David Jamieson, founder of Salus Technical, discusses his journey into process safety engineering, the challenges of starting a business during the pandemic, and the importance of integrating psychological safety and cultural elements into technical safety work. He shares insights on the tools and techniques used at Salus, the role of AI in process safety, and advice for young professionals entering the field. The conversation explores the diversity of industries Salus serves and the need for continuous learning and clear communication in process safety.
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Mark McBride-Wright 0:01
Mark, hello. Welcome to the next episode of the safe leader podcast. I’m your host, Mark McBride Wright, and I’m delighted to be joined today with David Jamieson, who is the founder of Salus technical. So David is the founder of Salus technical, helping to make process safety straightforward. He is a chartered mechanical engineer who was part of the winning team of the Formula One constructors World Championship in 2010 and 2011 with Red Bull Racing. He’s passionate about he’s passionate about the development of training young engineers. He’s an amateur marathon and Hill runner and a lover of chess and Lego. David,
David Jamieson 0:47
welcome. Hi Mark. Thanks for having me on.
Mark McBride-Wright 0:51
Absolute pleasure to have you here. So you and I have I’ve been following you for a few years now. I think that sounds creepy, doesn’t it? When mcgride verbs of online into real world that that doesn’t Yeah,
David Jamieson 1:07
yeah,
Mark McBride-Wright 1:10
for a few years, and then, I mean, probably just within the last year, started being a bit more well. We translated that into actually having a virtual chat together, and we’re now some exciting collaborations on the way. And I’m sure there is a ton more that we could be doing together, but I built, I’m starting this podcast. We’re doing this podcast series all around you know the safe leader, the book that I’ve written, and this notion of trying to create safe leadership as a thing that can incorporate diversity, equity and inclusion, and the work that we’re doing in the sector, and I’m a big believer as a fellow process safety engineer as well, by technical background, that that’s there’s stuff within process safety that we can borrow with pride, steal with pride when it comes to cultural work. So I’m really interested to so I’m not out in the field doing the technical stuff anymore. I’m doing the, you know, the more cultural advisory side of things. But as a fellow entrepreneur, I’ve been really inspired to see the what you’ve been doing at Salus technical, the innovation and ingenuity that you’re bringing to the products that you’re creating, and the impact that you’re having with the clients that you’re working with. Had I still been doing technical stuff in industry, you’re definitely a brand that would have piqued my interest, and I’d be looking at your job career sections to figure out, how can I, can I get involved? So, so I want to dig into the brains behind it, the founder behind it, yourself. And you know what? What, what, what brought, if we go back to route, what, what led you to safety, what, inspired you into this field?
David Jamieson 3:03
Yeah, well, that’s a really interesting question, because I got into safety by accident. You know, I did a degree in Aeronautical Engineering and, you know, worked in other industries, including motor sport, as you said. And when my wife and I moved back to Scotland, I was doing like fire and explosion and modeling and safety and that kind of thing. And what I was doing was I was looking at, you know, the impact of a lot of consequences, and then just over time that led into more like frontline process safety. And I had a six month secondment to an operator, because there was lots of ongoing study work I had to help manage that. And I just loved it from day one, and I never looked back. I realized I could have a far bigger impact doing that. You know, then, although it was hugely enjoyable sitting in the corner for a month on end without talking to anyone, modeling 180 different explosions narios can only have such an impact. So I found it was much better when I was actually, you know, speaking directly with the decision makers and things like that. And
Mark McBride-Wright 4:04
one of the we tell our listeners a bit about the work that you did, I think that was when I discovered Salas. Actually, you did a campaign where you wrote, used the Freedom of Information Act in the UK to get data. And you, you wrote to a lot of operators to find out, to try and get has study, you did a study or something and published a report. Clearly, my memory is a little bit No, no, I’m talking about, I can tell. So can you just talk about that, please? Yeah,
David Jamieson 4:40
so we did that, and again, it was a bit of a gamble, and I actually almost didn’t press send on it when we put it out. What we did was, just before I left to start Salus, I was working for a UK offshore oil and gas operator, and I got this naughty letter from the HSC after an inspection. It’s like a year. A low card in football, and it was a system I was responsible for. So I felt like I totally messed up. And that was maybe pre WhatsApp, and there was a, there was an email chain at that time, rather than a WhatsApp group of similar like tech safety technical authorities. And I asked some of them, you know, like, for some advice. And it turned out that a few of them had had that same letter sent in the past few years. So I was like, what a waste that these letters aren’t actually out there. So years later, at Salus, we did a theme of Information request. Took a bit of time, a bit back and forward, but we got all the letters for a single year. I chose 2019, the last year before they were impacted by COVID. And yeah, we it was over 1000 non compliances. We made a guidance document. We focused that document all on making actions. And they basically our thesis was, if three or more operators got a similar letter, the chances are, as an industry, that a lot of people would be open to as well. And it was such a success, it got downloaded over 10,000 times, shared loads and email, and we won an award. And I never realized at the time, but it had such an impact on our company in terms of being recognized. And I was about a year afterwards, or maybe six, seven months afterwards, I was in a conference meeting, and someone from the HSE was there, and they were talking about the Salish report as if there were some massive enterprise that had done this thing. So it was quite, yeah, that was, that was quite good, but I’m very glad that we did that. Yeah, what would
Mark McBride-Wright 6:29
you just, what was, what was the question that you asked? Like, what was the report on? Again?
David Jamieson 6:33
So essentially, it was like we went through all of these letters that are usually private, and so they’re not in the public domain. And it was, is there something that we can learn from those? And then the question we answered is, what are the recurring findings? And we put them all into a nice document, and that document is available for free on our website. And yeah, as I say, over 10,000 downloads, which is quite remarkable, actually, almost brought our website down, which was,
Mark McBride-Wright 7:01
we’ll put a link in the show notes, but it’s been people want to google it on the go, What’s the title of the report?
David Jamieson 7:05
If you just type Salas technical HSC inspection report, I’m sure that you’ll find it. We’ve got a publication section on our website, and that sits there. Yep, amazing,
Mark McBride-Wright 7:17
amazing. So yeah, talk us through then the journey to so you decided to tech, safety was going to be your thing, that there must have then been a, what was the transition to think, right? I want to, I want to taste it, that entrepreneurship. I want to, I want to be the one at the helm, or, you know, helping support growth and have influence.
David Jamieson 7:42
I Yeah, it’s quite interesting, because I can’t really remember exactly why. I just have always wanted to run my own business. I don’t know when that thought came into my head, but probably from a young age at school. And I tried quite a few things, like, you know, buying and selling stuff on eBay. I used to work in Halfords, and I wrote this, like guide on how to modify your car that nobody downloaded. I wrote, like, Excel macros for some small businesses. I had actually had a company called macro matics, and again, we had very few customers. And then eventually I decided to take the plunge and start Salus. And I had a few other ideas, but I decided I’d come quite far with process safety. It was a really worthwhile thing to do. And I Yeah, thought I would just go and I do it, and I did it three months before COVID. So you know, if you’re thinking about starting a business, I would say, only spend so much time on your business plan, because you’ll probably change it, as I had to do.
Mark McBride-Wright 8:38
Yes, so what, what had you been planning, pre pandemic? So, December, January, 2019, 2020, you’re planning to do your new business. You’ve got this exciting plan you launch, and then, yeah, the world completely changes as we know it, three months later, what? What had you been planning? And how did you have to pivot So
David Jamieson 9:02
originally, but very quickly, this went away. I was going to actually teach myself to code and make the software all by myself, but I realized I did not have the necessary financial runway to teach for that. So I had made a demo. There is actually an original demo you can still see online of the bow tie diagram software that I made, but it was perfect. If you spoke to me, you know, in February 2019, I would have, is that right, the month before COVID, I had a freelancer making software for me, and I’d lined up two consultancy jobs to pay for all of that. And there’s a street in Aberdeen called albine place, and I was walking along that, and I got three phone calls. This was the week before Boris Johnson’s, you know, you must stay at home speech. And the Freelancer announced that he wasn’t freelancing anymore. He’d gone back to his old work, so there was no software. The offshore execution of the first project got deferred by one. Year, so I wasn’t required, and then the other company canceled the contract. So I got to the top of Albin place, and I had no software and no income. But fortunately, I was able to find a few things, and then from there, the plan of having a engineering consultancy to build a software company and then start to feed each other’s kind of, you know, evolved from there, so and
Mark McBride-Wright 10:21
that, and that’s the model you’re working today, is that talk us through your product then and your service line, like, what type of work does? Yeah, so,
David Jamieson 10:28
you know, we obviously provide process safety expertise to major hazard industries. Major hazard industries are quite, you know, volatile to say the least. You know, I still think I’m quite young, although I’m probably not that young anymore, and I’ve and like, I’ve been part of two down turns. So I always wanted to strive to have diverse income in terms of different services, different countries, different industries. And we’ve so we’ve got a team of engineers, we’ve got some On Demand training courses, and we’ve got some software products, and I’ve got a really good blend across the industries and different global locations, too. And, you know, I look at it like I’ve got three children, and at any one time, there’s at least one problem child, so there’s always an area, you know, that needs expertise, but I’m trying to get them all to be about the same size,
Mark McBride-Wright 11:14
okay? And what that’s really interesting. So what? So that, I mean that just shows you diversity within business, doesn’t it like having a diverse portfolio of stuff that you do can help offset a drop in any UN one it’s a good risk mitigation strategy. You’re not then fully exposed to one singular strand of income or even one singular client that you can then have some redundancy, I guess, in your in your portfolio, which is similar to what I’ve done with equal engineers, with having the events portfolio. In fact, actually, yeah, thinking back to that time, February 2020, I’m glad we had a training portfolio as well as the events portfolio, because, guess what, the in person events portfolio went south. So we were delivering, we’d secured some investment from the Engineering Construction Industry Training Board to deliver training to 1000 engineers in the UK nuclear sector. And it was supposed to be in person. And in the January I’d already gone up to Cumbria to do a couple of sessions, but they just, you know, they were really poorly attended. And I was thinking, Oh, we’re never going to realize the income of all this, what we’ve been offered, you know, but then the pandemic happened. Everything went virtual. People were at home, needing stuff to do became much easier to execute and deliver, and we were able to start really drawing down that funding and offering it up to clients to book places on it. And how have you adapted? Then what you learned? So, what scale was your business at that point in terms of head count, and then as you’ve grown, have you, like, maintained any things that you learn, it, running a business in that time that still live today in your culture, in terms of flexible working, or, you know, culture in the business?
