In this episode, Mark McBride-Wright sits down with Trish Kerin, the Director of the IChemE Safety Centre, to explore the critical intersection of process safety and diversity, equity, and inclusion. Trish shares her personal journey into the world of process safety, recounting pivotal moments that shaped her career. They delve into the challenges of fostering a common understanding of safety across engineering disciplines and the opportunities to leverage safety culture to promote more inclusive workplaces. Listeners will gain insights into the future of process safety, the role of technology, and Trish’s unique “platypus philosophy” for identifying and managing weak signals. This conversation offers valuable perspectives for safety professionals, engineers, and leaders seeking to create safer, more connected, and equitable organisations.
Read the Transcript
Mark McBride-Wright 0:00
Fast, deep breaths. So nice to see you. Trish, how are you?
Trish Kerin 0:04
I’m doing well. Mark, really great to see you and connecting again.
Mark McBride-Wright 0:08
Yeah, it’s been quite a few years. So this is that. This is the first episode of well, should hang on. Let me see that might not be the first one terms of how we cue them. So this is a recording of the safe leader podcast. It’s a new project that I’m doing whilst I’m over here now in New York. I’m really excited to lean into my book, the book that I’ve written, the safe leader and I’ve invited, I’ve curated a guest list of people who have invited, who are specialists in this field, and you were one of the first people front of mind, given your role in process Safety and leader at the institution of chemical engineers, International Safety Center, have I said that right? International Safety Center?
Trish Kerin 1:07
Just I came Safety Center,
Mark McBride-Wright 1:09
I came E Safety Center, I came E Safety Center. And so I’ve prepared some some some questions for you, but really, this is just a space to riff off one another, offer some insights into into any advice that you’ve got, you’re also a podcast host yourself. I noticed so any hints or tips as well as we go through would be much appreciated. But if I guess, to start off with, I wanted to go back to when you and I first met. I connected with you when I was running inter engineering for LGBTQI plus engineers. And you, you were on a radio station over in Melbourne, is that right? Yeah, that’s right.
Trish Kerin 2:06
I was on the board of joy 94.9 which is Australia’s only gay and lesbian radio station, and I was on that board for a total of about seven years. And wow, those I was vice president for So, yeah, really interesting and exciting activity to be part of, and joy is still going strong today. So it’s fabulous to have been part of its its esteemed history. And you know, to be there as it did its coming of age. I was there as it turned 21 and things so that was pretty cool. And
Mark McBride-Wright 2:41
so. So if we go back to So you’ve had an impressive career in process safety. That was one of the areas in which we connected. I was a process safety engineer by background, working in industry, and you’ve led global initiatives to improve safety outcomes. So what first ignited your interest in safety in high hazard industries?
Trish Kerin 3:06
Yeah, I was actually having this conversation last night over dinner with someone. And I started my career in the oil industry, and I started in designing and installing aviation fueling systems, yeah, and after a few years of doing that, I moved to the refinery and started to do some refinery operations, some shipping operations, and over those early years in my career, I was actually involved, and in fact, probably the cause of two process safety incidents that had occurred. Now neither of them were significant. They didn’t reach a significant consequence, but they were process safety type, low level events in both instances, and I didn’t still really connect it at that point in time. Okay, when I was working at the refinery, one thing that did happen was the Longford gas plant explosion in Victoria, and the refinery I worked at was at the end of a pipeline that came from first, originally, Longford, and then that product moved to another intermediate terminal and then onto the refinery. And I remember standing in the refinery planner office when he got a phone call to say that they were shutting the pipeline down because there had been an explosion at Longford, and we turned the radio on to hear the news, because it was, you know, it was last century. We couldn’t just quickly go on the internet and see what happens. We turned on the old school am radio to listen to the breaking news, and the news was saying there had been an explosion, and there were two workers missing. That point hit me like nothing else, because we there was a few of us in the room. We all just looked at each other and we knew they weren’t missing. You know, when you work in that environment and you hear that, you know they’re not alive anymore. Yeah, that really it absolutely gutted me. I can remember precisely where I was standing the. Moment that call came in on the 25th of September, 1998 it was about 12 o’clock in the afternoon. It was lunchtime, okay? It was just, it really shook me at that point in time and and it was that was on that day that I thought, you know, I’ve got to do something so this doesn’t happen again. Yeah. And that was a turning point in my career. I didn’t safety immediately. At that point, I continued in operations management for a period of time before I then actually found myself in a safety role and discovered how much I loved being in safety. But you know, I as I think back and reflect that, that turning point, that was a point in my life where I thought, you know, this, this can’t happen again. And And sadly, there were political reasons why this incident, you know, it had a lot of uproar in in the city of Melbourne. It cut off natural gas supply for for two or three weeks. That upset the population, because we all had to have cold showers. We had no gas hot water system making hot water for us. So politically, it was a big thing, yeah, but John and Peter died that day, yeah, and, and people forget that. And I think it, you know, we, we owe it to those that have tragically lost their lives in process safety incidents to just do better,
Mark McBride-Wright 6:17
absolutely. And I’ve heard, you know, you ascribing their names there to the incident. That’s one of the best ways to commemorate, to honor their what they gave and the fact that they existed. I’ve seen some clients before. It becomes a bit of a they become a number, or it’s like the identity gets lost in the, you know, the box of we not we don’t talk about this stuff now, when actually, in safety, that’s it’s the opposite to that. We need to talk about it. We need to do the root cause analysis, to share the lessons learned, to so it doesn’t happen again. Yeah, absolutely. And is that so? So you’ve been the director of the ikemi Safety Center for over 10 years now, I think it is, yeah. So how is that going? You know, are you worked a bit in industry, then in a process safety role, but now you must have oversight over quite, quite a unique position, actually in in supporting the sector.
Trish Kerin 7:23
Yeah, it’s, it’s a really interesting role to be part of. So when I was recruited into Ike, me to start the center right, and when we started, we had six fun founding members that put funding forward to get it off the ground. Okay, fast forward to today. We have 120 member companies.
Mark McBride-Wright 7:40
Wow, that’s amazing.
Trish Kerin 7:43
In 11 years, and we’ve actually increased our membership numbers every year over those 11 years so and we’re still growing. We’re still creating influence, and, you know, helping companies get access to useful material that can help them improve their process safety. And so it’s really exciting to be part of something like that, where I liken it to when I worked in industry. I had influence in one company, yep, I now work globally in the process safety field. I am able to influence not only different companies in an industry sector, different industry sectors.
Mark McBride-Wright 8:28
This is not just energy, yeah, oil and gas, yeah. Now I work
Trish Kerin 8:32
in so many different fields now, so many different industry sectors with people on process safety and so it’s wonderful to actually be able to raise that awareness and create that that influence, so that they get better results,
Mark McBride-Wright 8:47
can you give our audience a bit of a flavor of the expanse of process safety? Because people’s minds might just go straight to gas, risk of explosion, you know, crop by your example as well that you’ve given, but you know, you’re in so many more industries. Can you just give us a flavor of the of the sectors, the diversity of the sectors that you transect?
Trish Kerin 9:09
So we talk about process safety as a high consequence, low likelihood, loss of control. Event, right? What loss of containment? Containment is an outcome of losing control.
