How to Manage Risk Using Human and Organizational Performance (HOP)

Peter Steinfeld: Hello and welcome to the Employee Safety Podcast from AlertMedia, where you’ll hear advice from experienced safety leaders on how to protect your people and business. I’m Peter Steinfeld. Today I’m talking with Erick Anez, Head of Enterprise Risk and Resilience for Bridgestone West, a division of Bridgestone, the world’s largest tire and rubber company. Erick has spent over 16 years working in crisis management, business continuity, and enterprise risk management across high hazard industries. In this episode, he shares his passion for human and organizational performance and how the concept completely shifted how he approaches risk programs. Let’s hear what he has to say. Hey, Erick, thanks so much for being here.

Erick Anez: Thank you for having me. It’s great to be here.

Peter Steinfeld: Well, you have a lot of experience in high hazard industries. Are there certain strategies that you learned in past roles that inform your approach to risk and resilience in your current one? In other words, do certain things easily carry over or do you have to start from scratch every time?

Erick Anez: For sure. I would say the high hazard environment, primarily when I worked in oil and gas, really changed my outlook on how I look at risk and resilience. When I worked in the maritime industry we were heavily focused on human and organizational performance. This is really a concept that looks at how workers, or how your people, interact within the systems that you have within the organization and externally to achieve successful work. And when something does happen, rather than looking at the person, if you had an event, rather than saying, hey Peter, what did you do wrong, how can we point the finger at Peter on how he failed, the system primarily will look at the system and say the system failed Peter there, and that’s why we had an event. So really focusing on those systems, on those outcomes, and those interactions between people and systems to understand how the organization works.

The other thing is not really just looking at an event from a sense of failure. So rather than looking at events from the lens of what should Peter have done to achieve successful work, it’s what does Peter do every day to achieve successful work? And what are the deviations between how we think work happens, because we think that work happens in a linear fashion, but in reality you’re adapting how you execute that work, especially in the high hazard world, on a minute to minute basis. And looking at all the successful work, because there’s a lot of failures in successful work, and how do we start eliminating those from the everyday transactional standpoint, or the routine in which something actually gets done?

Peter Steinfeld: What are some common pitfalls that you’ve seen in system design that led to human errors, and how have you addressed them?

Erick Anez: I would say the primary component is when you design a system that requires perfection from the operator. That’s usually the first one that we look at. There’s a lot of principles that are set forward within this concept, and the number one is that humans make mistakes. People are fallible. And usually when you’re looking at incident investigation, you’ll see, and I mean, you could probably do a Google search on human error within critical events or within major failures, and you’ll see that that’s where the quote-unquote investigation stops. Someone committed an error and that’s why this happened. But to me, I always made the correlation that if I stopped at human error as a root cause for an event, all I would know is that people made mistakes. And I could apply the same thing to where, if I was putting Christmas lights up on my roof and I fell, did I fall because of gravity? Trying to eliminate error out of the system is really just a wild goose chase.

So usually that’s the first one that we see, because machines will give you reliability, humans will give you adaptability. So machines are going to perform the same task over and over again. What a machine won’t know is that when a specific machine starts making a specific noise, you have to replace the belt within 10, 15, 20 minutes. The human will know that, because they can adapt to it. But there’s a lot of messiness with that adaptability, right? Which is managing those systems and the interaction of the two.

Peter Steinfeld: So then how do you approach balancing high standards for safety and performance while acknowledging that mistakes are bound to happen?

Erick Anez: Number one is looking at the system design and making sure that that system doesn’t primarily expect perfect operations from that employee at all times. That’s number one. Number two is looking at how you gather feedback from your people. A lot of the times we think that we need to hire these big consultants to come in and sort of tell us, hey, this is what you guys are doing wrong, this is how you should do it. The experts at the work that you do already work for you. They’re doing this work day in and day out, some maybe doing it for 10, 20, 30, 40 years.

The problem is that there’s a lot of cultures built in organizations where when something happens, we point the finger and we blame the other person. Blame and punish, I would say, is usually how these things go after bad events. You really find yourself as an organization at a crossroad where you can either blame and punish or you can learn and improve. You really can’t do both. So from a cultural standpoint, you have to have that learning mindset within your teammates. You have to make sure your teammates are open to give you bad news, that they know that they’re not going to be punished for doing that. In a lot of cases punishment doesn’t just mean I’m going to write you up, or I’m going to fire you, or I’m going to give you a really bad consequence. Punishment can also mean I’m going to give you extra work because you brought this up to me. So it’s really looking through the lens of those teammates, of what they see as punishment, removing that from the equation as best as you can, and having that open culture and mindset of learning and improvement in everything that you do within the organization.