David Jamieson 13:18
Yeah, you know, probably quite a few things, and some of them might actually be polar opposites. So at the time, it was just me during COVID, we did build up. I had a few, like, fully remote employees, and I had a few like, you know, contractors that were working with me. So there was, there was, you know, people in remote in other places in the UK, there was people as far away in Taiwan that were working for me now as an organization, although we have an office, and everyone comes into the office, you know, we do offer, you know, flexible working. And you know that can be hugely effective. And I learned that in COVID, I would have, you know, if you’d asked me pre COVID, I would have been very against all that sort of stuff, and said, That’ll never work, but the flip side of that is I’ve learned that me as a person, you know, probably not realizing it day by day, but it certainly eroded, sort of, you know, my motivation. I’ve learned that I absolutely do like that, you know, that physical interaction with people and, you know, I try, and now, as I have a business where we have a happy medium, people are free to do what they want. But I feel that, you know, collectively, when, when everyone’s in it does, there is a certain energy that I just have not been able to replicate without. So, yeah, but I’m a lot more open minded to these things. Now, as a result of the pandemic, I didn’t, you know there was no other option. Before,
Mark McBride-Wright 14:42
it’s funny, I remember being on a camera I think I was doing a it was a planning call for a webinar that I was going to be on. And it was around about the time that I was looking at taking an office on for equal engineers, or maybe i. Had taken the office on with equal engineers, and it wasn’t being used as much as I wanted it to. And so I was thinking, so I’m looking at the money, right? You know? I’m looking at the overhead of what this no new decision that I’d made to take on had been and then we weren’t using it 100% so kind of playing devil’s advocate a bit on this, on this webinar, where everyone was saying, Well, no, everyone should be able to work flexibly and choose what they need, and that works best for them and stuff. And I was like, Well, yeah, but if you’re a business owner and you’re paying for this setup, you know, is it? Does it? Is it quite binary? Does it have to be everyone in or everyone out, like how it’s putting my business hat on when I then look at the cost to have this place of work, and if it’s not being used, I’m like, well, what’s the point of having it, you know? And try and try. And I absolutely believe in the need to have flexible work in and work life that works for how people work best. But I can also understand the business owners looking at pure numbers and thinking, well, if our real estate space isn’t being utilized to 100% we have to make some decisions on downsizing offices or removing it completely, or the opposite, making people come into the office to actually justify this, the spend. And it was a psychologist that was on the call that really helped me get clarity of thought on on having this investment. She said, You need to decouple for decouple it from expecting that that return. She said, What you’re doing is you’re providing that space that all, you’re providing that framework for that flexible working forum. And then people know that they’ve got it available to them, obviously, those who work locally in London, where our office is. And then then you just see it from that then you’re getting the best out of those people, you know. So it was, it was, it was a, it was a shift that I nudge, that I just need a little bit when I was starting to go down the mindset of, you must work in the office and blah, blah, blah, you know, because I could feel myself being pulled in that direction, from a, from a investment, no,
David Jamieson 17:16
and, you know, and it’s absolutely right, and you know, you know, we’ve got a lot of KPIs in the business, or even some I’ve got personally, you know, like with process safety, there’s some more leading indicators, and I’ve got ones around taking, take my three process safety engineers on their personal development. There’s certain milestones I want them to hit. And you would think, if they’re doing well, and they’re developing and they’re growing, and they’re getting experience the business overall do well. And I personally find it’s easier to hit those milestones when we’re all together in a collaborative environment. But equally, there’s plenty times where there’s people who work through remotely, and you get that too. I just, I think that, you know, work from home, flexible work, and that sort of thing. I think everyone tries to put it in a bucket of this is how it is. It’s entirely different for every company. Even in the same company, our developers and our engineers have got entirely different needs. We actually, before we moved into our new office, we canvassed the team. It was like, Well, what do you want? You know, maybe I’ll take a smaller, nicer office to hardly anyone comes to. But overwhelmingly, the team were like, No, we feel better when we’re all together. And yeah, most people work three, probably four days in the office, and maybe one or two from home. And yeah, works great for me. Yeah, totally.
Mark McBride-Wright 18:28
I had, yeah, I remember, and I had the same I was in the news. There was all these, whatever companies were mandating. I returned to work to use the offices, and I had the opposite effect, like I had my team, like we’d taken our hot desk in places, or that was the first decision. Actually, it was to take out some hot desk and memberships before we got our I realized quite quickly we needed our own office rather than I got bored. I got annoyed trying to like Portal every morning. It was just so inefficient. It was my team that were wanting to have community together and have space. So it’s like reading in the paper about this gruntled employees being made to come into the office and I’m like, I’m fine, let’s continue to work remote, you know? But then the team were like, no, no, we want to be in person, build connection, yeah.
David Jamieson 19:15
And the thing with being a leader, particularly, and I’ve learned this probably to my detriment at times is everything you say, everything you do, and everything that you don’t see and don’t do you know, that can have such an impact on the team unit and I, I work in the office every single day. I’ve got a young family at home, and I wouldn’t get any work done at home, you know, in most circumstances, but that’s my personal position, and I’m sure that’ll change as my kids get get get older, but so I’m in every day, and I need to, almost, like, remind my team. It’s like, you know, I’m here every day, but you are free to work from home, so, you know, and I’ve learned as a leader that you really need to sometimes watch what it is you’re saying and doing and how you’re behaving, because everyone will follow suit. And. And very, very true, very, very true.
Mark McBride-Wright 20:03
So you mentioned working across different sectors and different industries. Can you just tell us a bit more about the type for people who don’t know, actually what process safety is? Safety is a term that gets you. It’s got very a few different guises, hasn’t it? You know, there’s process safety, there’s technical safety, there’s personal safety, there’s health and safety. Occupational Safety can get a bit confusing,
David Jamieson 20:31
absolutely, you know, I always tell people, you know, that my discipline, process safety, engineering, it’s a completely made up job. It’s, you know, four major hazard industries. It’s that bridge between engineering and the prevention. Of the major events like fires and explosions, you know, large dropped objects, structural damage, etc, and the difference between something like personal safety, that people oversimplify to call, you know, like slips, trips and falls, but those things happen all the time. They impact a small number of people, but process safety incidents, major accidents, major incidents are rare, but when they do happen, they can have devastating impacts, and a lot of the things you do to prevent them are invisible, or certainly less visible, and it’s more difficult. You know, everyone understands, right? I’m going to put a hard hat on when I’m walking under this scaffold, because there’s danger above my head, but you might not understand why an audit that’s found that someone’s missed two steps from a 500 step startup procedure could actually cause a disaster. So for me, it’s about trying to unpick that if you think you’ve got a, you know, a bowl of spaghetti that you’ve cooked, this all messed up and makes no sense of trying to untangle that and get it in a way that you can communicate it to the people, to the people that need to know and only what they need to know. Because with process safety, you might talk to regulators, you might talk to the C suite, you might talk to senior management, you might talk to people on the work site. You might talk to residents that are impacted by something, and it’s different language you’ve got to use each time. So I think that’s a real difference between the two type or the types of safety is process. Safety is rare but devastating, and it’s all we do. Is a lot of what we do is invisible and it’s hard to describe. Yeah, and that’s the challenge. And
Mark McBride-Wright 22:11
where so in the design chain of where do you find most of your work happening? Is it in new studies, in the sort of concept design space where you’re developing your influence and things that aren’t in existence yet, or maybe more developed designs in front end engineering design or detailed design. You know, there’s a whole design process before something then moves into construction, and then obviously you’ve got operations and brownfield modifications that maybe need to be done on assets and stuff. So we’re, I guess I’m interested in, like, what’s your composition, like traditional oil and gas, and is it still mean like that, or are you doing broader industries where there’s high hazards, hazards, and like, where in the chain are you doing? A lot of you mentioned there about evaluating startup procedures and doing work on existing facilities. You know, there’s the way in which something is designed to be operated, and then the way in which it develops and actually ends up getting operated, and there’s always a deviation, and you know, you don’t always know then how things are actually being handled by the operators. Where do you do
David Jamieson 23:26
work? Yeah, so, no, no. So we’re all we’re probably a bit all over the place. So in terms of industries, very much started out as oil and gas. That was my skill set and wheelhouse. But you know, for example, in 2023 our biggest client was an offshore wind operator who they were trying to use some of the learnings from oil and gas into their operations, because they were seeing similar incidents taking place, you know, that felt more oil and gas incidents rather than offshore wind. You know, you think offshore wind might be quite safe because you’ve taken away, like the hydrocarbons, but you’ve still got heavy lifts, you’ve still got boats in the sea, you’ve got personnel transfers, you’ve got, there’s, there’s a lot, you know, that could go wrong in terms of, like, when and, you know, I think just with my skill set, my background, you know, working in operations or smaller projects, it is more the Brownfield mods, the operations. Of course, you can have a massive impact, a far greater impact the earlier that you’re involved. But there is something I quite like about the immediate feedback, or being able to speak to the person that actually does the job and are opening the procedure that’s actually used. So I think we’re a lot closer to that. So we’re a lot further down, you know, the end of the design phase, and more into helping people with how they actually operate. Right now.