Mark McBride-Wright 9:21
Interesting, if
Trish Kerin 9:23
you go a little bit further upstream, we can start to talk about different sorts of sectors. So, you know, I’m currently working with the mining sector and minerals processing, with new energies, with food and beverage manufacturing, dairy, those sorts of things, pharmaceutical sector and utilities, treatment, as well as your traditional oil and gas, your traditional chemical sectors, you know, pulp and paper manufacturing, yeah, aviation, air traffic control, yeah. So all sorts of different things can actually when we think about it as this whole. Consequence, low likelihood loss of control, and apply the principles to that we can start to talk about and importantly, learn from so many diverse sectors. So learning from the aviation sector is a great thing, but also helping the aviation sector learn some things too. So there’s a whole range of different crossover
Mark McBride-Wright 10:22
Well, what would you so I recently started a visiting professorship at UCL in inclusive engineering leadership, and I have come at it admittedly with a bias of safety being a chemical engineer. And I have this sort of I had this bias that safety, and I’ve used inverted commas there is understood by engineers, commonly across all disciplines. But what I’ve realized I actually need to do is step back a bit and do a kind of fundamental baselining, because the civil engineers were interpreting what we mean by safety differently to the electrical engineering students when compared to the chemical engineering students, etc, etc. So can you just give some color to that experience I’ve just described and how it plays out in industry, and then maybe, what do you think we should be doing earlier on in the chain, to bring some common ground to to that,
Trish Kerin 11:26
yeah, look, that is definitely a gap. So we don’t tend to see most disciplines of engineering actually talk about process safety in the undergraduate degrees, chemical engineering does talk about process safety, specifically, typically in in Chem, Eng, yes, other disciplines, don’t we? We come to safety in a different way at times. So my, my background discipline is actually mechanical engineering, okay, now, back when I studied mechanical engineering, I really don’t think we understood safety terribly well there, either other than, you know, we focused on, we would do finite element analysis and crash modeling for vehicles. So we, we thought we talk safety, because we were designing cars so that the people inside were protected. We were we were used to dealing with managing dissipation of energy and energy in some form, not chemical energy, although, you know, we also understood the fundamentals of chemical energy release, because mechanical engineers are also the ones typically designing internal combustion engines. So we get the thermodynamics of all of this right. We study thermodynamics as well. And then you look at civil engineers, and you know, they their safety was quite different. They’re concerned, you know, more typically, with Earth cavids, for example, structural integrity of buildings in high winds, yeah, and sort of thing. So we, we all look at safety differently. We look at it from our own discipline. I think when we start to cut across process safety and start to say, Okay, if we talk about this high consequence, low likelihood, loss of control, it applies across all of the disciplines, but we need to get better at communicating that. And so I think there needs to be a move to have that concept of process safety embedded in every engineering discipline, regardless of what it is, because there is a serious impact there. And in my my career and time in this role, I’ve talked about many different incidents. And if I think about civil engineering, one of the incidents I’ve talked about is the collapse of the West Gate Bridge in Melbourne under construction, and it was a high consequence failure right of a bridge construction that killed several workers. Because, you know, even just sort of layout planning, the the rest huts were located underneath the span that was being built. Oh, right, okay, collapsed at morning tea, yeah, everybody in the hut, yeah? Were gathered in the huts because it was break time, yeah, yeah. So, you know, and I’ve talked about that in terms of understanding mechanical stress, because that was civil construction, but the bridge suffered mechanical stress, which caused a catastrophic failure, yeah, and, you know, often chemical engineers don’t talk about mechanical stresses. You know, flixborough incident 50 years ago is a classic example of not understanding mechanical stress. Yeah, pipeline that resulted in a catastrophic event. So, you know, we all need to work together. We all need to have a base level understanding. And one of the things I talk about is process safety is the ultimate team sport. We all have a role to play. We all play different roles, but we all have a role to play in making that team successful and winning the game. And for me, winning the game is safe production, not product. Safe production, whatever you produce, whatever your output is, safe output. But. What the game needs to be that’s
Mark McBride-Wright 15:01
really interesting. It kind of I reflect on my own relationship with safety and journey into the industry, and maybe I had a bit of a warped impression in terms of how integrated safety is understood across disciplines, because I I didn’t work in the detailed design phase, where you tend to then be much more in the depths of your discipline. I was more concept design. So I worked on a CRO I think, in the in the years that I was at my employer, I worked on about 15 different projects. You know, no project would be any longer than two or three months, but you were always working with piping engineers, electrical engineers, mechanical we were all there in the hazard workshops, the ISD workshops, you know, looking at designs from a and are they inherently safe perspective? And so it really, it shocked me a bit to be honest, and it’s a little bit frustrating that we have to do this education piece to our future leaders now to to even get parity, equivalency of our understanding of safety. Because, you know the angle, the angle I’m we’re trying to take with the I’m trying to take with a safe leader is trying to use the fabric of safety and the familiarity that engineers have or those working in high hazard industries, it doesn’t just have to be the engineers the relationship that we have with safety, and how can we extend that to now look at the new concepts around psychological safety And the ability to be not just physically present on site, but also mentally present as well. So these concepts that we often ascribe to the EDI movement of masking, hiding, covering, you know, the energy delta between being your whole self, but then showing up to someone different and then being being distracted. I wondered if I’d really, I could, like hog the air wave here, just monologuing about this. It’s my passion area. I’m really keen to understand your relationship or your thoughts on, where can safety be used to communicate diversity, equity and inclusion? Is there an opportunity there? What are your thoughts?
Trish Kerin 17:23
I think there is because at the end of the day, the way we get better safety outcomes is by engaging collaboratively with the entire workforce. And that means we need the entire being there for everybody. Everybody needs to be able to show up without fear in their workplace, because they bring unique and diverse perspectives, and that’s incredibly important. So I think safety needs good Ed and I to be successful, because that starts to help you deliver that psychological safety in the workplace, because if we don’t have the psychological safety, people can’t say what they need to say and speak up and intervene importantly in safety when they need to. Can we use safety to help drive that Ed and I as well? I think we can by creating safe environments where people are respected for what they contribute and what they bring to the table. So I think it goes both ways, and I think we need to get a lot better at doing that. Ed and I, is critically important, I think, to to make sure that the people are able to bring their whole self. And you know, I have, I have had periods in my life where I didn’t bring my whole self to work, okay, and how relieving it is to be able to is amazing.
Mark McBride-Wright 18:48
And do you see, do you see companies opening up to this? Do you, I mean, it sounds pretty obvious when you, when we, when we talk about it in this lens, um, you know, I’ve seen the penny drop for many an engineer and many an HR professional and many a director, but some, maybe sometimes, the most obvious things are the things that we don’t see. And so it’s our role as educators to try and shift the focus to be in this way.
Trish Kerin 19:20
I think we need to get better at showing the value of it. Because, I mean, I’m sure you you hear the rhetoric around Yes, you know, the anti woke, and, you know, we’re sick of political correctness and all this sort of stuff. And I gotta admit, I sit back and I look at some of this stuff, and I think the things that people are saying awoke and politically correct, I was brought up with those just being polite and respectful. Yeah, if someone wants to be referred to in a certain way, then it’s polite to acknowledge their request.
Mark McBride-Wright 19:56
Absolutely. I
Trish Kerin 19:57
don’t see that as as you know. Correct or woke, I just see that as fundamental dignity and politeness. And my mother would have been horrified if I didn’t treat people with respect and be polite to them. That was who I was raised. Yeah. And it’s like, how is how is that? How have we lost that? I
Mark McBride-Wright 20:17
think, yeah, oh yeah, absolutely. I think, I think there’s a there’s a thing. There’s a there’s a relationship here with connectedness that we need to speak more into when it comes to the white, straight, cisgendered, heterosexual, neurotypical, able bodied male that represents 84% of the United Kingdom engineering workforce and similar stats globally, you know, a male majority workforce, essentially. And what? What’s really charting the course of my what I’m trying to influence here is this whole discovery around masculinity and engineering, I genuinely could not believe the statistics in 2018 where the Office of National Statistics in the UK death by suicide broken down by occupation, the construction, manufacturing and process industries combined had the highest suicide rate of any other sectors in the UK, and we then did our own research equal engineers on masculinity and engineering, and found similar rates of suicidal ideation and self harm. One in five engineers reporting losing work colleague to suicide, one in four reporting suicidal ideation or self harm. And so men were 3.5 times more likely to answer yes to that than female respondents. So my aha moment was, well, hang on. Firstly, we would never tolerate such a high potential loss of life in any physical hazard scenarios. We would design them out, eradicate them, trying to get them to as low as reasonably practicable for residual risk management. Yet here we are when it comes to people’s psychological safety being at risk. They’re obviously not got in a culture where they can be open and talk about whatever the root causes that might be driving these high, high incident rates, you know? And actually, that’s what inclusion and belonging tries to achieve, is creating cultures where you can be your whole self, bring your whole self to work. So I think there’s a there’s a relationship and connectedness that we, we, we need to make there. And then I think your will, will, will, will, it will get better. It’s interesting. You mentioned about the political dynamics. You know, we’re recording this episode, what two weeks away from the US election, and that pendulum swing off equality, that can move forward, but it can also regress backwards. What role do you think? What are you seeing in terms of, like, working with your members? You’ve got such a large number there now through the Ike me Safety Center, like, what? What do you kind of sense is the potential here to help the people that you’re working with, from a safety culture perspective, get better at their their cult, their culture, internally, in totality.