Peter Steinfeld: So how did you introduce this concept to coworkers, leaders, and other employees?

Erick Anez: The primary component is really tone at the top, right? So you start with your leadership and you gain alignment to say, these are the core principles on how we look at our business, how we look at our people, how we look at our operations, and how we look at becoming a learning organization. Once you have consensus with your senior leadership, then you can have a consistent message throughout the organization, and then you can start to train and reeducate the entire organization, starting with the next layer of leadership, starting with middle management, from supervisors, and ultimately the entire organization as a whole.

It’s something that takes time, to be honest with you. I think it’s easier to do it in high hazard environments because everyone walks around with sort of the awareness that, hey, I could really hurt myself today, or I could really hurt my teammate today, if I am not paying attention to what I’m doing, if I’m not following certain safety protocols and so on. And there is more of a quality management and safety mindset in high hazard than there would be, let’s say, in an office tech environment. But nonetheless, you can apply the lessons from this methodology into any industry.

Peter Steinfeld: How have folks in your organization adapted to or responded to this approach?

Erick Anez: It’s been very positive. I’ve never run into an organization that believes in the opposite. I think a lot of these concepts are, I would say, common sense concepts that most organizations would like to see and would like to do. One of the biggest challenges is obviously the culture and the history that the organization starts out with. There’s been a lot of movement, especially in the high hazard world, of transition from a behavioral based safety component to what some call the new view of safety, human and organizational performance. For those teammates that have seen the evolution of the learning culture, the safety mindset, there’s a little bit of skepticism that this may be today’s flavor, but it’s going to change tomorrow.

I think it’s also how you make it relatable to people. I love using the car manufacturing world as an analogy. When we talk about controls, and when we talk about the purpose of these controls, one of the main examples that I like to use is seatbelts. Seatbelts weren’t around until the late 1960s, and they were more of an accessory that you could have in your car. And then when seatbelts started being put into vehicles, the reason you put a seatbelt on was to prevent you from flying out of the windshield and hurting yourself. In today’s car, the seatbelt has nothing to do with restricting you from ejection. The purpose of a seatbelt today is that you’re seated in the right place, so when airbag deployment happens, you are protected and you are in the position that you need to be in when that airbag deployment happens.

So when you start looking at the evolution of controls, and why those controls are put in a certain place and how they have shifted, there’s a lot of companies out there creating fatality free cars. There are certain models that have never had a fatality because of all the different controls that are put in place, with the main goal of preventing human fatality, and having that component be the main driver in how they engineer certain components, how they can warn the driver, how they can adjust the driver behavior in real time.

And taking it even a step further, all the systems that you interact with when you drive your vehicle really dictate how you’re going to behave in that vehicle, which is one of the main concepts within this frame of thought: the context in which you put your teammates really drives the behavior that they give you. So when you’re driving, if I make the road really narrow, you’re going to feel constricted in that system, therefore you’re going to slow down. That’s why construction areas actually have narrower driving lanes. And then you have additional controls in place to sort of jolt the driver back into that system. I think one of the most effective ones is the rumble strip. It’s a very manual control, you have to go over that rumble strip, but it jolts you back into focus if the car doesn’t have lane assist, if it doesn’t have automatic steering and all these other components that are going to bring the driver back to focus.

I think taking a look at how your organization is performing the work that they’re performing, in the way in which they’re performing it, and then utilizing the context that you’re able to create as an organization to drive those behaviors and drive those practices, is really powerful. It’s some of those aha moments that you would have, especially in the high hazard world, how changing little things, whether it’s giving your teammates the ability to stop work, and enabling them to say, hey, if you feel that you’re not safe in what you’re doing, you have the ability to stop this entire operation. That’s a very powerful thing to do with your people. The other one is just having the ability to not just communicate up, but having leadership close that loop with them. That’s really how you build that trust: hey, you brought this up to me, and either A, we fixed it or we changed it, or B, we’re not going to, and here’s why. Here’s the reason why this is not going to change, and it’s not just that we blew you off.

Peter Steinfeld: Yeah, closing the loop is so important. And on that note, can you share a time where human error led to an unexpected improvement or innovation? I’d like to hear about how learning from moments like those makes a real difference.

