Delivering Safety Excellence. Michael M. Williamsen
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Canada. Dave was one of the first safety professionals to embrace Dr. Dan Petersen's cultural approach to achieving safety excellence. Dave has been a good friend and a safety culture innovator for as long as I can remember. The risk tolerance material is all his.
Erik Williamsen, my son, did all the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software conversion for Dr. Charles Bailey's Railroad Study booklet. The only surviving copy I could find of this embryonic safety culture work was a photocopy of the original book. It was barely legible, yet Erik spent hours doing the conversions of the text and excel graphics materials which now appear in the appendix of this book.
Mark Mays, a close friend from our days when our family lived in Colorado. Mark has deep interest and academic course work in creative writing along with an interest in writing a book. During a ski trip in Colorado, blizzard conditions snowed us in for three days giving us the time and venue to outline this book. Mark's ongoing critiques of my many drafts were of significant importance to my being able to finish this work.
John Busch, has had a broad professional career in teaching, research, and government service, including being the Chairman of Engineering at LeTourneau University in Longview, Texas. Dr. Busch edited my doctoral dissertation and thus insured its first pass acceptance with no changes by the dissertation committee of Columbia Southern University in Orange Coast, Alabama. John more recently spent many hours helping me with the final editing polishes necessary to get this book accepted by the publisher, John Wiley and Sons.
Raelee Williamsen, my wife of 50+ years and her brother Tom, who lives with us on our small farm, keep the television and radio on until 10 p.m. most nights. In turn, this provides the necessary incentive for me to move out to my man cave office in the barn and do the many hours of work necessary to complete this book.
Domino, our cat who walks around the farm with me in the dark after my day is done. I get solace from this furry friend.
Author Biography
Michael M. Williamsen has a BS in chemical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley; MBA from California State University Hayward, California; and PhD in business – dissertation topic: “How to Accomplish Organizational Turnarounds” – from Columbia Southern University, Orange Coast, Alabama. Certified Safety Professional (CSP). Since graduating from Cal, Dr. Williamsen has worked as a turnaround specialist with a number of small, medium, and large organizations throughout the world that were in trouble in one or more of their functionalities. Over the years the many experiences have helped him to originate and document a cadre of materials which have proven to be effective in developing a culture of interactive engaged employees and managers. The result is a vigorous culture in which the frontline people relentlessly solve their own problems by themselves with their own resources. In addition, these problem solvers have effectively taught and passed on the attitudes and skills learned within their companies and beyond.
Preface
The book teaches the use of in‐depth, practical processes that enable frontline function people solve day‐to‐day weaknesses and dysfunctional culture problems in an organization. The author and his associates have tested and proven these culture improvement models and approaches in multiple industries worldwide. In the book's text each of the culture improvement processes and models are analyzed and worked through to conclusion. The solution is presented in dialogue format using case study snippets discussed between the author as the senior consultant and the organization's employees and leadership involved with the troubling issue that faces them. The case study snippets are from the author and his staff's actual experiences that have occurred in a spectrum of industries and organizations across the United States, Canada, Mexico, South America, Europe, Africa, Middle East, Australia, and India.
This book is different from others written about culture improvement. Every chapter has documented examples of challenging real world problems solved by actual frontline employees using simple effective tools that engage other employees in their group. These real examples are like the majority of workplace problems facing frontline employees on a regular day‐to‐day basis.
As you read this book you will encounter colloquial words and phrases with which you may not be familiar. There is a Glossary of definitions for these terms available to you by going online to this book's landing page in wiley.com.
Prologue
A while back a friend sent in the following thought‐provoking question: “Do you see a reduced need for safety professionals in the future while considering the huge ongoing tech advances in the industry that could greatly affect the need and actions of present and future safety professionals? Examples include: robotics, drones, automation, employees using smart phones to capture hazards and send in reports, wearable devices that monitor a worker's health conditions and physical exertion, etc. With this tsunami of change, consider how technology is disrupting so many fields and causing job losses, e.g. trucking in the future with driverless trucks, delivery drones replacing drivers, robotic welding replacing welders, etc., how might this affect future safety professionals?”
One thing we can always count on in life is change. And with change comes transformation. Consider how the safety profession began in earnest with the Triangle Shirtwaist factory disaster back in 1911 (see Chapter 1). At that point in time there were no laws, or standards, or safety professionals. Then in the 1970s all the regulations and bureaucracies associated with OSHA caused another huge change in what safety was and how it is practiced. In the meantime, we have seen the rise and fall of behavior‐based safety (BBS) and then the initiation of safety accountabilities and safety culture. Through it all we have transformed the way we work in order to protect others. And now our future seems to include many changes through the tech innovations mentioned and many more.
These changes bring to mind Moore's Law: Technically, Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. The observation is named after Gordon Moore, the co‐founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel, whose 1965 paper described a doubling every year in the number of components per integrated circuit, and projected this rate of growth would continue for at least another decade. Since then, the term Moore's Law has been applied to other industries as an intentional generalization to describe the significant technology explosions occurring in many fields in addition to integrated circuits. These significant advances/changes will likewise require associated advances in the development and application of robust techniques for improving safety. Although we are no longer producing nearly as many (of what some would consider) obsolete technology products, there is always the need for the fundamentals of safety: such as regulations, PPE (Personal Protective Equipment), and the like including the continued development and application of safety fundamentals.
Newer technologies bring new challenges to other associated cultures such as human relations, training, industrial safety, and much more. The generational changes that come with a Moore's Law society also affect how we live and what we do as the older generations are continually replaced by younger generations. There are, and will be, foundational safety challenges that must continually be addressed. There will also be all kinds of new challenging safety issues with: electronic and chemical processing, nanotechnology, healthcare, robotic utilization, drone usage, biological safety, security enforcement, etc. The continuing tech upheaval does, and will, change what goes on in the field. As we look to the future, safety professionals, if they want to continue to protect employees, will need to adjust to the changes impacting our frontline production and society. A part of this future will be the need for safety documentation and accountability, and safety culture excellence which may very well be something challenging for younger generations to grasp. This newer generation has many people who have had far less practical experience than the