on personal protective equipment, they really don’t have any protection at all. Right. When it comes to high energy hazards, you know, a glove isn’t going to protect your, your hand getting run over or crushed by something. Not really. Right. It’ll just kind of hold it all together. So, the, the intention is that you’ve got this, this hierarchy of controls. It’s most effective to least effective. And then the intention is that you would also have in that kind of a layer of protection. So, you’re not relying on one form of protection, but many forms of protection. And if we can rely on more that are like less of the PPE or administrative controls, which tend to be kind of the, the less effective, more easily bypass able controls.

You know, if it’s administrative control, like you know, hazard communication training and you know, it’s a new guy and he didn’t get the training, then it’s an ineffective control effective. Right. People, if my dad is not wearing the right glasses, he’s still going to get shards in his eye. Right. So, it’s poor protection. So really this idea of hierarchy of controls and there’s other related principles. So, you’ve got safety by design. The EU has safe and sustainable divide design and it’s really being used in Europe for emerging technologies like software, nanotechnology, bioengineering and it’s meant to protect workers, consumers and the environment. So, it’s, it’s kind of a broad umbrella.

Broader.

Yep, broader umbrella. And then we have prevention through design, which is used by US NIOSH, and it’s really used in construction, manufacturing industry generally. And it’s really to think about everything from hand tools to heavy machinery to how do you design the hazards out of the system to protect workers. Right? So that’s prevention through design. And then there’s related concept. It’s inherently safer design which is used in the chemical process safety and nuclear industry. And the concept is what you don’t have can’t leak, so if you, if it’s not in your pipes, it can’t escape. Right. So, it was put into place after, after we had that methyl isocyanate leak in Bhopal that killed all those people. And basically, it was an unnecessary intermediate byproduct that wasn’t needed for, for the process. Right? So, they had, they had this unnecessary intermediate product that they stored in a large quantity on site, and it ended up, you know, a whole bunch of, for a bunch of reasons releasing in the middle of the night. It was heavier than air and people were sleeping close to the ground and they, and you know, it was thousands that fatalities as a result, I think even hundreds of thousands of.

Well, hundreds of thousands affected. Right?

Affected.

Yeah, yeah. So, it was. And then, you know, thousands that were those fatalities as a result. So, this whole idea of these concepts of how do we actually design the hazards out of this system? Right. Or so it’s, you know, and inherently safer design. The four principles are substitution, minimization, modernization, simplification. So, it’s really. How do we substitution is, you know, change the nature of the hazard by swapping it out for something less hazardous. Minimization is using a less hazardous material or energy to reduce the severity. Moderation is changing the physical state or operating conditions to reduce the severity. And simplification is how do you make it user friendly to minimize errors and emissions? Okay, so when we go to construction, an example might be you avoid complexities at the human machine interface. So, you could have automatic safeguards, emergency shutoffs, you could standardize your valves. Right. You could have easy to understand controls or alarm room rationalization. So that’s the idea of simplification. So how do we make it easier to understand such that we are not complicated, like we’re not overwhelmed, cognitively overwhelmed as an operator, as a worker. Like it’s obvious, you know, we’re going to do the right thing.

We’re going to pull the right knob because it’s the right color and it’s the biggest one and it’s the closest to our hand. Right, right.

Or it’s not alarming too often. Right. Like a deep-water horizon where I think they shut off the alarming for five years on the, on the well, because it was likely alarming too often as opposed to trying to understand why it is alarming.

Yeah, yeah. And probably they could have used some alarm rationalization there to simplify it. Right. You know, another example would be using your right foot for the brake in the gas. Right. So, you can’t step on the brake and the gas simultaneously. Right. We’re simplified. It’s a way of simplifying in our brains, you either accelerating or breaking. Right. That would be another good example. Right. Keep it simple. Right. So that’s kind of inherently safer design. And but if you, you know, think about the, again, the top of the most effective of that, you know, even before those principles, is elimination. So how do you completely remove the hazard to eliminate the frequency and severity entirely? So, if we’re thinking about, you know, a cause effect diagram, what does that mean? It means if you’re going to assemble your modules at grade, as opposed to having to lift stuff up and do it at height. Right. So you’re seeing, you know, PCL now they, you know, did this whole big module, the scraping furnace, they developed it all in modules at grade and then they assembled it and then they just kind of rolled it right into the refinery, so they didn’t have to stick build anything.