Mark McBride-Wright 24:43
So you and I, one of the things I approached you about recently that I think our teams are working on was taking your bow tie XP. One of the things that I approached you about was work. In on
David Jamieson 25:09
leave in.
Mark McBride-Wright 25:18
So one of the things I’ve one of the things I approached one of the things I approached you about recently was our businesses collaborating on bow tie diagrams. I used to work in the consultancy, erm environmental resources management, and one of my jobs there was to look at bow ties. Bow Tie diagrams, I worked with a client where we had to go to an oil storage terminal, take their control of major accident hazards, report their coma report, and convert all the major accident hazards that have been identified in it into some bow tie diagrams. Blow them up into sort of a to a one, get them printed off, and then take them along to this workshop where we got the team to annotate all the branches that were coming off these, these diagrams. And so, for the listeners who are unaware, like imagine the shape of a bow tie. The major accident hazard sits in the middle, and all the stuff to the left of that are the things that could lead to it. And then in the event that the event happens, the stuff to the right of the bow tie is all the things that could result if it were to happen. And then you can look at your preventative barriers along the left hand side, and then your mitigation barriers on the on the right hand side, and that helps you quantify and qualify in your process. You know where you’ve got backstops and resilience and safeguards in place. And also look for are they like mutually separate, or actually, are you having things that are preventing two escalation routes? And it just, it’s a concept we use in process safety around major accident Hazard Management. And so what I was interested in is, when I moved into Ed and I diverse Secretary inclusion consulting, was this concept of barriers. You know, the very word barrier is used when we talk about underrepresented groups and ability to progress. Is there a way we could use bow tie diagrams to communicate gaps and create engagement tool, essentially for for engineers, I’m really interested in using the language in safety. And can we be can we repurpose it for for our cultural needs and our our cultural workshops? So it’s just interested to get your get your take on that and what when you work with clients, you know the physical safety and the link with psychological safety. When I was practicing, you know, 10 years ago, process safety as an engineer, the psychological safety, wasn’t really spoken about. It wasn’t part of the hazard identification studies or, you know, we just spoke about the engineering and the physical stuff and the bits and components that the cultural elements got then grouped into human factors. But even then, that was around the design, the ergonomics of the control room, the what happens when we respond to an alarm going off and stuff. So I’m my I’m really interested in the culture that team leadership create, and and and how that then impacts how we do our engineering. So where is the sectors that you work in on that? Does it, is that a part of workshop focus? Or, you know, is this, or is there a good opportunity there?
David Jamieson 28:54
Absolutely, and it was a great description of both eyes, you know, as only one tool in the toolbox. There’s obviously many other ways, but, you know, a great way to visualize risk, and that’s not just safety risk. We’ve actually got quite a lot of software customers, you know, who isn’t safety. We’ve got, you know, it’s more project risk or cyber risk. I think we’ve got a, we’ve got a travel and tourism company in New Zealand that use our software for, you know, planning some of their like, project risks. So absolutely, it’s a great way to visualize risk. And sometimes the value of doing these things, and, you know, the example that we’ve talked about, the value can actually be, sometimes not even in the end product. It’s just the journey of making the bow tie makes you think, what type of barriers that, where does that set is? You know, oh, my goodness, I never thought about that threat or, Oh, it’s clear now we don’t have as many things to stop that from happening as we did. So, you know, it’s a truly wonderful tool if used correctly. You know, there can be criticism of bow tie diagrams, but most of the criticism I read are people who haven’t used them right, you know? And if you use the toolbox analogy, if you try and use a screwdriver. As a hammer. It’s not going to be very good, but I certainly wouldn’t want to not have a screwdriver. So, yeah, I think it’s one of it’s an amazing tool. And exactly the examples you’ve talked about, you know, it can help you visualize what you need to do and help drive risk based, risk based decisions. And
Mark McBride-Wright 30:14
what other tools are in the toolkit that Salas help?
David Jamieson 30:18
Yeah, well, we’ve got quite a few, you know, we’ve got a tool for doing safety critical task analysis. So that’s like understanding the role that human error can play. You know, if I asked you to, I don’t know, install a new electrical socket in your house, I don’t think I would need to tell you to turn the power off in your house. Or I certainly hope that it wouldn’t be if that’s part of a 500 step procedure, and it might not be as obvious, how do you flag, you know, the steps that you’ve really got to get right. So it helps you do that. We’ve also got an instant investigation tool. I’ve unfortunately had to investigate a few accidents that took place, a few incidents that took place, and I found that I wrote, you know, like you write a report that you’re very proud of, and you think you’ve got to the bottom of it, you know, you’re like Sherlock Holmes, but you realize that actually what you found is very difficult to share, and sometimes your one pager of the diagram that you make is actually the most valuable part. So we made some software where, basically you do the investigation as you’re building the diagram. So the idea would be, you can have a higher quality investigation because it’s done in less time, and you might investigate more instance that previously might not have met the threshold. So you can learn a bit more. So it’s still early phases with that one yet, but we’re finding, you know, we’re getting quite a lot of good traction with that, but you got to pitch it right. You’re not trying to help people shortcut instant investigations. But equally, you know, let’s help them try to get to the root cause faster than the other than they otherwise would.
Mark McBride-Wright 31:40
And what, how, where do you see? So the question just come into my mind is, where do you see the role? Well, two things that I’m interested in, your views on training, the future workforce and so young professionals and process safety, what? What advice do you give? Give to them, but then in that they’re growing up in a and maturing professionally in a world where artificial intelligence is going to play a role in how we do our work. And so how do you see it now coming into impact in process safety workshops, for example, maybe if you could answer those two together,
David Jamieson 32:25
yeah, you know. So, you know, you talk about the world that young people are growing or, I suppose I’m growing up in it too. But, you know, coming into the industry, when you’ve got all these tools, you know, like, you know, like AI and process safety, I think if it hasn’t happened already, it will happen. We’ll have our first major accident, you know, that’s AI related, not in, you know, in terms of, like, there’s been a risk assessment done that no people were actually in, involved in, you know. So my advice to young engineers would be, you know, use the technology that’s out there as a tool to help enhance the journey, but not to fast forward you to the destination. I’m using someone else’s example here, but someone recently described like, think back to high school, when you were writing, you know, English essays. I had to do one on Hamlet for higher English. And I’m pretty certain that my my essay on Hamlet would be no use to anyone today. It’s rubbish. It’s terrible. And it wasn’t actually important. What was important was the journey me, having to read the play, having to, you know, look at a different character, get different points of view, try and present a well balanced argument. And that’s actually what, you know, increased my competence. So what I would say to anyone, and for training and coming into that, is, yes, there’s great technology there. And unfortunately, the technology probably already exists to, you know, have a magic button that could generate a HAZOP, you know, and things like that. And things like that, and that’s all good. I think we should keep exploring these things. I’m really liked at New Tech, but we should never try and shortcut that journey. The value in risk assessment, just like I said with bow ties, not actually the finished risk assessment, it’s the discussion that you had and the decisions that you made, and that should never be something that falls way. But unfortunately, yeah, I think, as with any new, you know, with any new emerging technology, there’ll be some poor decisions and some wrong directions made, but let’s not be us, because the stakes are pretty high, you know, with major accidents of process safety,
Mark McBride-Wright 34:13
certainly, you know, in my thoughts and how this might evolve, I remember back to being a graduate engineer and being the scribe, you know at a workshop, that’s how you learn your craft, you know. And you’re sort of how successful your assessment will be is dependent on the experience of the team around the table. And I wonder if there’s a role that AI will play, which is where all the prior hazops and hazards and ISD, and all the other workshops that have been done on an asset can then be available much more quickly, much more so you can essentially have this co pilot as you’re doing the assessment it can look for. Means it can flag up stuff. So you still have the workshops performed, as has always been done, but you’ve then got access to much greater intelligence that your
David Jamieson 35:13
finger can Yeah, and we’ve actually made something like that for a customer mark. They probably haven’t even described this to you before, but we have, we had a client who had, if you’ve got an impaired like safety equipment, there’s certain risk assessments you have to do, and you’ve got to, I mean, I’ve just choose one part of that. You’ve got to clearly demonstrate how you’re going to fix it and when you’re going to fix it. And this client was finding that they had so many of these things across their entire company that they were actually being driven the admin of risk assessment rather than the value in the conversation. So we made this tool. It doesn’t do anything for them, but when you describe the impairment and your forward plan, you press a button and it just comes back with questions. So for example, if you’ve not clearly put the end date rather than you’ve subscribed, you know you have to help, it’ll come back to you and say, look, you’ve said that the date there is the 18th of October. Is that the start date of the work? Or is that the dates actually going to be closed? It’s like you’ve mentioned, it’s in the plan. Is that, is that plan approved? Can you just confirm what the work order number is, please? So the idea is you’ve just got a little bit of a back and forward. And those questions are based on their governance and their regulations. So that does quite a few things. Find it saves a bit of time and time is important, you know, in a business, I think it increases the quality. So the people actually come in to review these things. You know, I’ve got better quality risk assessments, I think increases the competence of the people there, because the next time they come back, they go, oh, wait a second before I start, let’s raise the work order. Let’s get the plan approved. So that’s the view I’m trying to like. Well, that’s what I think AI is for, is to help you on that journey, rather than fast tracking to the destination. So I think I actually get pitched quite a lot of tools from people, because I speak about AI quite a lot online, and there, there’s some really exciting stuff out there. Equally, there’s some people pitch me things that, like, here’s a magic button that will generate the risk assessment, which I don’t, personally don’t agree with that. Route, I mean, I’m my my mind’s there to be changed if someone comes along with something. But we’re going more of that co pilot that helping you, you know, do thing. Route, yeah,
Mark McBride-Wright 37:10
I think you need that to your point. It’s the process, the process of processes, it’s the process that you’re going through to do that learning. That’s, that’s key. So maybe we can expect to see a fourth product in the Salus. Maybe
David Jamieson 37:22
we’ll watch the space. Maybe there’s one already made that we
Mark McBride-Wright 37:29
just have so I guess, yeah, that sort of covers off. What are some of the emerging trends or challenges? I mean, is there anything else that you think in the process safety landscape, that sort of headwinds that we’ve got ahead of us, or is there? Is there, like our one thing that I’ve one thing that I’ve discovered, I’d be interested to hear your views on was I started my visit professorship at UCL, and I realized through doing that, that I have had a bias as a chemical engineer towards safety. I have assumed that all engineers see safety one and all the same, but my lens is process safety and the prevention of major accident hazards. Safety to an electrical engineer is different. Safety to a mechanical engineer is different. Safety to a software engineer is different. Their mind goes to cyber security. Mechanical Engineers minds go to mechanical integrity and pressure vessels and you know, so it’s been really interesting stepping up a level and thinking just going back to basics, almost be like, Well, hang on, what does this word safety mean to different types of engineers and working in industry? Because I worked in the concept design phase, I was actually working on a lot of projects that were high turn through six weeks long maximum, and actually working really tight with electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, piping engineers, you know, and so we all will process safety had a kind of equal footing in all of that. I guess. If you’re working on much deeper detailed designs, and you’re pretty much, you know, there are more engineers from your discipline in that singular entity, it’s more it’s more siloed, isn’t it? So where do you see safety going? What? How do we need to be approaching safety with the education of you know, the future workforce, maybe on engineering degree programs, for example, is there some, some things that we could do with in industry and with those that are learning their engineering now?