Trish Kerin 23:21
Yeah, I think it’s, it’s a challenging area, because we’re also trying to shift the needle and have people recognize that process safety, whilst it is grounded in engineering, is not just engineering. Yeah, that process safety involves people, and we need to be able to understand the human factors, elements of what we do, but also the cultural aspects of what we do and how we do it. So I think it’s around trying to shift that needle. And you know, the organizations that join the Safety Center are interested in improving their process safety. They’re interested in understanding how they can do that. And so when we can incredibly, say things around, you know, if we’ve got good consultation with employees, and they’re able to share what is important, you will get better outcomes, yeah. And so I think it’s around, you know, sometimes just fundamentally coming back to some of those basics of, you know, it’s about consultation. And consultation doesn’t mean I have to agree with you, yes, but consultation does mean I have to ask you. I have to genuinely listen and take into account before I make my decision. And as I said, it doesn’t mean I have to agree. I might not agree with all the consultation that I receive, but it’s important to genuinely Listen, take it into account, and then communicate back the decision, yeah, if I didn’t, if I didn’t agree with you, why and what we’re going to do going forward, and some of this is really basic stuff, yeah, yet, we just don’t seem to be able to get it right, or we get caught up in our. Own egos, yeah, and stuck with, you know, well, I’m the boss. I get to make these decisions. Well, that That’s so old school you’re
Mark McBride-Wright 25:09
describing there, like really good basic first basic practice in Mental Health First Aid training, which is that ability to one on one, tune in, tune out the non verbal communication that might be coming into your head that is your impetus to respond. But that’s almost like scaling it up to an organizational level, isn’t it, and tuning it not having a pre determined course of direction that you’re going to go in the consultations just to tick the box and get the outcome, but actually have an open heart and mind to figuring out whether or not your people may have some input that challenges that obviously leaders have got a direction of travel that they anticipate leading the organization. Otherwise, not very good leaders, you know. But it’s about challenging those notions and making sure you’re shaping the decision making and minimize an impact.
Trish Kerin 26:03
One of the things I actually talk a lot about with different leaders around the world is around, you know, engaging with the workforce and having conversations with them. And I always sort of give them the caveat of, you know, you actually need to get out there and talk to your workforce and ask them questions. Ask them what’s going on, yeah, but you have to genuinely listen and take appropriate action on the conversation. And if you are not prepared to genuinely listen and take appropriate action, don’t, don’t talk to them, because if you are just going to tick the box and go through the motions and pretend before you do that, that the workforce might think you don’t care, yeah, but if you actually just go through the motions, don’t pay any attention, then ask the question, because everyone says you have to go and ask the question, don’t pay any attention. You’ve just proven to the workforce that they know you don’t care, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so them thinking you don’t care is probably better than them knowing you don’t care, yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally get somewhere with it. But, and so it’s a little bit flippant of you know, if you can’t do it properly, don’t do it at all. But the aim is actually do it properly. Learn to listen. Learn to actually hear what people are saying to you. Yeah, and do with that information what you need to
Mark McBride-Wright 27:16
that that really plays into the safe leader model of share, act, feel and empower, trying to get people to understand their own difference, their own diversity story. First, bring it to the surface, share it, talk about it, and then, can you be a lighthouse for others? You know, to bring people to you, I find a lot of them. There’s a lot of men that haven’t opened up about fertility issues, struggling to conceive, to start a family, etc. I even had one client, actually, where the executive team, it transpired through the training session that three of them, three out of 10, were going through IVF, you know, different stages. Some just come to terms of the fact that they have to use it. Some well into the cycles. And none of them were talking about between one another. Literally, in that moment, in that session, was the discovery that they were going through that 30% of the leadership team, and they thought, Well, my goodness, if we scale this up to our business size, how many people is this affecting? So do you know what they did? They did an investigation. They kind of culturally set some stuff up to try and find out the conversation. Some of the a couple of the guys actually spoke about it publicly at one of their town halls, and, yeah, a lot of people were going through it. So they then created a parent and carers network. They adjusted their think they even had to bring in, like, a new policy, a new process. But what it did was made a conversation that wasn’t happening for whatever reason wasn’t happening, whether it was taboo or just just no one was talking about it. They became the luminaries to table that conversation more people, then it’s just like mining the diamond, as we say, in safety, you know, looking for the the the things that we don’t know what’s happening. It then became a known, known, you know, and then you can make decisions on on fact and things that affect people. But it takes for those people going through that to share, and very often, white straight men may often feel excluded from the EDI conversation, like they are othered from it, and they’re not part of it, but actually they do have a story to tell. And so, yeah, I just think we need to give some space to that to help bring the temperature down on the conversation of this anti, woke anti, this anti, that’s one of my bug bears just how polarized it can become. Yeah, absolutely.
Trish Kerin 29:43
And you know, it’s, it’s harming people, and it’s, it’s affecting their well being and their mental health, which is actually having effects on organizations. Yeah, both, not only. In the safety space, but also in the economic space, the financials. So you know, if you’ve got people that are really feeling targeted and and not included in what’s going on, then you do not have your best potential business running, yeah,
Mark McBride-Wright 30:15
well, um, are there any tools that we use in industry. I’m coming back. Keep thinking about this education of future leaders, like our you know, the students, the apprentices, the technicians, the people that are going through the ladder. Now, is there any stuff that we do that we could bring forward to, like the education experience that then when those graduates come off the degree conveyor belt, or the apprenticeship conveyor belt, and then move into industry, they they’ve got a greater understanding. I tried to play the reason I’m asking this. I tried to play around a bit with some of my UCL students, with looking at equality impact assessments that we do in industry. Sometimes we do them too late, that they don’t actually have the intended impact that they’re designed to have. But then could we bring that into the engineering projects, the capstone project that they did for one of their designs, to then be looking at communities through an EDI lens, through the stakeholder engagement, you know? So so it’s the process of doing the engineering and the diversity of the composition of the degree class, and does the team, the engineering student team, feel psychologically safe to challenge one another, but they’re also thinking about the communities that they’re designing things for, and are they involved in them, or are they making assumptions? There’s one tool that gets used in industry that I don’t, I didn’t see being used in academia. And maybe there’s a lift and shift opportunity that then increases its usage in five to 10 years time. Yeah,
Trish Kerin 31:48
look, look, possibly, possibly. There is, I think one of the interesting things is, when I did my engineering degree long time ago, we actually had to do, I think it was two units over our whole four years, okay, in the humanities
Mark McBride-Wright 32:06
field, interesting. And
Trish Kerin 32:09
so, you know, we had to, there was like seven or eight different classes we could pick to do, and we had to pick two of them over our whole four year degree. And we had to complete those to be able to graduate, right? And, you know, so, I mean, one of them was, was, you know, sex and society and understanding
Mark McBride-Wright 32:28
gender, Wow, very interesting.
Trish Kerin 32:30
This was in the 90s.
Mark McBride-Wright 32:32
It’s probably more progressive then, then it’s become now, possibly,
Trish Kerin 32:36
possibly, you know, and there are other ones that were more arts based. And I think at the time, you know, these engineering students that were perhaps not had never studied humanities or certainly pursued it very much through high school, because they’re all very math science people. Yeah, I thought it was quite fascinating to watch who was picking which subjects, and what we were saying about them at lunchtime. And it wasn’t necessarily respectful conversations about them. I you know, I’m sad to admit, but it was an interesting concept. And I don’t know whether we still do things like that. I don’t know whether my old university still has that requirement in their engineering degree. But at the end of the day, humanities is equally as important as engineering in my my book, because, you know, we do need to understand the beauty of the world, not just the science of the world. And I think one of the other things I’ve seen happen a lot now is we talk a lot about STEM and I’ve now seen people starting to talk about steam, steam the arts, yeah, and I heard steam the for the first time. And I have to admit, my original initial bias was, what? And then I thought that actually makes sense, yeah, because during at its core, is actually a creative science. Yes, yes, we have to be creative and innovative to solve the problems. There is a level of artisticness in engineering, and I think we need to be willing to embrace that and pick it up. I like the idea of taking engineering students and apprentices and whatever, and actually making sure that they do have some exposure to the humanities, yeah, because that also has a lot of critical thinking training in it, yeah, but it also broadens your horizon. It broadens your outlook, and it it opens your mind up to different concepts and different ideas. So I think that’s actually something that probably we could be doing a little bit better with and a little bit more of. And the fact is, you know, English, and for example, English literature is a humanities subject, yet we do engineering. And as engineers, we have to communicate.