Right. It was all done in a, basically a factory or manufacturer setting. Right. As opposed to stick building on site.

Sure. It’s almost a prefab environment.

Yeah, almost a prefab environment. Right. So, you know, the examples of elimination might be you eliminate your solvent cleaning. Right. So, you don’t have to worry about solvents and any inhalation issues. You could remove redundant machinery or site clutter. Right. So how do you just clean out of the site? You could switch to cordless tools at height to remove tripping hazards. That would be another example. Right. So, you just get rid of all of that. Get rid of it entirely. Eliminate. Right. So that’s kind of the most foolproof because if you don’t have it, the hazard, then it can’t, it won’t hurt you. What you don’t have can’t hurt you effectively. Right. So that’s kind of elimination. Right. You know, we’ve talked about, there’s other principles. Substitution might be you reduce a hazardous processor tool with a safer one, like electric tools for pneumatic tools, you know, so you don’t have to worry about the pressure associated with pneumatic tools. It could be fiberglass insulation instead of asbestos insulation. That would be another example. Or using induction heating instead of open flame for industrial welding or curing. So those would be another example of where you’re substituting, swapping for something less hazardous.

Okay. Minimization is. You’re looking using less hazardous materials. So, you could keep minimum inventories in hand just in time delivery, you know, in situ work would be an example of that could be replacing massive, centralized battery bank with smaller distributed power packs would be an example. Right. So, if you’re worried about thermal run away from your lithium-ion batteries, you don’t want to have, you know, all your batteries in one place. Right. You could have a cascade. You really want to have these smaller distributed. That would be an example of that. Or it could be, you know, limit your work in progress on site to minimize clutter. That would be an example. Right. So, you’re not doing this assembly stuff where you’re, you’re cluttering up. Right. Moderation is really about how you change the physical state. So, you could store refrigerated liquids at atmospheric pressure instead of high pressure. So, this, when it comes to like, like liquid hydrogen, for example, you know, do we have to store it at high pressure, or can we store it at atmospheric pressure? If we put it in like, you know, in hydro state, you know, maybe with you’re using ammonia as a carrier, then you don’t have to worry about pressure anymore.

Right. So, it’s again, that would be an example of, of moderation. We talked about simplification already. Separation is where you separate the people from the hazard. Okay, so this is where you’re segregating, segregating people away with setback distances. It could be barriers, it could be exclusion zones, it could be doing the work at night if you’re working on roads rather than during the day when there’s traffic around. It could be machine guarding, sound enclosures, blast walls, those are all kind of separation type principles. Could be circuit breakers, interlocks, you know, secondary containment would be an example. It could be guard rails on your, on your platforms, on your scaffolding. Could be a one-way flow layout on your site or a manufacturing facility so you can avoid collisions. Right? So effectively you’ve got traffic management on your site. That’s a mechanism of separating, right. And then next is warnings, right? So, warnings are kind of interesting and you mentioned about Deepwater Horizon, right? Because warnings could be those alarm systems, backup alarms, beepers, proximity detectors, atmospheric monitoring. But warnings are only as good as, as if they’re working. They’re not bypassed and people pay attention to them, and they understand what they mean.