David Jamieson 39:51
Yeah, really good points raised there. You know, I’ve interviewed a lot of graduate engineers in the last, you know, the four years and. A lot of people who’ve had, you know, like process safety, your master’s degrees, or things like that. And we ask a question to our graduate safety engineers, like in the interview, I say something along the lines of, you know, What’s your understanding of the concept of ALARP? And could you explain it to me with a word example? And you know, for someone who’s done a degree in process safety or even chemical engineering where you do process safety modules, I mean, that question should be a free hit, and that is the single most poorly answered question that we ask. So that tells me, and that tells me that maybe there’s some aspects of process safety that maybe aren’t being effectively at the top. However, you know, you do learn these things as you go. And I think what I see is a wide variety and how integrated process safety is in an organization, in an industry. And yeah, I think some are far better than others. Some clients we help. My jobs are breeze because everyone’s already up to speed and we’re all there. And there’s other times when you might ask a really basic question, nobody’s ever heard of that before. And you’re like, oh my goodness, right, we need to actually take a few steps back here. So I always don’t assume anything. I’m not afraid to just explain the basic concepts. Again, just for people’s you know, we’ve, like, got our process, safety, awareness. Course, it’s purely meant for awareness, and I always got it was a company that signed up, like some like people from an asset, and I almost got nervous knowing that there was some, like, offshore installation managers and stuff going on this course. But even some of them fed back. They’re like, you know, something, it’s really good from time to time, just to go right back to the basics and hear it all again. And so I do that, I would say, don’t be afraid to go back to basics and start right at the top and just work your way along. And you know, knowing your knowing your governance, you know in terms of, what is it that what is it that you have to do, what is it that you should be doing? And, you know, we cheered a hazard for I was a select phase hazard for a hydrogen facility on shore, and I was sort of called in as an independent consultant. And at the start, I’m like, right? So who’s never been to a hazard before? And usually nobody, or one person puts their hand up. Almost everyone put their hand up. Oh, okay, this session’s immediately what I had planned can’t happen. And we had to really, you know, I’d sort of a much different direction. So I’d say, Never assume, yeah, yeah, no,
Mark McBride-Wright 42:22
that’s, that’s, that’s really good, really good advice you mentioned in our when we were chatting before you, you have some advice for young professionals. What’s in the box? Onions have layers. Ogres have layers. Tennis, doubles, not tennis singles. What? What is that?
David Jamieson 42:41
So, yeah. So, I mean, I try and get these things across to my engineers, various stories. So one of them’s about accountability. So take the tennis doubles rather than tennis singles. So if you and I were having a game of tennis and I hit the ball over the net, you know that ball is your problem. You know, if you can get it, if you fall over, if you’re too tired, there’s nothing doing me and you know, but whereas, if we’re on the same team, and the ball comes over, and I see that you’re struggling, or you’re not going to get there, then it’s on me to try and help you out. I think a lot of the time you see that with accountability. I’ve seen it again and again and again. You know, someone’s like, well, I sent you an email, you know, well, you were CC. I sent you the the attachment type thing. And I always say to my engineers, it’s, no, we’re, we’re tennis doubles partners, and that applies with us working together and our customers. If you send the email, make sure that it’s been received. Follow up. Don’t, don’t assume. And if, if if you’re having to remind me to open something, send me the link again. Don’t make me have to go and Delve and try and find it. So I’m always about that having the like respect you would as your tennis partner, and yeah, if any of my engineers say things to me like, well, you know, I’ve sent the email, that’s it done? I’m like, No, it’s not done until you’ve verified that the person’s received it and has understood it and is happy. So that’s something I always try and get across to my engineers. You’ve got to be accountable for the whole thing and the other one what’s in the box, right? So I think one of the most important things for especially for a young engineer, is communication, right? I think everyone say so, say that I give you a project to do. It’s a two week project. It’s a three week project, and you love it, and it’s so detailed, and there’s calculations, and you’re making fancy charts, and it’s great. And imagine that’s a box that you’re carrying your little box of tricks. What tends to happen is any question that you get asked, the question you hear is, what’s in the box? And you immediately start talking about, Oh, yeah. And I had the data, and I had the data, and I had to do this, and I was trending this, and I’ve done that, and that’s fine. Sometimes I’ll come along to my team and I’m asking them, what’s in the box? I want to talk about the detail, but remember, it’s a job, and you’ve got a box to carry from A to B, and sometimes the person just wants to know, when am I getting my box, what’s my risks to get in my box? No, it can. Very easy. If a project manager asks you a question, or your engineering manager asks you a question, it’s probably quite easy for you to gage. It’s he’s asked me, What’s in the box, but she’s asking me, When am I going to get it? So I always say to my engineers, when we’re speaking to customers, when you’re speaking to other engineers, when they’re speaking with me, it’s actually, you know, listen to the question that you’re being asked by the person that you’re being asked, because sometimes I’m more interested in what’s the risk of this project getting complete on time? I’m not as interested right now. And you know that chart then that you’ve done, and then the final ones about communication. You know, I think I got quite far in my career, mostly, or part of it, was just the ability to communicate exactly like if you picked up, I don’t know, The Sun newspaper, you know, there’s a headline, there’s maybe, like, a bold paragraph, and then there’s the rest of the thing, you know, and that’s how I think you should communicate quite often, like we did this big job for a client where actually there was an impact on their allowable people that they could have on their asset. And I don’t just immediately start talking about the report. I start with the headline. There is a risk you’ll have fewer people on there’s a meeting next week to decide, and and I need your help, and then you can start talking about so that’s my like, onions have layers. I’ve got to have layers. Like, from Shrek, I say to the team, don’t just jump in with all details, details, details, what’s the headline, then what’s the next bet, and then what’s the next bet? And, yeah, I’m finding the my engineers take all these bunkers stories that I tell them, you know, and they actually run with it, and hopefully it’ll lead to these guys, you know, being a, you know, a much higher standard of engineers. So I’ve got, yeah, I’m full of anecdotes like that that maybe don’t make a lot of sense for you. Oh, they’re
Mark McBride-Wright 46:32
great. They’re great. Great people learn that way. It’s brilliant. Okay, quick fire questions. What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
David Jamieson 46:40
Oh, if you’re going through hell, keep going.
Mark McBride-Wright 46:44
What’s your proudest professional achievement? You
David Jamieson 46:47
know, my graduate engineer did a big presentation at hazards 33 last year, and sitting in the crowd watching him. That was awesome. That was good.
Mark McBride-Wright 46:56
What’s the one skill you think every engineer should have?
David Jamieson 47:00
I think, as I just said, good communication, tea or coffee, coffee.
Mark McBride-Wright 47:06
What’s your go to? Productivity, hack, stop
David Jamieson 47:10
working, take a break and then come back.
Mark McBride-Wright 47:14
If you could have dinner with any engineer or safety expert past or present, who would it be?
David Jamieson 47:18
I mean, terrible guy, but as an engineer, probably Elon Musk, I think, just to talk about engineering and nothing else.
Mark McBride-Wright 47:29
What’s the one thing you do to unwind after a long
David Jamieson 47:33
day exercise? Yep.
Mark McBride-Wright 47:36
What’s the most exciting project you’re working on right now?
David Jamieson 47:39
We’ve got some pretty cool AI enabled stuff in the works just now that we’re really excited about
Mark McBride-Wright 47:47
what’s one book or resource you’d recommend someone interested in process safety?
David Jamieson 47:54
I think everyone who works in a major hazard industry should read the book or watch the documentary fire in the night about the Piper Alpha disaster, yep.
Mark McBride-Wright 48:03
And what’s the one piece of advice you’d give your younger self,
David Jamieson 48:09
whatever problem you’ve got right now is not a problem. Just keep going, probably back to that
Mark McBride-Wright 48:15
hell analogy. Love it. Love it. Thank I’ve really enjoyed our chat. David, how if other people listening to this want to get in touch with you? How do they do that?
David Jamieson 48:27
Yeah, I’m quite active on LinkedIn, so just search me on LinkedIn, and I’ll connect with you, and you can send me a message. And our website, Salas technical.com, there’s contact us. Boxes litter all over the place. I’ll get them all probably LinkedIn would be the best place to get hold of me.
Mark McBride-Wright 48:45
Well, we’ll put links to all that stuff, all those bits in the show notes as well. But thank you very much for your time today.