Erick Anez: Yeah, there’s a concept that I call the learning team model. In the learning team model, what you do is, when an event happens, you bring people together that either were part of the event or people that perform the work on a daily basis, and you workshop this within different teams. During those times, you’re able to gather the feedback from all these different groups that are performing this work on a daily basis. One of the most powerful things that you can do when you’re doing this is not just doing it over an hour period. Usually you set up a two or three hour workshop and then you give them some soak time. That soak time may be a day or two where everybody goes away, you let it marinate in their minds, they come back, and you’re able to reassess the entire thing.

One of the things that we did in one of my previous lives is we were trying to figure out how to track all this. We had a lot of different maritime terminals, warehouses, ships that we would visit, just an array of different locations, and it was, how do we keep all this together? Especially for our executive team that would go out to these different places. And we were working with a group of folks that said, one of you guys should just build an app for this, right? And this was right at the beginning of where everything was starting to have an app. You had your email app and you had specific ones, but not a lot of work related apps on mobile devices. And we actually were able to build one where, as these visits were happening, leaders and managers and folks that would visit certain locations could actually track what they were doing. Take pictures of things that were brought up by teammates, you know, the place wasn’t well lit, or if you needed new safety precautions, if we needed to replace ladders, if we needed to do certain things, they could do it within the app and route it to the person responsible for that, whether it was the facilities person, whether it was the head of safety, whether it was the head of quality, whoever it might have been. And everything would have its notation, and loops would close within that app.

And you could also recognize the teammate that brought that forward within the app. It was kind of like the modern day IT ticket, where the teammate would get copied on all these resolutions, and the teammate could see all of the different actions that were taking place just from the idea that he or she brought forward to leadership when they were at a facility at that time. And the most powerful thing was, years into this process, going to a facility and hearing a teammate tell another teammate about the time that the CEO came by, and they brought something up, and how that got resolved, and how they have certain things because it got brought up to leadership. And so you start changing not just the culture, but the storytelling within the organization, from one that’s, hey, you don’t want to mess up or you don’t want to make a mistake, to, hey, you’re empowered to tell leadership at the highest level what’s not working, because this is how it gets resolved, and your voice matters. And everybody wants you to go home better than you came in today. That’s how much we care, not just about keeping you safe and not having an OSHA incident. We really want you to leave this place better than how you came in, on a daily basis.

Peter Steinfeld: I really love this approach of fixating on the problem with the process instead of blaming a person. The simple act of just acknowledging that people are fallible and are going to make mistakes is an absolute game changer. To set them up for success, everyone from the top down really has to be on the same page that it’s about the process, and creating ones that reduce error. So for organizations out there that are wanting to improve their risk or resilience programs, where do you suggest they begin?

Erick Anez: I would suggest that you start with current state. And what I mean by that is understanding, number one, what your risk environment looks like. Then your risk environment, you can break into two different ones. You can break it into current, meaning what are all the risks that I’m facing today in the way that my organization is structured and the way that I’m operating today. And what does my emerging risk profile look like? So as we work through our three or five year strategic plan, which will take the organization from point A to point B, how is our risk landscape going to change? And then, what sort of enablement do we have within the organization to allow us to mature how we’re managing our current risk environment into that emerging one?

And that could look many different ways. That could look into how strong are our policies and procedures, how strong is our overall governance, how strong are we at identifying risk and communicating those risks up to leadership and our decision makers, how well suited are we to create mitigation plans to manage a lot of these risks, and how effective are those mitigation plans, right? So going back to the learning team model, as you manage these risks, go back and go through a learning team process to say, how well did we manage that risk? Did the plans that we put in place work, yes or no? If they did work, how well did they work? If they didn’t work, what could we have done differently? And you sort of have that ace in your back pocket, to where when you face that risk again, you can pull from that experience and say, hey, last time this happened, we did A, B, and C, and we learned that we probably should have done D and E. So your next plan will include A through E, rather than just the one or two components that you might have been aware of at that time.

Peter Steinfeld: Erick, thank you so much for being on the show. This has been fantastic.

Erick Anez: Thank you so much for having me. It was a really great pleasure to speak with you, Peter, and I hope to be able to share some more insights in the future and learn from other guests that you have on the show.

Peter Steinfeld: To learn more about Erick and his work with Bridgestone West, click the links in the show notes. For video highlights from today’s episode, just search for AlertMedia on YouTube. Don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and review the show wherever you get your podcasts. Stay safe out there. Thank you for listening to the Employee Safety Podcast from AlertMedia, the industry’s most intuitive emergency communication and threat intelligence solution. To learn more about how to protect your people and business during critical events, visit alertmedia.com. Until next time.