Right. So, this is why, you know, when we’re getting down into the correct, the funnel or getting down to the pointy end of the hierarchy of controls, warnings are still good. And they can be engineered in like an automatic alarm. But if the alarm is going off all the time, the fire alarm, and I’m not leaving the building anymore because it’s gone off for the fourth time this week, then effectively the alarm, different problem. It’s a different problem. Effectively the alarm isn’t working anymore. It’s become normalized that we ignore the alarm. So that’s why warnings, people like, oh, we’ve got, you know, proximity detector, we’ve got beeping alarms, sure, right. But they’re only effective if, if they’re followed, right? And again, they start to feel that. That’s why, you know, I put them in with effectively administrative controls because that’s what they are. You rely on a person to, to do something, right? Have a procedure associated with the alarm and then next is procedures. And what that is, is it’s really about changing the way that people work using defined procedures and schedules. So that’s the start work checks like do we understand the hazards, field level hazard assessments, job procedures.

Could be like original equipment, manufacturer maintenance procedures, right? Could be access controls, emergency response plans, inspection schedules, rotation of workers, you know, everything to do with, you know, how do we do work, how do we do this work? Right. It’s mainly meant to again, change the way that people work, right? And some of these are more effective than others. And we all know, like, if I were to, you know, pull out an OEM manual for maintaining my dozer, how many pages is in it? It’s probably thousands, right? Thousands. You know, how do I find, you know, is it this kind of battery or that kind of battery do I need to take off the, the counterweights this way or that way? You know, like, do I do these bolts? What order do I remove the bolts in? Does it matter? Of course it matters. Right, so. So, the manuals and procedures, oftentimes companies will have a lot because what they do is, is complex, it’s complicated, right? But oftentimes it’s overwhelming with people. It’s or for people, right? So, you know, here you are, here’s another manual. Here you are, here’s another manual. You know, you have people have a shelf full of very, very dusty manuals that no one takes out because it’s a lot.

It’s. They’re overwhelmed by these manuals, right? So, and if there’s a problem, what’s the solution? It’s, you know, throw another procedure on it, right? So again, people like, oh, we have a procedure for that. Is again, very poor defense because more is not better. Less is better. You really need to declutter. You need to basically say, you know, how can we simplify this for the folks doing the work such that they can have that just in time, information, the right information so that they’re, you know, removing the bolts in the right order, right? Or following the right manual for the right model of the or this year’s equipment, right? So, it really matters. So that’s procedure, you know, training, you know, is another favorite, right? People like, oh, you know, you know, lack of training. Let’s just throw more training on it. You know, training is, yes, we need to be trained. Absolutely, absolutely. Absolutely. Of course. But the problem is that training is an input variable. What we really need is competency, which is the output variable. So how do you actually, you assure that people are competent to do the task at hand?

What does that look like? So, it could be again, for those high hazard tasks like confined space entry or hydrogen H2S training, hazard communication, emergency response drills so we can have the emergency response plan. If we don’t actually train for a drill, then I don’t know what stairwell I should go down in. I don’t know that I should, you know, count, you know, the people who are coming out of the building, again, some sort of occupancy list who happened to be at work that day. Like I don’t understand those, those parts. So, it’s important that when you, you train folks, you actually practice the training, and you demonstrate competence in that training. Right. So training is great, but it’s not the only thing. Right?

Yeah. That piece on competence to me is, is, is probably one of the key ones. There’s a lot of training that’s been done and unfortunately many crafts that’s being done through eLearning, which is even worse because you can completely disengage from the actual training. You would never want to have a pilot who’s flying your plane, who’s read the book. You want them to go through a drill and to simulation and to demonstrate they’re capable every single year. And it’s not that hard. You just, you run a regular process to make sure that you understand what you’re doing, and you run different challenges that people have experienced over the last year. But you would never expect to get on a plane where that has not happened. But yet you’ve got power line technicians that are doing extremely high hazard work that got trained 30 years ago and that’s okay.