David Jamieson 48:52
That was fun. Yeah, good stuff. See you soon. Thanks. Thanks,
Mark McBride-Wright 48:56
everyone. Cheers. Bye. You.
E009: From Accidental Beginnings to Industry Impact
Podcast Description
Read the Transcript
Mark McBride-Wright 0:01
Mark, hello. Welcome to the next episode of the safe leader podcast. I’m your host, Mark McBride Wright, and I’m delighted to be joined today with David Jamieson, who is the founder of Salus technical. So David is the founder of Salus technical, helping to make process safety straightforward. He is a chartered mechanical engineer who was part of the winning team of the Formula One constructors World Championship in 2010 and 2011 with Red Bull Racing. He’s passionate about he’s passionate about the development of training young engineers. He’s an amateur marathon and Hill runner and a lover of chess and Lego. David,
David Jamieson 0:47
welcome. Hi Mark. Thanks for having me on.
Mark McBride-Wright 0:51
Absolute pleasure to have you here. So you and I have I’ve been following you for a few years now. I think that sounds creepy, doesn’t it? When mcgride verbs of online into real world that that doesn’t Yeah,
David Jamieson 1:07
yeah,
Mark McBride-Wright 1:10
for a few years, and then, I mean, probably just within the last year, started being a bit more well. We translated that into actually having a virtual chat together, and we’re now some exciting collaborations on the way. And I’m sure there is a ton more that we could be doing together, but I built, I’m starting this podcast. We’re doing this podcast series all around you know the safe leader, the book that I’ve written, and this notion of trying to create safe leadership as a thing that can incorporate diversity, equity and inclusion, and the work that we’re doing in the sector, and I’m a big believer as a fellow process safety engineer as well, by technical background, that that’s there’s stuff within process safety that we can borrow with pride, steal with pride when it comes to cultural work. So I’m really interested to so I’m not out in the field doing the technical stuff anymore. I’m doing the, you know, the more cultural advisory side of things. But as a fellow entrepreneur, I’ve been really inspired to see the what you’ve been doing at Salus technical, the innovation and ingenuity that you’re bringing to the products that you’re creating, and the impact that you’re having with the clients that you’re working with. Had I still been doing technical stuff in industry, you’re definitely a brand that would have piqued my interest, and I’d be looking at your job career sections to figure out, how can I, can I get involved? So, so I want to dig into the brains behind it, the founder behind it, yourself. And you know what? What, what, what brought, if we go back to route, what, what led you to safety, what, inspired you into this field?
David Jamieson 3:03
Yeah, well, that’s a really interesting question, because I got into safety by accident. You know, I did a degree in Aeronautical Engineering and, you know, worked in other industries, including motor sport, as you said. And when my wife and I moved back to Scotland, I was doing like fire and explosion and modeling and safety and that kind of thing. And what I was doing was I was looking at, you know, the impact of a lot of consequences, and then just over time that led into more like frontline process safety. And I had a six month secondment to an operator, because there was lots of ongoing study work I had to help manage that. And I just loved it from day one, and I never looked back. I realized I could have a far bigger impact doing that. You know, then, although it was hugely enjoyable sitting in the corner for a month on end without talking to anyone, modeling 180 different explosions narios can only have such an impact. So I found it was much better when I was actually, you know, speaking directly with the decision makers and things like that. And
Mark McBride-Wright 4:04
one of the we tell our listeners a bit about the work that you did, I think that was when I discovered Salas. Actually, you did a campaign where you wrote, used the Freedom of Information Act in the UK to get data. And you, you wrote to a lot of operators to find out, to try and get has study, you did a study or something and published a report. Clearly, my memory is a little bit No, no, I’m talking about, I can tell. So can you just talk about that, please? Yeah,
David Jamieson 4:40
so we did that, and again, it was a bit of a gamble, and I actually almost didn’t press send on it when we put it out. What we did was, just before I left to start Salus, I was working for a UK offshore oil and gas operator, and I got this naughty letter from the HSC after an inspection. It’s like a year. A low card in football, and it was a system I was responsible for. So I felt like I totally messed up. And that was maybe pre WhatsApp, and there was a, there was an email chain at that time, rather than a WhatsApp group of similar like tech safety technical authorities. And I asked some of them, you know, like, for some advice. And it turned out that a few of them had had that same letter sent in the past few years. So I was like, what a waste that these letters aren’t actually out there. So years later, at Salus, we did a theme of Information request. Took a bit of time, a bit back and forward, but we got all the letters for a single year. I chose 2019, the last year before they were impacted by COVID. And yeah, we it was over 1000 non compliances. We made a guidance document. We focused that document all on making actions. And they basically our thesis was, if three or more operators got a similar letter, the chances are, as an industry, that a lot of people would be open to as well. And it was such a success, it got downloaded over 10,000 times, shared loads and email, and we won an award. And I never realized at the time, but it had such an impact on our company in terms of being recognized. And I was about a year afterwards, or maybe six, seven months afterwards, I was in a conference meeting, and someone from the HSE was there, and they were talking about the Salish report as if there were some massive enterprise that had done this thing. So it was quite, yeah, that was, that was quite good, but I’m very glad that we did that. Yeah, what would
Mark McBride-Wright 6:29
you just, what was, what was the question that you asked? Like, what was the report on? Again?
David Jamieson 6:33
So essentially, it was like we went through all of these letters that are usually private, and so they’re not in the public domain. And it was, is there something that we can learn from those? And then the question we answered is, what are the recurring findings? And we put them all into a nice document, and that document is available for free on our website. And yeah, as I say, over 10,000 downloads, which is quite remarkable, actually, almost brought our website down, which was,
Mark McBride-Wright 7:01
we’ll put a link in the show notes, but it’s been people want to google it on the go, What’s the title of the report?
David Jamieson 7:05
If you just type Salas technical HSC inspection report, I’m sure that you’ll find it. We’ve got a publication section on our website, and that sits there. Yep, amazing,
Mark McBride-Wright 7:17
amazing. So yeah, talk us through then the journey to so you decided to tech, safety was going to be your thing, that there must have then been a, what was the transition to think, right? I want to, I want to taste it, that entrepreneurship. I want to, I want to be the one at the helm, or, you know, helping support growth and have influence.
David Jamieson 7:42
I Yeah, it’s quite interesting, because I can’t really remember exactly why. I just have always wanted to run my own business. I don’t know when that thought came into my head, but probably from a young age at school. And I tried quite a few things, like, you know, buying and selling stuff on eBay. I used to work in Halfords, and I wrote this, like guide on how to modify your car that nobody downloaded. I wrote, like, Excel macros for some small businesses. I had actually had a company called macro matics, and again, we had very few customers. And then eventually I decided to take the plunge and start Salus. And I had a few other ideas, but I decided I’d come quite far with process safety. It was a really worthwhile thing to do. And I Yeah, thought I would just go and I do it, and I did it three months before COVID. So you know, if you’re thinking about starting a business, I would say, only spend so much time on your business plan, because you’ll probably change it, as I had to do.
Mark McBride-Wright 8:38
Yes, so what, what had you been planning, pre pandemic? So, December, January, 2019, 2020, you’re planning to do your new business. You’ve got this exciting plan you launch, and then, yeah, the world completely changes as we know it, three months later, what? What had you been planning? And how did you have to pivot So
David Jamieson 9:02
originally, but very quickly, this went away. I was going to actually teach myself to code and make the software all by myself, but I realized I did not have the necessary financial runway to teach for that. So I had made a demo. There is actually an original demo you can still see online of the bow tie diagram software that I made, but it was perfect. If you spoke to me, you know, in February 2019, I would have, is that right, the month before COVID, I had a freelancer making software for me, and I’d lined up two consultancy jobs to pay for all of that. And there’s a street in Aberdeen called albine place, and I was walking along that, and I got three phone calls. This was the week before Boris Johnson’s, you know, you must stay at home speech. And the Freelancer announced that he wasn’t freelancing anymore. He’d gone back to his old work, so there was no software. The offshore execution of the first project got deferred by one. Year, so I wasn’t required, and then the other company canceled the contract. So I got to the top of Albin place, and I had no software and no income. But fortunately, I was able to find a few things, and then from there, the plan of having a engineering consultancy to build a software company and then start to feed each other’s kind of, you know, evolved from there, so and
Mark McBride-Wright 10:21
that, and that’s the model you’re working today, is that talk us through your product then and your service line, like, what type of work does? Yeah, so,
David Jamieson 10:28
you know, we obviously provide process safety expertise to major hazard industries. Major hazard industries are quite, you know, volatile to say the least. You know, I still think I’m quite young, although I’m probably not that young anymore, and I’ve and like, I’ve been part of two down turns. So I always wanted to strive to have diverse income in terms of different services, different countries, different industries. And we’ve so we’ve got a team of engineers, we’ve got some On Demand training courses, and we’ve got some software products, and I’ve got a really good blend across the industries and different global locations, too. And, you know, I look at it like I’ve got three children, and at any one time, there’s at least one problem child, so there’s always an area, you know, that needs expertise, but I’m trying to get them all to be about the same size,
Mark McBride-Wright 11:14
okay? And what that’s really interesting. So what? So that, I mean that just shows you diversity within business, doesn’t it like having a diverse portfolio of stuff that you do can help offset a drop in any UN one it’s a good risk mitigation strategy. You’re not then fully exposed to one singular strand of income or even one singular client that you can then have some redundancy, I guess, in your in your portfolio, which is similar to what I’ve done with equal engineers, with having the events portfolio. In fact, actually, yeah, thinking back to that time, February 2020, I’m glad we had a training portfolio as well as the events portfolio, because, guess what, the in person events portfolio went south. So we were delivering, we’d secured some investment from the Engineering Construction Industry Training Board to deliver training to 1000 engineers in the UK nuclear sector. And it was supposed to be in person. And in the January I’d already gone up to Cumbria to do a couple of sessions, but they just, you know, they were really poorly attended. And I was thinking, Oh, we’re never going to realize the income of all this, what we’ve been offered, you know, but then the pandemic happened. Everything went virtual. People were at home, needing stuff to do became much easier to execute and deliver, and we were able to start really drawing down that funding and offering it up to clients to book places on it. And how have you adapted? Then what you learned? So, what scale was your business at that point in terms of head count, and then as you’ve grown, have you, like, maintained any things that you learn, it, running a business in that time that still live today in your culture, in terms of flexible working, or, you know, culture in the business?