Mark McBride-Wright 34:58
Yeah, yeah. Part. Public Speaking. And yeah, writing,
Trish Kerin 35:02
writing a document that someone can actually understand, yeah, that is, of course, concise, but written in a simplified way, not simplistic, but a simplified way that others can understand. Yes. And you know, you need English, or whatever your native language skill is that you write in to be able to do that, yeah, and, you know, I studied English literature in my final year of high school, wow, because I loved English and literature. So, you know, I went into engineering, not having done just pure sciences and maths in my high school, yeah, as well, because I found it interesting, and I think it’s really helped my career long term in terms of being my main role is really a safety and an engineering communicator. Yes, yes. I’m not the person you want to have doing detailed calculations for you, yeah, but I’m the person that can explain that to someone that needs to understand it,
Mark McBride-Wright 35:56
yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. And we need, we need communication conduits that have that technical understanding as well. So what with that in mind, then, like, what excites you most about the future of process safety? What opportunities innovations do you see in the field? What you know, if you’re leading the icame, you’re leading the IChemE Safety Center with this phenomenal growth that’s happened, what are your aspirations for it and the industry in the next five to 10 years?
Trish Kerin 36:26
Yeah, so I’ll tackle the aspirations first. So I want to see the Safety Center continue to grow. I want to see it continue to attract new members around the world, new organizations, new industry sectors, so that we can continue to create this rich learning that we see when we start to talk outside of our own little inner circles. And I think that’s really, really important in terms of what I think are some of the exciting areas I think, I think we’ve still got a long way to go on human factors and understanding the human interaction with the system. If someone makes a mistake that’s not the cause of the incident. Yes, the system around them that allowed and facilitated that mistake to result in a catastrophic outcome. That’s the issue we need to get to. So I think there’s still, we still got a long way to go here. I still don’t think a lot of organizations are yet embracing enough the human factors? Yes, the other aspect that you know, technology is fantastic, we need to make sure we’re using it appropriately. And I think there is amazing opportunity in technology, but just because you can doesn’t mean you should. So there’s some technologies that, you know, we’re embracing and we’re using and we’re doing all these things with, and you look at it and go, we’re not adding any value, right? Yeah, because it’s cool and it’s sexy and it’s fun, okay? But it’s not helping anything. It’s a distraction. People like to break anything. It’s a distraction. So, you know, there’s a lot of excitement about artificial intelligence, obviously, AI, the fact is, it’s large language models and machine learning. It’s not actually intelligence starting off that we’re using now. I think there’s enormous opportunity in machine learning and large language models to be able to sort yes quantities of data that as humans, we just can’t Yeah time, but we then need the human to take that sorting and make sense of yes context and get to the next stage of implementation. And so I don’t see you know that technology that we’re going through that development eliminating the need for the human input.
Mark McBride-Wright 38:43
Absolutely.
Trish Kerin 38:44
Do need that, that ability to then look at it and say, okay, is that right? What can we do with it? What’s it telling us? You know, yet, data is one thing, but data without insight is not very useful.
Mark McBride-Wright 38:58
I’m imagining like now being able to do a hazard identification study, or for a single facility, you know, getting all the major accident hazard reports, coma reports or offshore safety cases, you know, getting them all loaded up into an AI. And then you’ve got the ability to call upon and trend and look for patterns, which is what its benefit tends to be,
Trish Kerin 39:23
yeah, but then the inside is, so what’s that pattern actually alluding to, exactly? And that’s, that’s the big catch there. And yeah, one of the things I talk about, so I wrote a small little book called The platypus philosophy, okay, which is about identifying and managing weak signals. Oh, okay. How do we actually identify, first of all, that a weak signal has occurred, and then how do we see that and determine whether it’s actually something we need to worry about or it’s just white noise in the background. So much of it is white noise in the background. But that one important bit, if we just. To ignore, it could result in an incident, because, as I’m sure you’re aware, after every incident, there were all these warning signs that nobody saw. Yeah, why did
Mark McBride-Wright 40:09
you call it? Why did you call it the platypus? Is there something linked to the animal? That
Trish Kerin 40:14
there is something linked to the animal? Yes, it’s called the platypus because there’s two parts to it as a metaphor. The first part is the platypus is so ridiculous, an animal so unlikely, it should not exist. It’s got the bill of a duck, the tail of a beaver, the claws of an otter. It’s a mammal that lays eggs,
Mark McBride-Wright 40:37
so it does, yes, yeah, I learned that recently from my son,
Trish Kerin 40:42
yeah, so it sweats milk to feed its young. So it actually sweats it out of its paws. Wow. Its fur grows a glows under ultraviolet light. It bioluminesces, and it uses electro perception to find its food. And you go, okay, none of these things should work together. It’s it’s an animal made up of spare parts, but it’s so unlikely, it’s possible and process safety incidents no matter how unlikely are possible. So first of all, get your head around these things can happen. But then the second part of the metaphor is a platypus is very elusive. They’re very hard to see. And if all you see is just the bill sticking out from some reeds in a river, and you don’t see the rest of it, remember, Bill is it a duck? And so I then, sort of, I actually use the words, the letters of the word platypus, to have an action plan to Okay, to sort through that sighting and say, so, is it a duck, or is it a platypus? Because if it’s a duck, it won’t hurt you. But another aspect of the platypus that’s not very well known is male platypuses have a toxic venom in a spur, and they can actually envenomate you and hurt you. Oh, gosh, you need to know, if it’s a platypus, you’ve got to manage it and deal with it. Yeah, you can ignore it. So I have this concept that I use to it’s a, you know, a step process to take you through and say, okay, you know, here’s, here’s what it what it means. You know, these are the sorts of things you consider when you see that first week signal, when you sense that first week and, you know, it’s a quick scanning of, yeah, I think there might be something here. Okay, now I move into a risk assessment phase. Fabulous.
Mark McBride-Wright 42:31
Well, I’ve got some quick fire questions here. Are you? You ready?
Trish Kerin 42:41
I’ll give it a shot, right?
Mark McBride-Wright 42:44
So what’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received? Take the opportunity. What’s your favorite safety innovation or tool that has made a difference in your work?
Trish Kerin 43:01
I think so many apps that just make me able to focus in different areas. So there’s so many apps, so Tracy jokes that there’s always, I always say there’s an app for that. How did you do this? There’s an app for that. So any sort of app I love to help me focus on what I need to be
Mark McBride-Wright 43:18
doing. What’s the one thing you do to unwind after a long day
Trish Kerin 43:24
walk my dogs.
Mark McBride-Wright 43:25
What’s your proudest professional accomplishment,
Trish Kerin 43:29
creating the Safety Center and making it a success?
Mark McBride-Wright 43:32
If you could have dinner with any engineer, expert, industrialist, who would it be?
Trish Kerin 43:39
Trevor kletts, I never had the pleasure of meeting him. I would love to meet him, or to have met him.
Mark McBride-Wright 43:43
What’s a skill you believe every safety professional should have
Trish Kerin 43:49
critical thinking? Tea or Coffee? Coffee?
Mark McBride-Wright 43:53
What’s one book, podcast or resource you’d recommend to someone in safety or process engineering or engineering in general,
Trish Kerin 44:03
anything by Trevor kletts of his mountain of work. And I have to admit, I am enjoying reading the safe leader at the moment. Oh,
Mark McBride-Wright 44:10
thank you. What’s the most exciting project you’ve worked on?
Trish Kerin 44:18
Oh, that’s a really, really tough one, because I’ve done some interesting things, I’m going to go right back to my first job that was very exciting to me at the time, where I was building aviation fueling systems at airports, and I installed kilometers of underground hydrant systems, fuel hydrants at at Melbourne Airport. And I still get a a nice little buzz when I’m at Melbourne Airport and I’m a gate and I’m about to get on a plane, and I think I built that.
Mark McBride-Wright 44:46
That’s cool. That’s cool. If you could give your younger self one piece of advice, what would it be
Trish Kerin 44:53
again? Take, take the opportunity. You may not like it, and if you don’t move on to something else, but. When an opportunity is presented, give it a go and do your best at it.
Mark McBride-Wright 45:03
That is really great advice. Trish and I’ve really enjoyed our conversation today for our listeners, where can they find out more about your work and what you’re involved with? How can they get in contact with you?
Trish Kerin 45:20
So first of all, there’s the work through the ikemi Safety Center. Www, dot Ikeme safety center.org, for my own activities, the platypus philosophy and some of the other consulting activities I do my personal website, www, dot lead, like karen.com, so that’s k, e, r, I N, and you can get my email there as well and see all the different sorts of
Mark McBride-Wright 45:47
things I’m doing fabulous. We’ll make sure those links are in the show notes as well. Thank you so much for your time today. Trish, I’ve loved it
Trish Kerin 45:55
pleasure. Mark, always fabulous to have a conversation with you. And hopefully our paths will cross at some point when I get across to New York and say hi,
Mark McBride-Wright 46:03
absolutely, you’re more than welcome to come and visit See you soon.