Right. And, and on the job training is fantastic. Right. And especially for the, the new folks to, to demonstrate competence. The, the trick is thought to make sure that on the dog training is done by a competent person. Right. So if it’s Joe who was trained 30 years ago and he’s going to do the on-site training for the new guy and all of his, his potentially bad habits are baked into his shortcuts and how he does his work, then the new guy is, you know, is also learning his bad habits. So, it’s really correct. Yeah. Ensuring, you know, continuous and ongoing assurance of competence for all workers. Right. And you know who’s most likely to get hurt? It’s the new guys, the young and inexperienced workers. And it’s, and it’s the older, more experienced workers who do this shortcutting. Right. So, it’s. We really have to ensure both tells. Yeah, exactly. Right, absolutely. So, training.

Correct.

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And then the last one is PPE as we’ve mentioned, you know My father, you know, in his glasses, you know, but it’s safety harnesses, it’s anchoring, respirator, safety glasses, gloves, hearing protection, all those things. But again, it’s just all you’re doing is kind of shielding the person from the hazard. Right. And it is, it’s pretty meager, meager protection. So, this idea of all of this, whether or not it’s inherently safe to design prevention through design, or safe and sustainable design, it’s all this. The concept is that we’re going to focus on the hierarchy of controls. We’re going to focus on the top end, the most more effective ones, to ideally eliminate those hazards out of the system with engineering controls. Or, you know, substitute, minimize, moderate, simplify, separate.

So, we’re really focusing in, on those engineering type controls. And the philosophy is that you do it early in the system. Early, right? You do it early. It’s hard after the facility is built to change your, to go change it. Right. So correct. Like all of these principles and the philosophies behind them are that they’re most effective when they’re done during the design stage. So, the earlier that you do it, the better. Right. And ideally you would do it during like a design safety review. Right. And that’s really, you know, at the very, very beginning. So when you’re thinking about, okay, how are we designing this facility, how are we building this car, how are we building, you know, the knobs on an airplane or, you know, a screen on a, in a control panel of a refinery in the control room, you’re really doing it at that stage. So how do we help people? And again, eliminate, substitute, minimize, moderate at the, at the very, very much at the design stage. Right. So, it’s really. How do you think about, you know, at the conceptual stage, what do you think about it? You’re doing kind of research and development.

You got sort of a design, and then you’re really at that design, the detailed engineering design stage. So, you’re kind of, okay, how do we, how do we do this from a detailed engineering design perspective? And that’s, you know, before your procurement, construction, commissioning, it’s in the design stage. That’s really where you want to do it.

And I think that’s the part I love the most because unfortunately, safety tends to be very reactive to something happening. And the majority of controls that get put in after an event tend to be at the bottom of the hierarchy of control. And so, they’re just slapping more training, more PPE things along those lines. But the opportunity, I think is to get in front of it before the incident ever happens to really start designing sites, environments and even thinking like what I liked about your example around the modular building, it goes even down to which sites are we going to build. Like if you’re building an LNG facility, certain sites may not be conducive for what we want. So, we end up having to build a very vertical structure. But then we are not doing it in a prefab environment. So, we’re introducing a lot more risk. So, all of those things to me are, is how we can get in front and be much more proactive from a safety standpoint.

Yeah. Or even, you know, where do you set your facility? Right? Like if you’re in a flood inundation zone and you know, like wow, okay, then what you’re doing is you’re, you’re, you’re putting your whole facility at a, at a greater risk for a whole bunch of other things. Right. Or hurricane zone with, you know, increase wind. Right. So. Or an earthquake zone. Right. When you look at, you know, where do you put your nuclear power plants in, in Japan.

Japan, Right, right, right, exactly. And how do you design it or not put it there or design it or not put it there. Exactly. Right. You know, and when you think about a nuclear facility, you need cooling water. Okay. Where else could you get your cooling water if not from the oceans? So, there’s all these other things, right. That you could be thinking about and that would be that you’re right. And that’s, you know, the, the purpose of my master’s research was okay, how do we even think about the sighting of a, of a facility? Right. So where do you even put it, you know, and you know, setback distances is a great example. Right. You know, because what is a setback distance? It’s, it’s, it’s effectively it’s a separation and separation distance. Gives you time, right? So, time to respond for a community or first responders or whatever. Right. And the setback distance is even, you know, and you look at a refinery site, like where’s the lunchroom. It’s the farthest corner in a blast proof building away from all the facility. Right. And that gives you, gives you separation in time. Right. You know, the occupancy of that shelter in place facilities are not underneath the reactors, right.

