Prof. Andrew Hopkins Interview from 2000

In September 2000, Professor Andrew Hopkins attended a book launch sponsored by WorkSafe Victoria.  The book was LESSONS FROM LONGFORD, the book that really shot Andrew to prominence in the OHS and safety management field.

Below is an edited text of an interview I did with Andrew at the time.  It originally appeared in SAFETY AT WORK magazine Volume 2 Issue 1 – Spetember 19 2000.  The article is ©Workplace Safety Services P/L.

Safety At Work magazine cover

 

 

Andrew Hopkins is a sociologist with the Australian National University. His first book was an analysis of a mining disaster at Moura in New South Wales. In 2000 he released LESSONS FROM LONGFORD, a book that reassesses management roles in system failures and disasters.

SAFETY AT WORK interviewed Andrew at a recent book launch organised by the Victorian Workcover Authority.

SAW: Did you see LESSONS FROM LONGFORD as a companion volume to the Royal Commission in to the Esso Longford Gas Plant Accident?

AH: No, no. The whole thing evolved. There’s no logic to it. It was just an evolutionary process. The Moura [Mine Disaster] book had just appeared and I said to some people that I thought gee, sounds exactly like what happened at Longford. And at that stage I hadn’t really paid any attention to Longford. The barrister was put in touch with my book reviewer, he came up to Canberra and said “we’d like you to give evidence, and we’d like you to read the transcript before you give evidence”. So I put a lot of time into reading the transcript and wrote them a statement. There was a 5-month period when I was reading transcript and thinking intensively about all the issues and I was stunned by how similar they were to the Moura issues. It was almost 9 months later I ended up in court in the Royal Commission. I had had some dealings with CCH and I said to one of their managers that I think I’ve got a book in my head about Longford. It just came out with no real additional work because it was all in my head. And 3 months later was the manuscript. And CCH was very quick off the mark with their manuscripts and 6 weeks later it was out.

SAW: With the book launch tonight there was a mix of legislators, industry organisations and unions. Is that the mix of people who you think need your book?

AH: Who I’m aiming for are more technical people. I’m aiming for the very top, the CEO’s. I’m actually delighted about how many of them do read the book; because when they do they agree that their organisation needs this book. I’m certainly not writing for my academic colleagues.

SAW: How vital is the role of communication between workers and management in avoiding disasters?

AH: Health and safety representatives are not going to learn much that they don’t already know. They know that management values and management complacency and inattention are problems. But the book, I suppose, provides them with the reinforcement for that perspective and ammunition which they can use when they are in discussions with management. But also it is educational for them, I think, in that everyone falls into the trap of focussing on the most common injuries. They all do. Certainly everybody does.

SAW: Can you see a time, not very far away, when LTIs aren’t used as performance indicators?

AH: No, unfortunately not. The reason is that everyone’s after a measure that’s convenient and has comparative purposes. They can compare across industries or between companies and the sort of direct measures of specific production that is most useful for increasing OHS in the workplace. Because of this demand for comparative measures those things will always be there. And the other thing is they’re so easy to measure. I mean these are things which occur on a reasonably frequent basis so you’ve got something to measure. Disasters occur rarely and the direct measures of risk production are not very so attractive to people, as it’s unbelievable. I guess you’d ask how many organisational changes have you made as a result of a hazard identification procedures? Which would be a sensible measure?

SAW: You say in the book that management sidestep around problems in the short term when they should be looking at organisational amendments. Is that because management sees OHS and OHS Committees as threats?

AH: There is, I think, a strategy that safety can be decentralised. It’s a conscious policy of all big companies for decentralisation to go as far as it possibly can. And the underlying criticism of that is that danger and lack of safety can be fixed at that level. So it’s a denial of the fact that there are really organisational factors that are ignored by the top end of the company.

SAW: Your concept of an absence of mindfulness is a good umbrella concept. But as I was reading I kept seeing associations with best practice, safety culture, due diligence. How do you the absence of mindfulness sitting in with those other, sometimes glib, concepts.

AH: It’s an interesting point you make and this is another glib concept. It’s a question of how it’s operationalised and what use you make of it. If people go to the heart of the matter and say what do we mean by mindfulness, what we mean is Incident Reporting systems that really work; Accident Investigation systems that really do trace causes right to the top of the organisation. If they do that, it is a concept that they are putting into practice. But, it does have the potential to become just another glib concept. Like all these phrases in a learning organisation, there’s a lot of truth in them but the significance of them easily gets lost.