E001: Safety First in High Hazard Industries
Podcast Description
Read the Transcript
Mark McBride-Wright 0:00
Fast, deep breaths. So nice to see you. Trish, how are you?
Trish Kerin 0:04
I’m doing well. Mark, really great to see you and connecting again.
Mark McBride-Wright 0:08
Yeah, it’s been quite a few years. So this is that. This is the first episode of well, should hang on. Let me see that might not be the first one terms of how we cue them. So this is a recording of the safe leader podcast. It’s a new project that I’m doing whilst I’m over here now in New York. I’m really excited to lean into my book, the book that I’ve written, the safe leader and I’ve invited, I’ve curated a guest list of people who have invited, who are specialists in this field, and you were one of the first people front of mind, given your role in process Safety and leader at the institution of chemical engineers, International Safety Center, have I said that right? International Safety Center?
Trish Kerin 1:07
Just I came Safety Center,
Mark McBride-Wright 1:09
I came E Safety Center, I came E Safety Center. And so I’ve prepared some some some questions for you, but really, this is just a space to riff off one another, offer some insights into into any advice that you’ve got, you’re also a podcast host yourself. I noticed so any hints or tips as well as we go through would be much appreciated. But if I guess, to start off with, I wanted to go back to when you and I first met. I connected with you when I was running inter engineering for LGBTQI plus engineers. And you, you were on a radio station over in Melbourne, is that right? Yeah, that’s right.
Trish Kerin 2:06
I was on the board of joy 94.9 which is Australia’s only gay and lesbian radio station, and I was on that board for a total of about seven years. And wow, those I was vice president for So, yeah, really interesting and exciting activity to be part of, and joy is still going strong today. So it’s fabulous to have been part of its its esteemed history. And you know, to be there as it did its coming of age. I was there as it turned 21 and things so that was pretty cool. And
Mark McBride-Wright 2:41
so. So if we go back to So you’ve had an impressive career in process safety. That was one of the areas in which we connected. I was a process safety engineer by background, working in industry, and you’ve led global initiatives to improve safety outcomes. So what first ignited your interest in safety in high hazard industries?
Trish Kerin 3:06
Yeah, I was actually having this conversation last night over dinner with someone. And I started my career in the oil industry, and I started in designing and installing aviation fueling systems, yeah, and after a few years of doing that, I moved to the refinery and started to do some refinery operations, some shipping operations, and over those early years in my career, I was actually involved, and in fact, probably the cause of two process safety incidents that had occurred. Now neither of them were significant. They didn’t reach a significant consequence, but they were process safety type, low level events in both instances, and I didn’t still really connect it at that point in time. Okay, when I was working at the refinery, one thing that did happen was the Longford gas plant explosion in Victoria, and the refinery I worked at was at the end of a pipeline that came from first, originally, Longford, and then that product moved to another intermediate terminal and then onto the refinery. And I remember standing in the refinery planner office when he got a phone call to say that they were shutting the pipeline down because there had been an explosion at Longford, and we turned the radio on to hear the news, because it was, you know, it was last century. We couldn’t just quickly go on the internet and see what happens. We turned on the old school am radio to listen to the breaking news, and the news was saying there had been an explosion, and there were two workers missing. That point hit me like nothing else, because we there was a few of us in the room. We all just looked at each other and we knew they weren’t missing. You know, when you work in that environment and you hear that, you know they’re not alive anymore. Yeah, that really it absolutely gutted me. I can remember precisely where I was standing the. Moment that call came in on the 25th of September, 1998 it was about 12 o’clock in the afternoon. It was lunchtime, okay? It was just, it really shook me at that point in time and and it was that was on that day that I thought, you know, I’ve got to do something so this doesn’t happen again. Yeah. And that was a turning point in my career. I didn’t safety immediately. At that point, I continued in operations management for a period of time before I then actually found myself in a safety role and discovered how much I loved being in safety. But you know, I as I think back and reflect that, that turning point, that was a point in my life where I thought, you know, this, this can’t happen again. And And sadly, there were political reasons why this incident, you know, it had a lot of uproar in in the city of Melbourne. It cut off natural gas supply for for two or three weeks. That upset the population, because we all had to have cold showers. We had no gas hot water system making hot water for us. So politically, it was a big thing, yeah, but John and Peter died that day, yeah, and, and people forget that. And I think it, you know, we, we owe it to those that have tragically lost their lives in process safety incidents to just do better,
Mark McBride-Wright 6:17
absolutely. And I’ve heard, you know, you ascribing their names there to the incident. That’s one of the best ways to commemorate, to honor their what they gave and the fact that they existed. I’ve seen some clients before. It becomes a bit of a they become a number, or it’s like the identity gets lost in the, you know, the box of we not we don’t talk about this stuff now, when actually, in safety, that’s it’s the opposite to that. We need to talk about it. We need to do the root cause analysis, to share the lessons learned, to so it doesn’t happen again. Yeah, absolutely. And is that so? So you’ve been the director of the ikemi Safety Center for over 10 years now, I think it is, yeah. So how is that going? You know, are you worked a bit in industry, then in a process safety role, but now you must have oversight over quite, quite a unique position, actually in in supporting the sector.
Trish Kerin 7:23
Yeah, it’s, it’s a really interesting role to be part of. So when I was recruited into Ike, me to start the center right, and when we started, we had six fun founding members that put funding forward to get it off the ground. Okay, fast forward to today. We have 120 member companies.
Mark McBride-Wright 7:40
Wow, that’s amazing.
Trish Kerin 7:43
In 11 years, and we’ve actually increased our membership numbers every year over those 11 years so and we’re still growing. We’re still creating influence, and, you know, helping companies get access to useful material that can help them improve their process safety. And so it’s really exciting to be part of something like that, where I liken it to when I worked in industry. I had influence in one company, yep, I now work globally in the process safety field. I am able to influence not only different companies in an industry sector, different industry sectors.
Mark McBride-Wright 8:28
This is not just energy, yeah, oil and gas, yeah. Now I work
Trish Kerin 8:32
in so many different fields now, so many different industry sectors with people on process safety and so it’s wonderful to actually be able to raise that awareness and create that that influence, so that they get better results,
Mark McBride-Wright 8:47
can you give our audience a bit of a flavor of the expanse of process safety? Because people’s minds might just go straight to gas, risk of explosion, you know, crop by your example as well that you’ve given, but you know, you’re in so many more industries. Can you just give us a flavor of the of the sectors, the diversity of the sectors that you transect?
Trish Kerin 9:09
So we talk about process safety as a high consequence, low likelihood, loss of control. Event, right? What loss of containment? Containment is an outcome of losing control.