David Jamieson 13:18
Yeah, you know, probably quite a few things, and some of them might actually be polar opposites. So at the time, it was just me during COVID, we did build up. I had a few, like, fully remote employees, and I had a few like, you know, contractors that were working with me. So there was, there was, you know, people in remote in other places in the UK, there was people as far away in Taiwan that were working for me now as an organization, although we have an office, and everyone comes into the office, you know, we do offer, you know, flexible working. And you know that can be hugely effective. And I learned that in COVID, I would have, you know, if you’d asked me pre COVID, I would have been very against all that sort of stuff, and said, That’ll never work, but the flip side of that is I’ve learned that me as a person, you know, probably not realizing it day by day, but it certainly eroded, sort of, you know, my motivation. I’ve learned that I absolutely do like that, you know, that physical interaction with people and, you know, I try, and now, as I have a business where we have a happy medium, people are free to do what they want. But I feel that, you know, collectively, when, when everyone’s in it does, there is a certain energy that I just have not been able to replicate without. So, yeah, but I’m a lot more open minded to these things. Now, as a result of the pandemic, I didn’t, you know there was no other option. Before,
Mark McBride-Wright 14:42
it’s funny, I remember being on a camera I think I was doing a it was a planning call for a webinar that I was going to be on. And it was around about the time that I was looking at taking an office on for equal engineers, or maybe i. Had taken the office on with equal engineers, and it wasn’t being used as much as I wanted it to. And so I was thinking, so I’m looking at the money, right? You know? I’m looking at the overhead of what this no new decision that I’d made to take on had been and then we weren’t using it 100% so kind of playing devil’s advocate a bit on this, on this webinar, where everyone was saying, Well, no, everyone should be able to work flexibly and choose what they need, and that works best for them and stuff. And I was like, Well, yeah, but if you’re a business owner and you’re paying for this setup, you know, is it? Does it? Is it quite binary? Does it have to be everyone in or everyone out, like how it’s putting my business hat on when I then look at the cost to have this place of work, and if it’s not being used, I’m like, well, what’s the point of having it, you know? And try and try. And I absolutely believe in the need to have flexible work in and work life that works for how people work best. But I can also understand the business owners looking at pure numbers and thinking, well, if our real estate space isn’t being utilized to 100% we have to make some decisions on downsizing offices or removing it completely, or the opposite, making people come into the office to actually justify this, the spend. And it was a psychologist that was on the call that really helped me get clarity of thought on on having this investment. She said, You need to decouple for decouple it from expecting that that return. She said, What you’re doing is you’re providing that space that all, you’re providing that framework for that flexible working forum. And then people know that they’ve got it available to them, obviously, those who work locally in London, where our office is. And then then you just see it from that then you’re getting the best out of those people, you know. So it was, it was, it was a, it was a shift that I nudge, that I just need a little bit when I was starting to go down the mindset of, you must work in the office and blah, blah, blah, you know, because I could feel myself being pulled in that direction, from a, from a investment, no,
David Jamieson 17:16
and, you know, and it’s absolutely right, and you know, you know, we’ve got a lot of KPIs in the business, or even some I’ve got personally, you know, like with process safety, there’s some more leading indicators, and I’ve got ones around taking, take my three process safety engineers on their personal development. There’s certain milestones I want them to hit. And you would think, if they’re doing well, and they’re developing and they’re growing, and they’re getting experience the business overall do well. And I personally find it’s easier to hit those milestones when we’re all together in a collaborative environment. But equally, there’s plenty times where there’s people who work through remotely, and you get that too. I just, I think that, you know, work from home, flexible work, and that sort of thing. I think everyone tries to put it in a bucket of this is how it is. It’s entirely different for every company. Even in the same company, our developers and our engineers have got entirely different needs. We actually, before we moved into our new office, we canvassed the team. It was like, Well, what do you want? You know, maybe I’ll take a smaller, nicer office to hardly anyone comes to. But overwhelmingly, the team were like, No, we feel better when we’re all together. And yeah, most people work three, probably four days in the office, and maybe one or two from home. And yeah, works great for me. Yeah, totally.
Mark McBride-Wright 18:28
I had, yeah, I remember, and I had the same I was in the news. There was all these, whatever companies were mandating. I returned to work to use the offices, and I had the opposite effect, like I had my team, like we’d taken our hot desk in places, or that was the first decision. Actually, it was to take out some hot desk and memberships before we got our I realized quite quickly we needed our own office rather than I got bored. I got annoyed trying to like Portal every morning. It was just so inefficient. It was my team that were wanting to have community together and have space. So it’s like reading in the paper about this gruntled employees being made to come into the office and I’m like, I’m fine, let’s continue to work remote, you know? But then the team were like, no, no, we want to be in person, build connection, yeah.
David Jamieson 19:15
And the thing with being a leader, particularly, and I’ve learned this probably to my detriment at times is everything you say, everything you do, and everything that you don’t see and don’t do you know, that can have such an impact on the team unit and I, I work in the office every single day. I’ve got a young family at home, and I wouldn’t get any work done at home, you know, in most circumstances, but that’s my personal position, and I’m sure that’ll change as my kids get get get older, but so I’m in every day, and I need to, almost, like, remind my team. It’s like, you know, I’m here every day, but you are free to work from home, so, you know, and I’ve learned as a leader that you really need to sometimes watch what it is you’re saying and doing and how you’re behaving, because everyone will follow suit. And. And very, very true, very, very true.
Mark McBride-Wright 20:03
So you mentioned working across different sectors and different industries. Can you just tell us a bit more about the type for people who don’t know, actually what process safety is? Safety is a term that gets you. It’s got very a few different guises, hasn’t it? You know, there’s process safety, there’s technical safety, there’s personal safety, there’s health and safety. Occupational Safety can get a bit confusing,
David Jamieson 20:31
absolutely, you know, I always tell people, you know, that my discipline, process safety, engineering, it’s a completely made up job. It’s, you know, four major hazard industries. It’s that bridge between engineering and the prevention. Of the major events like fires and explosions, you know, large dropped objects, structural damage, etc, and the difference between something like personal safety, that people oversimplify to call, you know, like slips, trips and falls, but those things happen all the time. They impact a small number of people, but process safety incidents, major accidents, major incidents are rare, but when they do happen, they can have devastating impacts, and a lot of the things you do to prevent them are invisible, or certainly less visible, and it’s more difficult. You know, everyone understands, right? I’m going to put a hard hat on when I’m walking under this scaffold, because there’s danger above my head, but you might not understand why an audit that’s found that someone’s missed two steps from a 500 step startup procedure could actually cause a disaster. So for me, it’s about trying to unpick that if you think you’ve got a, you know, a bowl of spaghetti that you’ve cooked, this all messed up and makes no sense of trying to untangle that and get it in a way that you can communicate it to the people, to the people that need to know and only what they need to know. Because with process safety, you might talk to regulators, you might talk to the C suite, you might talk to senior management, you might talk to people on the work site. You might talk to residents that are impacted by something, and it’s different language you’ve got to use each time. So I think that’s a real difference between the two type or the types of safety is process. Safety is rare but devastating, and it’s all we do. Is a lot of what we do is invisible and it’s hard to describe. Yeah, and that’s the challenge. And
Mark McBride-Wright 22:11
where so in the design chain of where do you find most of your work happening? Is it in new studies, in the sort of concept design space where you’re developing your influence and things that aren’t in existence yet, or maybe more developed designs in front end engineering design or detailed design. You know, there’s a whole design process before something then moves into construction, and then obviously you’ve got operations and brownfield modifications that maybe need to be done on assets and stuff. So we’re, I guess I’m interested in, like, what’s your composition, like traditional oil and gas, and is it still mean like that, or are you doing broader industries where there’s high hazards, hazards, and like, where in the chain are you doing? A lot of you mentioned there about evaluating startup procedures and doing work on existing facilities. You know, there’s the way in which something is designed to be operated, and then the way in which it develops and actually ends up getting operated, and there’s always a deviation, and you know, you don’t always know then how things are actually being handled by the operators. Where do you do
David Jamieson 23:26
work? Yeah, so, no, no. So we’re all we’re probably a bit all over the place. So in terms of industries, very much started out as oil and gas. That was my skill set and wheelhouse. But you know, for example, in 2023 our biggest client was an offshore wind operator who they were trying to use some of the learnings from oil and gas into their operations, because they were seeing similar incidents taking place, you know, that felt more oil and gas incidents rather than offshore wind. You know, you think offshore wind might be quite safe because you’ve taken away, like the hydrocarbons, but you’ve still got heavy lifts, you’ve still got boats in the sea, you’ve got personnel transfers, you’ve got, there’s, there’s a lot, you know, that could go wrong in terms of, like, when and, you know, I think just with my skill set, my background, you know, working in operations or smaller projects, it is more the Brownfield mods, the operations. Of course, you can have a massive impact, a far greater impact the earlier that you’re involved. But there is something I quite like about the immediate feedback, or being able to speak to the person that actually does the job and are opening the procedure that’s actually used. So I think we’re a lot closer to that. So we’re a lot further down, you know, the end of the design phase, and more into helping people with how they actually operate. Right now.
Mark McBride-Wright 24:43
So you and I, one of the things I approached you about recently that I think our teams are working on was taking your bow tie XP. One of the things that I approached you about was work. In on
David Jamieson 25:09
leave in.