Or in Texas City.

Yeah.

Right by the blast zone.

Yeah. You know, and that, anyone. And that’s part of the reason why you look at offshore facilities. Like when you look at an offshore platform or drilling platform, you’ve got A highly compressed footprint. Right. And you know, you really have to then think about, you know, where do you put your flare, where do you put your reactive your reactors and how are they then separate or high pressure, high temperature vessels and how far are they make sure that they’re the farthest distance possible from, from your, from your, where your people are. Right. And that’s really again how they’re, they’re really trying to, to separate. And you use those inherently safer design principles, but again at the design stage. Design stage. Design stage.

Correct.

Right.

Yeah. But you could still do it following an incident. But ideally, I really like what you’re saying is like you design it in. And there’s so many opportunities in this in terms of certain sites that I’ve seen that we’re building things that probably shouldn’t be the best locations for it. But it may be more economically viable. But are there some alternate ways of building.

Yep. Or alternate ways of operating? Like railroads are an interesting example because you know, in Canada, you know, the railroad came in and where do the towns built, you know, next to the railroads. So right around the railroads. So, what do you have now you have railroads carrying, you know, class one, class two, special dangerous everything. Railroads aren’t allowed to, to deny any lading. They have to take anything; they have to ship anything. Okay, so, okay, so what does that mean? It means that they could be, you know, shipping ammonia. You know, they can price it a certain way so that ammonia, it’s, it’s less likely to be shipped. But if you’re going to ship ammonia versus train versus a truck, a train is actually a safer way like by, you know, like 10,000 times safer. Right. In terms of accidents. But what happens then is you’ve got all these hazardous goods being carried through the center of towns. Right. And Lac Megantic is a good example of that. Right. So, so what does this mean? It means that do we need to have different train handling for special dangerous. Does it mean we have to slow down those trains going through populated areas?

Yes. Doesn’t mean we have, you know, different kinds of tank cars. Right. The DOT 111 route, you know, we no longer have those tank cars. So, you know, it’s really thinking about how we operate differently, you know, understanding, you know, in some cases we can’t change the location of where work happens or where we operate. So then how do we, how do we make sure that we use all these other principles in terms of, of designing either, you know, the track or the tank cars or the speed, you know, and, you know, slowing things down isn’t, is an example of, of moderation, right? So, it’s slowing down the speed, the force, the amperage, the pressure, the temperature, the noise. Like, how do you, how do you moderate your activities, right, Such that, you know, in speed, a great example, you know, what’s the likelihood someone’s going to be, you know, hurt or killed or either the driver or someone who’s walking across a road is speed. Right? And that’s why, you know, the speed limit through school zones is 30 km an hour. Because the difference between 30 and 40 makes a difference in terms of children.

Would a child survive or not? I mean, it’s a horrible thing to think about. But again, speed, right? That’s an example of moderation.

So how could an organization start thinking about how do I build this in? And then you also have helped organizations with some really tangible examples of applications. You’ve given a lot of examples of each type of control that you can put in. But what are some of the steps an organization can start thinking through to really build safety through the design?

Yeah, great question. So, and in many cases, like we’re not working with, with new builds, we’re working with operating companies, right? So, they’re in a certain operating phase. And as I mentioned, I’ve been involved, you know, following some workplace fatalities. And some of those examples are, you know, an operator of a dozer’s working on a tailings pond, a frozen tailings pond. Right. And the problem with that ice is it’s not really ice, right? So, tailings water has got, is mixed with a whole bunch of volatile organic compounds. You know, it’s, it’s got a whole bunch of other slurry type things in it that when the ice freezes, the strength, it acts and behaves differently than the Mackenzie River, right. At minus 40. Very, very different. Right. So, so what was their solution? The solution was one of elimination. We’re not working on ice anymore, period, full stop. Right? We don’t go on tailings ponds at all anymore when they’re frozen. So that’s an example of, you know, so we’re not going to measure thickness. We’re not going to, you know, worry about can the ice carry the weight of the dozer. Dozer is really heavy.