Mark McBride-Wright 9:21
Interesting, if
Trish Kerin 9:23
you go a little bit further upstream, we can start to talk about different sorts of sectors. So, you know, I’m currently working with the mining sector and minerals processing, with new energies, with food and beverage manufacturing, dairy, those sorts of things, pharmaceutical sector and utilities, treatment, as well as your traditional oil and gas, your traditional chemical sectors, you know, pulp and paper manufacturing, yeah, aviation, air traffic control, yeah. So all sorts of different things can actually when we think about it as this whole. Consequence, low likelihood loss of control, and apply the principles to that we can start to talk about and importantly, learn from so many diverse sectors. So learning from the aviation sector is a great thing, but also helping the aviation sector learn some things too. So there’s a whole range of different crossover
Mark McBride-Wright 10:22
Well, what would you so I recently started a visiting professorship at UCL in inclusive engineering leadership, and I have come at it admittedly with a bias of safety being a chemical engineer. And I have this sort of I had this bias that safety, and I’ve used inverted commas there is understood by engineers, commonly across all disciplines. But what I’ve realized I actually need to do is step back a bit and do a kind of fundamental baselining, because the civil engineers were interpreting what we mean by safety differently to the electrical engineering students when compared to the chemical engineering students, etc, etc. So can you just give some color to that experience I’ve just described and how it plays out in industry, and then maybe, what do you think we should be doing earlier on in the chain, to bring some common ground to to that,
Trish Kerin 11:26
yeah, look, that is definitely a gap. So we don’t tend to see most disciplines of engineering actually talk about process safety in the undergraduate degrees, chemical engineering does talk about process safety, specifically, typically in in Chem, Eng, yes, other disciplines, don’t we? We come to safety in a different way at times. So my, my background discipline is actually mechanical engineering, okay, now, back when I studied mechanical engineering, I really don’t think we understood safety terribly well there, either other than, you know, we focused on, we would do finite element analysis and crash modeling for vehicles. So we, we thought we talk safety, because we were designing cars so that the people inside were protected. We were we were used to dealing with managing dissipation of energy and energy in some form, not chemical energy, although, you know, we also understood the fundamentals of chemical energy release, because mechanical engineers are also the ones typically designing internal combustion engines. So we get the thermodynamics of all of this right. We study thermodynamics as well. And then you look at civil engineers, and you know, they their safety was quite different. They’re concerned, you know, more typically, with Earth cavids, for example, structural integrity of buildings in high winds, yeah, and sort of thing. So we, we all look at safety differently. We look at it from our own discipline. I think when we start to cut across process safety and start to say, Okay, if we talk about this high consequence, low likelihood, loss of control, it applies across all of the disciplines, but we need to get better at communicating that. And so I think there needs to be a move to have that concept of process safety embedded in every engineering discipline, regardless of what it is, because there is a serious impact there. And in my my career and time in this role, I’ve talked about many different incidents. And if I think about civil engineering, one of the incidents I’ve talked about is the collapse of the West Gate Bridge in Melbourne under construction, and it was a high consequence failure right of a bridge construction that killed several workers. Because, you know, even just sort of layout planning, the the rest huts were located underneath the span that was being built. Oh, right, okay, collapsed at morning tea, yeah, everybody in the hut, yeah? Were gathered in the huts because it was break time, yeah, yeah. So, you know, and I’ve talked about that in terms of understanding mechanical stress, because that was civil construction, but the bridge suffered mechanical stress, which caused a catastrophic failure, yeah, and, you know, often chemical engineers don’t talk about mechanical stresses. You know, flixborough incident 50 years ago is a classic example of not understanding mechanical stress. Yeah, pipeline that resulted in a catastrophic event. So, you know, we all need to work together. We all need to have a base level understanding. And one of the things I talk about is process safety is the ultimate team sport. We all have a role to play. We all play different roles, but we all have a role to play in making that team successful and winning the game. And for me, winning the game is safe production, not product. Safe production, whatever you produce, whatever your output is, safe output. But. What the game needs to be that’s
Mark McBride-Wright 15:01
really interesting. It kind of I reflect on my own relationship with safety and journey into the industry, and maybe I had a bit of a warped impression in terms of how integrated safety is understood across disciplines, because I I didn’t work in the detailed design phase, where you tend to then be much more in the depths of your discipline. I was more concept design. So I worked on a CRO I think, in the in the years that I was at my employer, I worked on about 15 different projects. You know, no project would be any longer than two or three months, but you were always working with piping engineers, electrical engineers, mechanical we were all there in the hazard workshops, the ISD workshops, you know, looking at designs from a and are they inherently safe perspective? And so it really, it shocked me a bit to be honest, and it’s a little bit frustrating that we have to do this education piece to our future leaders now to to even get parity, equivalency of our understanding of safety. Because, you know the angle, the angle I’m we’re trying to take with the I’m trying to take with a safe leader is trying to use the fabric of safety and the familiarity that engineers have or those working in high hazard industries, it doesn’t just have to be the engineers the relationship that we have with safety, and how can we extend that to now look at the new concepts around psychological safety And the ability to be not just physically present on site, but also mentally present as well. So these concepts that we often ascribe to the EDI movement of masking, hiding, covering, you know, the energy delta between being your whole self, but then showing up to someone different and then being being distracted. I wondered if I’d really, I could, like hog the air wave here, just monologuing about this. It’s my passion area. I’m really keen to understand your relationship or your thoughts on, where can safety be used to communicate diversity, equity and inclusion? Is there an opportunity there? What are your thoughts?
Trish Kerin 17:23
I think there is because at the end of the day, the way we get better safety outcomes is by engaging collaboratively with the entire workforce. And that means we need the entire being there for everybody. Everybody needs to be able to show up without fear in their workplace, because they bring unique and diverse perspectives, and that’s incredibly important. So I think safety needs good Ed and I to be successful, because that starts to help you deliver that psychological safety in the workplace, because if we don’t have the psychological safety, people can’t say what they need to say and speak up and intervene importantly in safety when they need to. Can we use safety to help drive that Ed and I as well? I think we can by creating safe environments where people are respected for what they contribute and what they bring to the table. So I think it goes both ways, and I think we need to get a lot better at doing that. Ed and I, is critically important, I think, to to make sure that the people are able to bring their whole self. And you know, I have, I have had periods in my life where I didn’t bring my whole self to work, okay, and how relieving it is to be able to is amazing.
Mark McBride-Wright 18:48
And do you see, do you see companies opening up to this? Do you, I mean, it sounds pretty obvious when you, when we, when we talk about it in this lens, um, you know, I’ve seen the penny drop for many an engineer and many an HR professional and many a director, but some, maybe sometimes, the most obvious things are the things that we don’t see. And so it’s our role as educators to try and shift the focus to be in this way.
Trish Kerin 19:20
I think we need to get better at showing the value of it. Because, I mean, I’m sure you you hear the rhetoric around Yes, you know, the anti woke, and, you know, we’re sick of political correctness and all this sort of stuff. And I gotta admit, I sit back and I look at some of this stuff, and I think the things that people are saying awoke and politically correct, I was brought up with those just being polite and respectful. Yeah, if someone wants to be referred to in a certain way, then it’s polite to acknowledge their request.
Mark McBride-Wright 19:56
Absolutely. I
Trish Kerin 19:57
don’t see that as as you know. Correct or woke, I just see that as fundamental dignity and politeness. And my mother would have been horrified if I didn’t treat people with respect and be polite to them. That was who I was raised. Yeah. And it’s like, how is how is that? How have we lost that? I
Mark McBride-Wright 20:17
think, yeah, oh yeah, absolutely. I think, I think there’s a there’s a thing. There’s a there’s a relationship here with connectedness that we need to speak more into when it comes to the white, straight, cisgendered, heterosexual, neurotypical, able bodied male that represents 84% of the United Kingdom engineering workforce and similar stats globally, you know, a male majority workforce, essentially. And what? What’s really charting the course of my what I’m trying to influence here is this whole discovery around masculinity and engineering, I genuinely could not believe the statistics in 2018 where the Office of National Statistics in the UK death by suicide broken down by occupation, the construction, manufacturing and process industries combined had the highest suicide rate of any other sectors in the UK, and we then did our own research equal engineers on masculinity and engineering, and found similar rates of suicidal ideation and self harm. One in five engineers reporting losing work colleague to suicide, one in four reporting suicidal ideation or self harm. And so men were 3.5 times more likely to answer yes to that than female respondents. So my aha moment was, well, hang on. Firstly, we would never tolerate such a high potential loss of life in any physical hazard scenarios. We would design them out, eradicate them, trying to get them to as low as reasonably practicable for residual risk management. Yet here we are when it comes to people’s psychological safety being at risk. They’re obviously not got in a culture where they can be open and talk about whatever the root causes that might be driving these high, high incident rates, you know? And actually, that’s what inclusion and belonging tries to achieve, is creating cultures where you can be your whole self, bring your whole self to work. So I think there’s a there’s a relationship and connectedness that we, we, we need to make there. And then I think your will, will, will, will, it will get better. It’s interesting. You mentioned about the political dynamics. You know, we’re recording this episode, what two weeks away from the US election, and that pendulum swing off equality, that can move forward, but it can also regress backwards. What role do you think? What are you seeing in terms of, like, working with your members? You’ve got such a large number there now through the Ike me Safety Center, like, what? What do you kind of sense is the potential here to help the people that you’re working with, from a safety culture perspective, get better at their their cult, their culture, internally, in totality.