Mark McBride-Wright 25:18
So one of the things I’ve one of the things I approached one of the things I approached you about recently was our businesses collaborating on bow tie diagrams. I used to work in the consultancy, erm environmental resources management, and one of my jobs there was to look at bow ties. Bow Tie diagrams, I worked with a client where we had to go to an oil storage terminal, take their control of major accident hazards, report their coma report, and convert all the major accident hazards that have been identified in it into some bow tie diagrams. Blow them up into sort of a to a one, get them printed off, and then take them along to this workshop where we got the team to annotate all the branches that were coming off these, these diagrams. And so, for the listeners who are unaware, like imagine the shape of a bow tie. The major accident hazard sits in the middle, and all the stuff to the left of that are the things that could lead to it. And then in the event that the event happens, the stuff to the right of the bow tie is all the things that could result if it were to happen. And then you can look at your preventative barriers along the left hand side, and then your mitigation barriers on the on the right hand side, and that helps you quantify and qualify in your process. You know where you’ve got backstops and resilience and safeguards in place. And also look for are they like mutually separate, or actually, are you having things that are preventing two escalation routes? And it just, it’s a concept we use in process safety around major accident Hazard Management. And so what I was interested in is, when I moved into Ed and I diverse Secretary inclusion consulting, was this concept of barriers. You know, the very word barrier is used when we talk about underrepresented groups and ability to progress. Is there a way we could use bow tie diagrams to communicate gaps and create engagement tool, essentially for for engineers, I’m really interested in using the language in safety. And can we be can we repurpose it for for our cultural needs and our our cultural workshops? So it’s just interested to get your get your take on that and what when you work with clients, you know the physical safety and the link with psychological safety. When I was practicing, you know, 10 years ago, process safety as an engineer, the psychological safety, wasn’t really spoken about. It wasn’t part of the hazard identification studies or, you know, we just spoke about the engineering and the physical stuff and the bits and components that the cultural elements got then grouped into human factors. But even then, that was around the design, the ergonomics of the control room, the what happens when we respond to an alarm going off and stuff. So I’m my I’m really interested in the culture that team leadership create, and and and how that then impacts how we do our engineering. So where is the sectors that you work in on that? Does it, is that a part of workshop focus? Or, you know, is this, or is there a good opportunity there?
David Jamieson 28:54
Absolutely, and it was a great description of both eyes, you know, as only one tool in the toolbox. There’s obviously many other ways, but, you know, a great way to visualize risk, and that’s not just safety risk. We’ve actually got quite a lot of software customers, you know, who isn’t safety. We’ve got, you know, it’s more project risk or cyber risk. I think we’ve got a, we’ve got a travel and tourism company in New Zealand that use our software for, you know, planning some of their like, project risks. So absolutely, it’s a great way to visualize risk. And sometimes the value of doing these things, and, you know, the example that we’ve talked about, the value can actually be, sometimes not even in the end product. It’s just the journey of making the bow tie makes you think, what type of barriers that, where does that set is? You know, oh, my goodness, I never thought about that threat or, Oh, it’s clear now we don’t have as many things to stop that from happening as we did. So, you know, it’s a truly wonderful tool if used correctly. You know, there can be criticism of bow tie diagrams, but most of the criticism I read are people who haven’t used them right, you know? And if you use the toolbox analogy, if you try and use a screwdriver. As a hammer. It’s not going to be very good, but I certainly wouldn’t want to not have a screwdriver. So, yeah, I think it’s one of it’s an amazing tool. And exactly the examples you’ve talked about, you know, it can help you visualize what you need to do and help drive risk based, risk based decisions. And
Mark McBride-Wright 30:14
what other tools are in the toolkit that Salas help?
David Jamieson 30:18
Yeah, well, we’ve got quite a few, you know, we’ve got a tool for doing safety critical task analysis. So that’s like understanding the role that human error can play. You know, if I asked you to, I don’t know, install a new electrical socket in your house, I don’t think I would need to tell you to turn the power off in your house. Or I certainly hope that it wouldn’t be if that’s part of a 500 step procedure, and it might not be as obvious, how do you flag, you know, the steps that you’ve really got to get right. So it helps you do that. We’ve also got an instant investigation tool. I’ve unfortunately had to investigate a few accidents that took place, a few incidents that took place, and I found that I wrote, you know, like you write a report that you’re very proud of, and you think you’ve got to the bottom of it, you know, you’re like Sherlock Holmes, but you realize that actually what you found is very difficult to share, and sometimes your one pager of the diagram that you make is actually the most valuable part. So we made some software where, basically you do the investigation as you’re building the diagram. So the idea would be, you can have a higher quality investigation because it’s done in less time, and you might investigate more instance that previously might not have met the threshold. So you can learn a bit more. So it’s still early phases with that one yet, but we’re finding, you know, we’re getting quite a lot of good traction with that, but you got to pitch it right. You’re not trying to help people shortcut instant investigations. But equally, you know, let’s help them try to get to the root cause faster than the other than they otherwise would.
Mark McBride-Wright 31:40
And what, how, where do you see? So the question just come into my mind is, where do you see the role? Well, two things that I’m interested in, your views on training, the future workforce and so young professionals and process safety, what? What advice do you give? Give to them, but then in that they’re growing up in a and maturing professionally in a world where artificial intelligence is going to play a role in how we do our work. And so how do you see it now coming into impact in process safety workshops, for example, maybe if you could answer those two together,
David Jamieson 32:25
yeah, you know. So, you know, you talk about the world that young people are growing or, I suppose I’m growing up in it too. But, you know, coming into the industry, when you’ve got all these tools, you know, like, you know, like AI and process safety, I think if it hasn’t happened already, it will happen. We’ll have our first major accident, you know, that’s AI related, not in, you know, in terms of, like, there’s been a risk assessment done that no people were actually in, involved in, you know. So my advice to young engineers would be, you know, use the technology that’s out there as a tool to help enhance the journey, but not to fast forward you to the destination. I’m using someone else’s example here, but someone recently described like, think back to high school, when you were writing, you know, English essays. I had to do one on Hamlet for higher English. And I’m pretty certain that my my essay on Hamlet would be no use to anyone today. It’s rubbish. It’s terrible. And it wasn’t actually important. What was important was the journey me, having to read the play, having to, you know, look at a different character, get different points of view, try and present a well balanced argument. And that’s actually what, you know, increased my competence. So what I would say to anyone, and for training and coming into that, is, yes, there’s great technology there. And unfortunately, the technology probably already exists to, you know, have a magic button that could generate a HAZOP, you know, and things like that. And things like that, and that’s all good. I think we should keep exploring these things. I’m really liked at New Tech, but we should never try and shortcut that journey. The value in risk assessment, just like I said with bow ties, not actually the finished risk assessment, it’s the discussion that you had and the decisions that you made, and that should never be something that falls way. But unfortunately, yeah, I think, as with any new, you know, with any new emerging technology, there’ll be some poor decisions and some wrong directions made, but let’s not be us, because the stakes are pretty high, you know, with major accidents of process safety,
Mark McBride-Wright 34:13
certainly, you know, in my thoughts and how this might evolve, I remember back to being a graduate engineer and being the scribe, you know at a workshop, that’s how you learn your craft, you know. And you’re sort of how successful your assessment will be is dependent on the experience of the team around the table. And I wonder if there’s a role that AI will play, which is where all the prior hazops and hazards and ISD, and all the other workshops that have been done on an asset can then be available much more quickly, much more so you can essentially have this co pilot as you’re doing the assessment it can look for. Means it can flag up stuff. So you still have the workshops performed, as has always been done, but you’ve then got access to much greater intelligence that your
David Jamieson 35:13
finger can Yeah, and we’ve actually made something like that for a customer mark. They probably haven’t even described this to you before, but we have, we had a client who had, if you’ve got an impaired like safety equipment, there’s certain risk assessments you have to do, and you’ve got to, I mean, I’ve just choose one part of that. You’ve got to clearly demonstrate how you’re going to fix it and when you’re going to fix it. And this client was finding that they had so many of these things across their entire company that they were actually being driven the admin of risk assessment rather than the value in the conversation. So we made this tool. It doesn’t do anything for them, but when you describe the impairment and your forward plan, you press a button and it just comes back with questions. So for example, if you’ve not clearly put the end date rather than you’ve subscribed, you know you have to help, it’ll come back to you and say, look, you’ve said that the date there is the 18th of October. Is that the start date of the work? Or is that the dates actually going to be closed? It’s like you’ve mentioned, it’s in the plan. Is that, is that plan approved? Can you just confirm what the work order number is, please? So the idea is you’ve just got a little bit of a back and forward. And those questions are based on their governance and their regulations. So that does quite a few things. Find it saves a bit of time and time is important, you know, in a business, I think it increases the quality. So the people actually come in to review these things. You know, I’ve got better quality risk assessments, I think increases the competence of the people there, because the next time they come back, they go, oh, wait a second before I start, let’s raise the work order. Let’s get the plan approved. So that’s the view I’m trying to like. Well, that’s what I think AI is for, is to help you on that journey, rather than fast tracking to the destination. So I think I actually get pitched quite a lot of tools from people, because I speak about AI quite a lot online, and there, there’s some really exciting stuff out there. Equally, there’s some people pitch me things that, like, here’s a magic button that will generate the risk assessment, which I don’t, personally don’t agree with that. Route, I mean, I’m my my mind’s there to be changed if someone comes along with something. But we’re going more of that co pilot that helping you, you know, do thing. Route, yeah,
Mark McBride-Wright 37:10
I think you need that to your point. It’s the process, the process of processes, it’s the process that you’re going through to do that learning. That’s, that’s key. So maybe we can expect to see a fourth product in the Salus. Maybe
David Jamieson 37:22
we’ll watch the space. Maybe there’s one already made that we
Mark McBride-Wright 37:29
just have so I guess, yeah, that sort of covers off. What are some of the emerging trends or challenges? I mean, is there anything else that you think in the process safety landscape, that sort of headwinds that we’ve got ahead of us, or is there? Is there, like our one thing that I’ve one thing that I’ve discovered, I’d be interested to hear your views on was I started my visit professorship at UCL, and I realized through doing that, that I have had a bias as a chemical engineer towards safety. I have assumed that all engineers see safety one and all the same, but my lens is process safety and the prevention of major accident hazards. Safety to an electrical engineer is different. Safety to a mechanical engineer is different. Safety to a software engineer is different. Their mind goes to cyber security. Mechanical Engineers minds go to mechanical integrity and pressure vessels and you know, so it’s been really interesting stepping up a level and thinking just going back to basics, almost be like, Well, hang on, what does this word safety mean to different types of engineers and working in industry? Because I worked in the concept design phase, I was actually working on a lot of projects that were high turn through six weeks long maximum, and actually working really tight with electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, piping engineers, you know, and so we all will process safety had a kind of equal footing in all of that. I guess. If you’re working on much deeper detailed designs, and you’re pretty much, you know, there are more engineers from your discipline in that singular entity, it’s more it’s more siloed, isn’t it? So where do you see safety going? What? How do we need to be approaching safety with the education of you know, the future workforce, maybe on engineering degree programs, for example, is there some, some things that we could do with in industry and with those that are learning their engineering now?