The risk is too great. We won’t do it, period. Okay, so that’s an example of, of, of complete elimination. And it was really understanding what the hazard is. The hazard is the ice and effectively falling through. And then you got, you know, confined, you know, your confined Space, you know, and you can’t get out of the dozer. Another example. But the first step really is companies understanding what are those hazards, right? What’s the stuff that kills people, those, those sticky hazards. And you know, we worked with another company, Nutrient, looking at across all their operations, mining, refining, transportation, retail. And in some cases, they don’t necessarily. A company might not necessarily know their hazards. Okay, you’ve got, you know, two guys in a small-town handling fertilizer, anhydrous ammonia, you know, doing could be $20 million worth of business for this small town for agricultural products, you know, crop inputs. And they, you know, they’re again, they’re, they’re running, you know, trailers, you know, they have to worry about power lines, they’ve got forklifts, they’ve got, you know, all these different hazards, moving equipment. And they’re not necessarily thinking about line of fire. They’re not thinking about line of fire, right?

Because what are they doing? They’re in production mode there, its springtime, you know, they want to make sure that the farmers have what they need to be able to get the crops in super important. So, it was interesting to work with companies like that because you can say, you know, well, refinery or mine might understand line of fire really well, or confined space energy. When you start to go into transportation or even into retail, they may not have the same understanding of the hazards, right? What are those high energy hazards? What’s the stuff that’s going to kill you? And then let’s think about what controls look like. So, the first step for companies is just even understanding what their hazards are, right? What are their hazards? What’s the stuff that’s going to kill you? And then how are you controlling it? And we worked with a bunch of companies, you know, in mining, you know, Suncor, Sync, Crude, Nutrient, you know, and other companies, construction companies like PCI and then basically saying, you know, what are the stuff that’s causing the incidents? Right, the hazards. And then how are you then controlling that and what are those controls look like?

And are you inspecting on the right thing’s things? Are you auditing the right things? Are you talking about the right things in your start work checks? And in many cases, they’re not right. And you know, they’re focused on, you know, housekeeping slips, trips and falls because it’s easy to see, right. Without necessarily being able to see. Again, these hidden hazards, right? And the blind spots and line of fire ones are really, really hard, right? Really hard. Because people don’t understand stored Energy you can’t see necessarily easy to see stored energy in a cable. Right. Or in a pipeline or power takeoff or, you know, they’re not. We’re not really wired to see stored energy, potential energy. Right. In that way. And it’s really helpful for companies, for us to go through that. And we’ve done this with several companies, go through and do this inventory of hazards and then compare the hazards in terms of what’s actually causing the serious incidence, fatalities, actual or potential, like the near missy stuff. And then, you know, again, back to their incidents, sorry, their investigations, their audits and inspections. And then, and then we change how they do work, change the critical controls assurance questions that they’re asking.

Right. And then putting, wherever possible in these engineered controls. Right. So how do we substitute, minimize, moderate, simplify such that we. We’re changing the work for the people. Right. We’re not relying on them to change how they work necessarily. We’re changing the work itself. Itself, the nature of the work. Like the dozer is no longer going on the ice as an example. Right. Or they’re assembling the module on the ground and then at elevation is. It’s the last thing they do. But no worker is any higher than, you know, 8 or 10ft off the ground at any one time when they’re assembly. Right. So that would be an example of how they can do that.

And how do you practically do this because you’ve built tools and capabilities in this space. Tell me a little bit more about the behind the scenes of how do you catalog those risks that often get missed by the organization that has them?