Trish Kerin 23:21
Yeah, I think it’s, it’s a challenging area, because we’re also trying to shift the needle and have people recognize that process safety, whilst it is grounded in engineering, is not just engineering. Yeah, that process safety involves people, and we need to be able to understand the human factors, elements of what we do, but also the cultural aspects of what we do and how we do it. So I think it’s around trying to shift that needle. And you know, the organizations that join the Safety Center are interested in improving their process safety. They’re interested in understanding how they can do that. And so when we can incredibly, say things around, you know, if we’ve got good consultation with employees, and they’re able to share what is important, you will get better outcomes, yeah. And so I think it’s around, you know, sometimes just fundamentally coming back to some of those basics of, you know, it’s about consultation. And consultation doesn’t mean I have to agree with you, yes, but consultation does mean I have to ask you. I have to genuinely listen and take into account before I make my decision. And as I said, it doesn’t mean I have to agree. I might not agree with all the consultation that I receive, but it’s important to genuinely Listen, take it into account, and then communicate back the decision, yeah, if I didn’t, if I didn’t agree with you, why and what we’re going to do going forward, and some of this is really basic stuff, yeah, yet, we just don’t seem to be able to get it right, or we get caught up in our. Own egos, yeah, and stuck with, you know, well, I’m the boss. I get to make these decisions. Well, that That’s so old school you’re
Mark McBride-Wright 25:09
describing there, like really good basic first basic practice in Mental Health First Aid training, which is that ability to one on one, tune in, tune out the non verbal communication that might be coming into your head that is your impetus to respond. But that’s almost like scaling it up to an organizational level, isn’t it, and tuning it not having a pre determined course of direction that you’re going to go in the consultations just to tick the box and get the outcome, but actually have an open heart and mind to figuring out whether or not your people may have some input that challenges that obviously leaders have got a direction of travel that they anticipate leading the organization. Otherwise, not very good leaders, you know. But it’s about challenging those notions and making sure you’re shaping the decision making and minimize an impact.
Trish Kerin 26:03
One of the things I actually talk a lot about with different leaders around the world is around, you know, engaging with the workforce and having conversations with them. And I always sort of give them the caveat of, you know, you actually need to get out there and talk to your workforce and ask them questions. Ask them what’s going on, yeah, but you have to genuinely listen and take appropriate action on the conversation. And if you are not prepared to genuinely listen and take appropriate action, don’t, don’t talk to them, because if you are just going to tick the box and go through the motions and pretend before you do that, that the workforce might think you don’t care, yeah, but if you actually just go through the motions, don’t pay any attention, then ask the question, because everyone says you have to go and ask the question, don’t pay any attention. You’ve just proven to the workforce that they know you don’t care, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so them thinking you don’t care is probably better than them knowing you don’t care, yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally get somewhere with it. But, and so it’s a little bit flippant of you know, if you can’t do it properly, don’t do it at all. But the aim is actually do it properly. Learn to listen. Learn to actually hear what people are saying to you. Yeah, and do with that information what you need to
Mark McBride-Wright 27:16
that that really plays into the safe leader model of share, act, feel and empower, trying to get people to understand their own difference, their own diversity story. First, bring it to the surface, share it, talk about it, and then, can you be a lighthouse for others? You know, to bring people to you, I find a lot of them. There’s a lot of men that haven’t opened up about fertility issues, struggling to conceive, to start a family, etc. I even had one client, actually, where the executive team, it transpired through the training session that three of them, three out of 10, were going through IVF, you know, different stages. Some just come to terms of the fact that they have to use it. Some well into the cycles. And none of them were talking about between one another. Literally, in that moment, in that session, was the discovery that they were going through that 30% of the leadership team, and they thought, Well, my goodness, if we scale this up to our business size, how many people is this affecting? So do you know what they did? They did an investigation. They kind of culturally set some stuff up to try and find out the conversation. Some of the a couple of the guys actually spoke about it publicly at one of their town halls, and, yeah, a lot of people were going through it. So they then created a parent and carers network. They adjusted their think they even had to bring in, like, a new policy, a new process. But what it did was made a conversation that wasn’t happening for whatever reason wasn’t happening, whether it was taboo or just just no one was talking about it. They became the luminaries to table that conversation more people, then it’s just like mining the diamond, as we say, in safety, you know, looking for the the the things that we don’t know what’s happening. It then became a known, known, you know, and then you can make decisions on on fact and things that affect people. But it takes for those people going through that to share, and very often, white straight men may often feel excluded from the EDI conversation, like they are othered from it, and they’re not part of it, but actually they do have a story to tell. And so, yeah, I just think we need to give some space to that to help bring the temperature down on the conversation of this anti, woke anti, this anti, that’s one of my bug bears just how polarized it can become. Yeah, absolutely.
Trish Kerin 29:43
And you know, it’s, it’s harming people, and it’s, it’s affecting their well being and their mental health, which is actually having effects on organizations. Yeah, both, not only. In the safety space, but also in the economic space, the financials. So you know, if you’ve got people that are really feeling targeted and and not included in what’s going on, then you do not have your best potential business running, yeah,
Mark McBride-Wright 30:15
well, um, are there any tools that we use in industry. I’m coming back. Keep thinking about this education of future leaders, like our you know, the students, the apprentices, the technicians, the people that are going through the ladder. Now, is there any stuff that we do that we could bring forward to, like the education experience that then when those graduates come off the degree conveyor belt, or the apprenticeship conveyor belt, and then move into industry, they they’ve got a greater understanding. I tried to play the reason I’m asking this. I tried to play around a bit with some of my UCL students, with looking at equality impact assessments that we do in industry. Sometimes we do them too late, that they don’t actually have the intended impact that they’re designed to have. But then could we bring that into the engineering projects, the capstone project that they did for one of their designs, to then be looking at communities through an EDI lens, through the stakeholder engagement, you know? So so it’s the process of doing the engineering and the diversity of the composition of the degree class, and does the team, the engineering student team, feel psychologically safe to challenge one another, but they’re also thinking about the communities that they’re designing things for, and are they involved in them, or are they making assumptions? There’s one tool that gets used in industry that I don’t, I didn’t see being used in academia. And maybe there’s a lift and shift opportunity that then increases its usage in five to 10 years time. Yeah,
Trish Kerin 31:48
look, look, possibly, possibly. There is, I think one of the interesting things is, when I did my engineering degree long time ago, we actually had to do, I think it was two units over our whole four years, okay, in the humanities
Mark McBride-Wright 32:06
field, interesting. And
Trish Kerin 32:09
so, you know, we had to, there was like seven or eight different classes we could pick to do, and we had to pick two of them over our whole four year degree. And we had to complete those to be able to graduate, right? And, you know, so, I mean, one of them was, was, you know, sex and society and understanding
Mark McBride-Wright 32:28
gender, Wow, very interesting.
Trish Kerin 32:30
This was in the 90s.
Mark McBride-Wright 32:32
It’s probably more progressive then, then it’s become now, possibly,
Trish Kerin 32:36
possibly, you know, and there are other ones that were more arts based. And I think at the time, you know, these engineering students that were perhaps not had never studied humanities or certainly pursued it very much through high school, because they’re all very math science people. Yeah, I thought it was quite fascinating to watch who was picking which subjects, and what we were saying about them at lunchtime. And it wasn’t necessarily respectful conversations about them. I you know, I’m sad to admit, but it was an interesting concept. And I don’t know whether we still do things like that. I don’t know whether my old university still has that requirement in their engineering degree. But at the end of the day, humanities is equally as important as engineering in my my book, because, you know, we do need to understand the beauty of the world, not just the science of the world. And I think one of the other things I’ve seen happen a lot now is we talk a lot about STEM and I’ve now seen people starting to talk about steam, steam the arts, yeah, and I heard steam the for the first time. And I have to admit, my original initial bias was, what? And then I thought that actually makes sense, yeah, because during at its core, is actually a creative science. Yes, yes, we have to be creative and innovative to solve the problems. There is a level of artisticness in engineering, and I think we need to be willing to embrace that and pick it up. I like the idea of taking engineering students and apprentices and whatever, and actually making sure that they do have some exposure to the humanities, yeah, because that also has a lot of critical thinking training in it, yeah, but it also broadens your horizon. It broadens your outlook, and it it opens your mind up to different concepts and different ideas. So I think that’s actually something that probably we could be doing a little bit better with and a little bit more of. And the fact is, you know, English, and for example, English literature is a humanities subject, yet we do engineering. And as engineers, we have to communicate.
Mark McBride-Wright 34:58
Yeah, yeah. Part. Public Speaking. And yeah, writing,
Trish Kerin 35:02
writing a document that someone can actually understand, yeah, that is, of course, concise, but written in a simplified way, not simplistic, but a simplified way that others can understand. Yes. And you know, you need English, or whatever your native language skill is that you write in to be able to do that, yeah, and, you know, I studied English literature in my final year of high school, wow, because I loved English and literature. So, you know, I went into engineering, not having done just pure sciences and maths in my high school, yeah, as well, because I found it interesting, and I think it’s really helped my career long term in terms of being my main role is really a safety and an engineering communicator. Yes, yes. I’m not the person you want to have doing detailed calculations for you, yeah, but I’m the person that can explain that to someone that needs to understand it,
Mark McBride-Wright 35:56
yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. And we need, we need communication conduits that have that technical understanding as well. So what with that in mind, then, like, what excites you most about the future of process safety? What opportunities innovations do you see in the field? What you know, if you’re leading the icame, you’re leading the IChemE Safety Center with this phenomenal growth that’s happened, what are your aspirations for it and the industry in the next five to 10 years?