SAW: Has the Australian Risk Management Standard been taken up in practice, or is it the poor relative of safety, environment and quality?

AH: Risk Management is there in the OHS Management System Standard but of course it is only one of many elements in that Standard. Yet it is a central one. But it is too easy for it to get lost when you talk about having a whole management system in place. The Hazard Identification and Risk Management processes, although being central are not going to be attended to. That’s really the lesson of the SafetyMAP audit that was done at Esso. In that audit the question “Have you identified all hazards?” was just asked in passing. And of course the hazards hadn’t been identified.

SAW: Workcover and many others focus on the system as the avenue of attack yet management still doesn’t seem to accept an OHS system as legitimate.

AH: Safety Management Systems is just another fad but if you look at the Major Hazard Regulations, they are very focussed on Risk Management – identifying your hazards and putting controls into place. The legislators have got the emphasis right. They don’t ask about whether you have a safety policy here, or whether you have a written statement from the CEO stating the importance of safety. It is not asking those questions yet Safety Management audits always start with those questions.

SAW: Has the “safety establishment” accepted an outsider, a sociologist with an interest in safety?

AH: I have applied to join the Safety Institute of Australia and because I don’t have formal safety qualifications and because I am not a safety practitioner, I am not eligible to be a Full Member of the Institute. I am an Associate Member and have had that granted on the basis of my publications.

SAW: You talked about computerised reporting processes that should flow through to the completion of a complaint. Have any brave organisations implemented such a program?

AH: It was based on something that is happening in a couple of BHP mines in Queensland. The system is working but the lower level of staff is not very computer-literate and so they are not putting in enough data. But the complaints and safety concerns are escalating up the lines and to the CEOs. The CEOs are asking managers down the line why are you not responding to these safety messages? Another thing with the system is that it is very important to get feedback to the initial reporter. The initial reporter may say “I don’t like the way you’ve responded to my initial report and that I think you need to go through this again.” There is evidence of that happening in some companies.

SAW: Many companies are committed to continual improvement but I see nothing but continual auditing. Is that been the case in your experience?

AH: Continual auditing is a waste of time. Auditing is grossly over-rated. These processes that I am talking about are only working if there is a real commitment by management. The managers need them to work and they need to demand them to work. If you don’t demand the system work then it won’t.

SAW: Many High Risk Organisations profess to continual improvement, yet it seems false.

AH: Unfortunately the people at the top tend to go around giving lectures and saying how important safety is, and how no accident is acceptable and we must all pull together here. Unfortunately no amount of pep talk is going to alter the way things are done. If you want to alter the way things are done, you have to go down to the grass roots level and find out how things are actually being done, and why they are being done, and why are these operators violating rules, as they often are. And there are always good reasons why they are violating rules. In this way you can find out what is needed to have them do the right thing. It’s about changing systems and changing procedures. It is not about getting people to believe that safety is important, which is, unfortunately, so often the message that is conveyed.

SAW: You mention in your book that safety is often sidelined for productivity. It is a core element of your book and was a core element of the Esso Longford operation. This flashed the word Capitalism to me, a word that we don’t hear much anymore. Can we learn anything through looking at safety from a Capitalist or Marxist perspective?

AH: In the book I trace the causal network back to the capitalist system. The problem is that it doesn’t give you any leverage on what to do about the situation. It is such a given that it’s not going to change, at least not in our lifetime.  The point I make about causal analysis is that you need to fill out that causal network as far as you possibly can, right back to the nature of the economic system itself. Then you have to stand back and ask, “Where can I intervene? Where is the most useful point to intervene?” For Government the most useful point to intervene is the regulatory system. For a Company, the most useful place to intervene is in its organisational practices. For a Worker, it is much lower down, perhaps in the training procedures. Noone can say scrap the capitalist system, not in this day and age.

SAW: Is there a place for the old concept of “benevolent capitalism”?

AH: I don’t believe so. I think they must be forced to be benevolent, to do good. That is why regulation is so important. The evidence is that without regulation they will not do the right thing.