Accidental Purpose and Boiling Frogs

This morning I took the bus to work, as I always do, with some reading material in my hand.  This reading material, however, was different to my regular reads because I have been actively avoiding beginning it.  I usually look forward to starting a new book, but this one was daunting.

Why was this one different?

A couple of months ago, while I struggled with getting settled into my new job of technical safety, I happened upon a documentary of the Piper Alpha Disaster.  It took only 20 minutes of my life to watch it, but I spent days with the information clouding my mind and monopolizing most of my conversations.

Weeks later I was given a book on the incident.  After the cloudy week following the doco,  you can imagine that I harboured some anxiousness about beginning to read.  I knew that doing so might plunge me into some kind of empathetic, helpless depression about the state of the nation.

So my husband read the book.

And every day he would say to me, “you have to read this book, so that we can talk about it.”

So, finally, this morning I started.  I managed to get through approximately 15 pages on my way to work — just enough to give me a fairly good swig of despair before I headed off to my day — which just so happened to begin with me reading a report containing a number of massive assumptions regarding the safety systems on an offshore platform.

Have we learned nothing?  Obviously, my despair deepened.

As seems to be the case with most safety engineers I speak with, I fell into my current position in the field of technical safety.  I’m the first to admit that it isn’t a glamorous discipline in terms of engineering sexiness, but I’ll admit that it’s necessary.  Even the reassurances of a wonderful mentor haven’t yet been enough to convince me that the pay and opportunities are worth the lack of prestige that seems to accompany the title.

As I see it, the reason why my job isn’t glamorous is that the entire priority of safety is at odds with the primary purpose of the industry.  Putting people’s safety behind that of creating profits is the elephant in the room of oil and gas production.  The clients I work with spend their days balancing the daily politics surrounding schedule, budget and scope against the cost of people’s lives.  This is often so daunting that it is much easier to focus on what needs to be done today than the big picture.  It is less political to use the same solution we used in the past, than it is to constantly step back and evaluate what you are really doing.

But does that mean that we are doing nothing but boiling frogs waiting for the next fatality?

If you asked any offshore worker to go out and spend weeks at a time on a platform with inadequate blast wall divisions, faulty lifeboats, questionable structural integrity, inadequate adherence to the procedural controls, and a managerial structure that placed profit ahead of life, they’d jump out of the proverbial boiling water rather quickly.  Yet on Piper Alpha, each of those conditions (among others) degraded over time, and no one  noticed that the temperature was slowly rising – 1 degree at a time.

I can see why the bigger picture is sometimes avoided.  It is more daunting than just reading an emotional  book which clouds your mind – it is a huge responsibility to be making these, potentially fatal, decisions.  And it is so easy to say:

“well, if safety really was our first priority, then we wouldn’t be taking oil out of the ground at all, would we?”

But let’s say that we look at it a different way.  Instead of taking the above approach (which in my humble opinion is a method of responsibility cop-out) let’s say that:

“given that we are going to produce energy, let’s make safety our first priority while we do so.”

Little changes in wording, but that may be all it takes.  And really, if you stop profit from being a priority and turn it into the purpose, then is there any other priority that can claim first before the safety of people’s lives?

Richard Hamming gave this talk on how you should be doing great work by basically asking yourself three questions (I stole this summary from Paul Graham because I thought it was so perfectly succinct):

1. What are the most important problems in your field?
2. Are you working on one of them?
3. Why not?

Arguably, safety is a possible answer to #1 for the oil & gas industry.  Yes there are others, but if we go by the idea that safety is a priority rather than simply lip service, then here I am (after a rocky start into a discipline I didn’t covet, and by reading a book I didn’t want to begin), getting to answer ‘yes’ to #2.

Daunting yes, but I think I am starting to see why my mentor emphasized the importance of this discipline.