Yeah. So, what we do in our company, Insight Risk Systems, and we have some patented algorithms, we use AI machine learning, specifically natural language processing. So, we can actually look at companies, tens of thousands of incidents, actual and potential. Right. And we look at the words that they use, like the incident descriptions that they use. And then we can pick out the hazards, and we can pick out the controls. Right. And we do what’s called a knowledge graph. So how do we start to link the hazards with the controls? What does that look like? And then we look at the audits and the inspections that happened before that incident. So, we look at the two months prior, matching on the same location, matching on the same hazard.

Right.

And then we can say, were you auditing or inspecting on the right things or not? And we can actually. And then we look at the similarity of language of the incident itself and the similarity of language in terms of how they describe their audits and inspections and then we can look at the gaps and overlaps. So are they. The overlaps would be. Yes, we’re, we’re good match here. The gaps are. Oh my gosh, we forgot completely about, about confined space entry for our truckers who might have to enter the back of a tanker truck. Oh, wow. Okay. That’s going to be something that maybe you should think about controlling for. Right. And again, we’ve worked with companies, you know, and some of these companies too. They’ll have millions of audits or inspections, like millions. Right. So, because this is what they do. Right. But many companies will have all this data, all this data, but they don’t actually analyze it. Or they may analyze it but only do like descriptive analytics, maybe perhaps some, some frequencies, but they don’t. But in comparing across incidents versus inspections and audits, it allows us to then improve their inspections and audits.

So we do this with companies and it’s really very enlightening for them, especially for like a large multinational, like whether or not it’s agricultural inputs or multinational energy company, to be able to see across their operations, right across their business units, across their geographies and then to help them rationalize, to then say, okay, are you doing it the same across, you know, what are the best practices? How do we rationalize those? How do we simplify? So you don’t have, you know, 200 key performance indicators, because if you have 200 priorities, you have none. How do you shrink that down to a manageable number and then focus on the important things? So, we’re not doing more critical controls assurance, more questions. We’re focusing on the right questions. We’re focusing on the questions that are going to help you find the stuff that’s going to kill you and make sure that it’s controlled. So that’s, that’s the work we do with Insight risk systems. Like I said, we worked with a bunch of companies, data analytics, and it really allows companies to see the hazards, the stuff that’s going to kill them, think about critical controls and then think about how can we apply this kind of hierarchy of controls thinking, prevention through design, inherently safer design thinking, even though they’re at the operation stage.

Because now we can start to think about elimination, substitution, minimization to really focus explicitly on those hazards. Stuff that’s going to kill you. Right, because we’re not going to, we’re not boiling the ocean here. We’re picking out certain fish. Right.

And yeah, exactly.

How do we focus on those, on those pieces that are the important pieces? 

Yeah, very cool. Because it allows you to really prioritize. Where am I going to put the emphasis? What controls need to be improved, what work should change as opposed to unfortunate pieces following the near miss. It sounds like there’s still not enough controls or changes that were implemented to actually find and resolve the underlying issue.

Yeah, well, more PPE, more training, sure, fine. That’s still the pointy end of control. Right? So yeah. Or more procedures. 

Exactly.

We don’t need more procedures. Right. We need, we need fewer procedures and more, more specific ones. The just in time procedures.

Absolutely. That’s very interesting. So, if somebody wants to get in touch with you, what’s the best way do that?

Probably LinkedIn is the best because then that’s. You can see me as my work at the university. If you want to do research, that’s great. And then insight risk systems, if you’re interested more in those tangible tools. And again, we’ve got AI machine learning. We’re working with companies in terms of developing apps. We’re working on a trenching app right now. So, we have the ability to then say how do you take all this intelligence and then embed it in real time decision support, and you know, someone’s phone. We’re doing stuff like, you know, VLM LLM, you know, so we can look at, you know, even images like how we can help you analyze images and in real time basis and identify those hazards. So, we’re doing a lot of really cool things.

That is very cool. Thank you.

Thanks.

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