Trish Kerin 36:26
Yeah, so I’ll tackle the aspirations first. So I want to see the Safety Center continue to grow. I want to see it continue to attract new members around the world, new organizations, new industry sectors, so that we can continue to create this rich learning that we see when we start to talk outside of our own little inner circles. And I think that’s really, really important in terms of what I think are some of the exciting areas I think, I think we’ve still got a long way to go on human factors and understanding the human interaction with the system. If someone makes a mistake that’s not the cause of the incident. Yes, the system around them that allowed and facilitated that mistake to result in a catastrophic outcome. That’s the issue we need to get to. So I think there’s still, we still got a long way to go here. I still don’t think a lot of organizations are yet embracing enough the human factors? Yes, the other aspect that you know, technology is fantastic, we need to make sure we’re using it appropriately. And I think there is amazing opportunity in technology, but just because you can doesn’t mean you should. So there’s some technologies that, you know, we’re embracing and we’re using and we’re doing all these things with, and you look at it and go, we’re not adding any value, right? Yeah, because it’s cool and it’s sexy and it’s fun, okay? But it’s not helping anything. It’s a distraction. People like to break anything. It’s a distraction. So, you know, there’s a lot of excitement about artificial intelligence, obviously, AI, the fact is, it’s large language models and machine learning. It’s not actually intelligence starting off that we’re using now. I think there’s enormous opportunity in machine learning and large language models to be able to sort yes quantities of data that as humans, we just can’t Yeah time, but we then need the human to take that sorting and make sense of yes context and get to the next stage of implementation. And so I don’t see you know that technology that we’re going through that development eliminating the need for the human input.
Mark McBride-Wright 38:43
Absolutely.
Trish Kerin 38:44
Do need that, that ability to then look at it and say, okay, is that right? What can we do with it? What’s it telling us? You know, yet, data is one thing, but data without insight is not very useful.
Mark McBride-Wright 38:58
I’m imagining like now being able to do a hazard identification study, or for a single facility, you know, getting all the major accident hazard reports, coma reports or offshore safety cases, you know, getting them all loaded up into an AI. And then you’ve got the ability to call upon and trend and look for patterns, which is what its benefit tends to be,
Trish Kerin 39:23
yeah, but then the inside is, so what’s that pattern actually alluding to, exactly? And that’s, that’s the big catch there. And yeah, one of the things I talk about, so I wrote a small little book called The platypus philosophy, okay, which is about identifying and managing weak signals. Oh, okay. How do we actually identify, first of all, that a weak signal has occurred, and then how do we see that and determine whether it’s actually something we need to worry about or it’s just white noise in the background. So much of it is white noise in the background. But that one important bit, if we just. To ignore, it could result in an incident, because, as I’m sure you’re aware, after every incident, there were all these warning signs that nobody saw. Yeah, why did
Mark McBride-Wright 40:09
you call it? Why did you call it the platypus? Is there something linked to the animal? That
Trish Kerin 40:14
there is something linked to the animal? Yes, it’s called the platypus because there’s two parts to it as a metaphor. The first part is the platypus is so ridiculous, an animal so unlikely, it should not exist. It’s got the bill of a duck, the tail of a beaver, the claws of an otter. It’s a mammal that lays eggs,
Mark McBride-Wright 40:37
so it does, yes, yeah, I learned that recently from my son,
Trish Kerin 40:42
yeah, so it sweats milk to feed its young. So it actually sweats it out of its paws. Wow. Its fur grows a glows under ultraviolet light. It bioluminesces, and it uses electro perception to find its food. And you go, okay, none of these things should work together. It’s it’s an animal made up of spare parts, but it’s so unlikely, it’s possible and process safety incidents no matter how unlikely are possible. So first of all, get your head around these things can happen. But then the second part of the metaphor is a platypus is very elusive. They’re very hard to see. And if all you see is just the bill sticking out from some reeds in a river, and you don’t see the rest of it, remember, Bill is it a duck? And so I then, sort of, I actually use the words, the letters of the word platypus, to have an action plan to Okay, to sort through that sighting and say, so, is it a duck, or is it a platypus? Because if it’s a duck, it won’t hurt you. But another aspect of the platypus that’s not very well known is male platypuses have a toxic venom in a spur, and they can actually envenomate you and hurt you. Oh, gosh, you need to know, if it’s a platypus, you’ve got to manage it and deal with it. Yeah, you can ignore it. So I have this concept that I use to it’s a, you know, a step process to take you through and say, okay, you know, here’s, here’s what it what it means. You know, these are the sorts of things you consider when you see that first week signal, when you sense that first week and, you know, it’s a quick scanning of, yeah, I think there might be something here. Okay, now I move into a risk assessment phase. Fabulous.
Mark McBride-Wright 42:31
Well, I’ve got some quick fire questions here. Are you? You ready?
Trish Kerin 42:41
I’ll give it a shot, right?
Mark McBride-Wright 42:44
So what’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received? Take the opportunity. What’s your favorite safety innovation or tool that has made a difference in your work?
Trish Kerin 43:01
I think so many apps that just make me able to focus in different areas. So there’s so many apps, so Tracy jokes that there’s always, I always say there’s an app for that. How did you do this? There’s an app for that. So any sort of app I love to help me focus on what I need to be
Mark McBride-Wright 43:18
doing. What’s the one thing you do to unwind after a long day
Trish Kerin 43:24
walk my dogs.
Mark McBride-Wright 43:25
What’s your proudest professional accomplishment,
Trish Kerin 43:29
creating the Safety Center and making it a success?
Mark McBride-Wright 43:32
If you could have dinner with any engineer, expert, industrialist, who would it be?
Trish Kerin 43:39
Trevor kletts, I never had the pleasure of meeting him. I would love to meet him, or to have met him.
Mark McBride-Wright 43:43
What’s a skill you believe every safety professional should have
Trish Kerin 43:49
critical thinking? Tea or Coffee? Coffee?
Mark McBride-Wright 43:53
What’s one book, podcast or resource you’d recommend to someone in safety or process engineering or engineering in general,
Trish Kerin 44:03
anything by Trevor kletts of his mountain of work. And I have to admit, I am enjoying reading the safe leader at the moment. Oh,
Mark McBride-Wright 44:10
thank you. What’s the most exciting project you’ve worked on?
Trish Kerin 44:18
Oh, that’s a really, really tough one, because I’ve done some interesting things, I’m going to go right back to my first job that was very exciting to me at the time, where I was building aviation fueling systems at airports, and I installed kilometers of underground hydrant systems, fuel hydrants at at Melbourne Airport. And I still get a a nice little buzz when I’m at Melbourne Airport and I’m a gate and I’m about to get on a plane, and I think I built that.
Mark McBride-Wright 44:46
That’s cool. That’s cool. If you could give your younger self one piece of advice, what would it be
Trish Kerin 44:53
again? Take, take the opportunity. You may not like it, and if you don’t move on to something else, but. When an opportunity is presented, give it a go and do your best at it.
Mark McBride-Wright 45:03
That is really great advice. Trish and I’ve really enjoyed our conversation today for our listeners, where can they find out more about your work and what you’re involved with? How can they get in contact with you?
Trish Kerin 45:20
So first of all, there’s the work through the ikemi Safety Center. Www, dot Ikeme safety center.org, for my own activities, the platypus philosophy and some of the other consulting activities I do my personal website, www, dot lead, like karen.com, so that’s k, e, r, I N, and you can get my email there as well and see all the different sorts of
Mark McBride-Wright 45:47
things I’m doing fabulous. We’ll make sure those links are in the show notes as well. Thank you so much for your time today. Trish, I’ve loved it
Trish Kerin 45:55
pleasure. Mark, always fabulous to have a conversation with you. And hopefully our paths will cross at some point when I get across to New York and say hi,
Mark McBride-Wright 46:03
absolutely, you’re more than welcome to come and visit See you soon.
Trish Kerin 46:09
See ya. Stay safe. You.
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