David Jamieson 39:51
Yeah, really good points raised there. You know, I’ve interviewed a lot of graduate engineers in the last, you know, the four years and. A lot of people who’ve had, you know, like process safety, your master’s degrees, or things like that. And we ask a question to our graduate safety engineers, like in the interview, I say something along the lines of, you know, What’s your understanding of the concept of ALARP? And could you explain it to me with a word example? And you know, for someone who’s done a degree in process safety or even chemical engineering where you do process safety modules, I mean, that question should be a free hit, and that is the single most poorly answered question that we ask. So that tells me, and that tells me that maybe there’s some aspects of process safety that maybe aren’t being effectively at the top. However, you know, you do learn these things as you go. And I think what I see is a wide variety and how integrated process safety is in an organization, in an industry. And yeah, I think some are far better than others. Some clients we help. My jobs are breeze because everyone’s already up to speed and we’re all there. And there’s other times when you might ask a really basic question, nobody’s ever heard of that before. And you’re like, oh my goodness, right, we need to actually take a few steps back here. So I always don’t assume anything. I’m not afraid to just explain the basic concepts. Again, just for people’s you know, we’ve, like, got our process, safety, awareness. Course, it’s purely meant for awareness, and I always got it was a company that signed up, like some like people from an asset, and I almost got nervous knowing that there was some, like, offshore installation managers and stuff going on this course. But even some of them fed back. They’re like, you know, something, it’s really good from time to time, just to go right back to the basics and hear it all again. And so I do that, I would say, don’t be afraid to go back to basics and start right at the top and just work your way along. And you know, knowing your knowing your governance, you know in terms of, what is it that what is it that you have to do, what is it that you should be doing? And, you know, we cheered a hazard for I was a select phase hazard for a hydrogen facility on shore, and I was sort of called in as an independent consultant. And at the start, I’m like, right? So who’s never been to a hazard before? And usually nobody, or one person puts their hand up. Almost everyone put their hand up. Oh, okay, this session’s immediately what I had planned can’t happen. And we had to really, you know, I’d sort of a much different direction. So I’d say, Never assume, yeah, yeah, no,
Mark McBride-Wright 42:22
that’s, that’s, that’s really good, really good advice you mentioned in our when we were chatting before you, you have some advice for young professionals. What’s in the box? Onions have layers. Ogres have layers. Tennis, doubles, not tennis singles. What? What is that?
David Jamieson 42:41
So, yeah. So, I mean, I try and get these things across to my engineers, various stories. So one of them’s about accountability. So take the tennis doubles rather than tennis singles. So if you and I were having a game of tennis and I hit the ball over the net, you know that ball is your problem. You know, if you can get it, if you fall over, if you’re too tired, there’s nothing doing me and you know, but whereas, if we’re on the same team, and the ball comes over, and I see that you’re struggling, or you’re not going to get there, then it’s on me to try and help you out. I think a lot of the time you see that with accountability. I’ve seen it again and again and again. You know, someone’s like, well, I sent you an email, you know, well, you were CC. I sent you the the attachment type thing. And I always say to my engineers, it’s, no, we’re, we’re tennis doubles partners, and that applies with us working together and our customers. If you send the email, make sure that it’s been received. Follow up. Don’t, don’t assume. And if, if if you’re having to remind me to open something, send me the link again. Don’t make me have to go and Delve and try and find it. So I’m always about that having the like respect you would as your tennis partner, and yeah, if any of my engineers say things to me like, well, you know, I’ve sent the email, that’s it done? I’m like, No, it’s not done until you’ve verified that the person’s received it and has understood it and is happy. So that’s something I always try and get across to my engineers. You’ve got to be accountable for the whole thing and the other one what’s in the box, right? So I think one of the most important things for especially for a young engineer, is communication, right? I think everyone say so, say that I give you a project to do. It’s a two week project. It’s a three week project, and you love it, and it’s so detailed, and there’s calculations, and you’re making fancy charts, and it’s great. And imagine that’s a box that you’re carrying your little box of tricks. What tends to happen is any question that you get asked, the question you hear is, what’s in the box? And you immediately start talking about, Oh, yeah. And I had the data, and I had the data, and I had to do this, and I was trending this, and I’ve done that, and that’s fine. Sometimes I’ll come along to my team and I’m asking them, what’s in the box? I want to talk about the detail, but remember, it’s a job, and you’ve got a box to carry from A to B, and sometimes the person just wants to know, when am I getting my box, what’s my risks to get in my box? No, it can. Very easy. If a project manager asks you a question, or your engineering manager asks you a question, it’s probably quite easy for you to gage. It’s he’s asked me, What’s in the box, but she’s asking me, When am I going to get it? So I always say to my engineers, when we’re speaking to customers, when you’re speaking to other engineers, when they’re speaking with me, it’s actually, you know, listen to the question that you’re being asked by the person that you’re being asked, because sometimes I’m more interested in what’s the risk of this project getting complete on time? I’m not as interested right now. And you know that chart then that you’ve done, and then the final ones about communication. You know, I think I got quite far in my career, mostly, or part of it, was just the ability to communicate exactly like if you picked up, I don’t know, The Sun newspaper, you know, there’s a headline, there’s maybe, like, a bold paragraph, and then there’s the rest of the thing, you know, and that’s how I think you should communicate quite often, like we did this big job for a client where actually there was an impact on their allowable people that they could have on their asset. And I don’t just immediately start talking about the report. I start with the headline. There is a risk you’ll have fewer people on there’s a meeting next week to decide, and and I need your help, and then you can start talking about so that’s my like, onions have layers. I’ve got to have layers. Like, from Shrek, I say to the team, don’t just jump in with all details, details, details, what’s the headline, then what’s the next bet, and then what’s the next bet? And, yeah, I’m finding the my engineers take all these bunkers stories that I tell them, you know, and they actually run with it, and hopefully it’ll lead to these guys, you know, being a, you know, a much higher standard of engineers. So I’ve got, yeah, I’m full of anecdotes like that that maybe don’t make a lot of sense for you. Oh, they’re
Mark McBride-Wright 46:32
great. They’re great. Great people learn that way. It’s brilliant. Okay, quick fire questions. What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
David Jamieson 46:40
Oh, if you’re going through hell, keep going.
Mark McBride-Wright 46:44
What’s your proudest professional achievement? You
David Jamieson 46:47
know, my graduate engineer did a big presentation at hazards 33 last year, and sitting in the crowd watching him. That was awesome. That was good.
Mark McBride-Wright 46:56
What’s the one skill you think every engineer should have?
David Jamieson 47:00
I think, as I just said, good communication, tea or coffee, coffee.
Mark McBride-Wright 47:06
What’s your go to? Productivity, hack, stop
David Jamieson 47:10
working, take a break and then come back.
Mark McBride-Wright 47:14
If you could have dinner with any engineer or safety expert past or present, who would it be?
David Jamieson 47:18
I mean, terrible guy, but as an engineer, probably Elon Musk, I think, just to talk about engineering and nothing else.
Mark McBride-Wright 47:29
What’s the one thing you do to unwind after a long
David Jamieson 47:33
day exercise? Yep.
Mark McBride-Wright 47:36
What’s the most exciting project you’re working on right now?
David Jamieson 47:39
We’ve got some pretty cool AI enabled stuff in the works just now that we’re really excited about
Mark McBride-Wright 47:47
what’s one book or resource you’d recommend someone interested in process safety?
David Jamieson 47:54
I think everyone who works in a major hazard industry should read the book or watch the documentary fire in the night about the Piper Alpha disaster, yep.
Mark McBride-Wright 48:03
And what’s the one piece of advice you’d give your younger self,
David Jamieson 48:09
whatever problem you’ve got right now is not a problem. Just keep going, probably back to that
Mark McBride-Wright 48:15
hell analogy. Love it. Love it. Thank I’ve really enjoyed our chat. David, how if other people listening to this want to get in touch with you? How do they do that?
David Jamieson 48:27
Yeah, I’m quite active on LinkedIn, so just search me on LinkedIn, and I’ll connect with you, and you can send me a message. And our website, Salas technical.com, there’s contact us. Boxes litter all over the place. I’ll get them all probably LinkedIn would be the best place to get hold of me.
Mark McBride-Wright 48:45
Well, we’ll put links to all that stuff, all those bits in the show notes as well. But thank you very much for your time today.
David Jamieson 48:52
That was fun. Yeah, good stuff. See you soon. Thanks. Thanks,
Mark McBride-Wright 48:56
everyone. Cheers. Bye. You.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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