E020: Building Safer Systems by Asking Better Questions

Mark McBride-Wright 0:00
Hello. Welcome to the next episode of the safe leader podcast. I’m your host, Mark McBride Wright, and I’m delighted to join be joined today by Paolo Oliveira, who is vice president of process safety Consulting at Decra UK. Paulo was born in Lisbon, Portugal in 1978 to an engineer father and a teacher mother, an inspiring combination that shaped his approach to both life and work. He completed his education in the UK and earned and earned a Bachelor’s of Engineering Honors in electronic and electrical engineering and an MSc in process safety and loss prevention. Paulo’s career spans sectors including commercial, retail, steel, chemical manufacturing and consulting across industries like utilities and defense, starting as an assistant engineer, he progressed through roles in Project engineering, maintenance, safety and leadership, now as vice president of process safety Consulting at Decra UK, he leads impactful safety initiatives. A former basketball player with 20 years of experience, Paulo believes that safe environments are essential for progress, a principle that drives his work and life philosophy. Paolo, welcome.

Paulo Oliveira 1:27
Thank you. Thanks for having me. I love that

Mark McBride-Wright 1:30
that final bit in your bio, safe environments are essential for progress, a principle that drives work and life philosophy, your life philosophy. So what? Tell us a bit more about that. But what are your very philosophical person?

Paulo Oliveira 1:48
Yes, is the short answer. I’ve since early days, have always been interested in the conceptual nature of everything we do it. I think it started in my teens, where I had a very inspiring philosophy teacher that challenged us not to learn what was being taught, but to learn why it was being taught. And I think I carried that throughout my my teenage years into my adult life, and now, as I’m getting a little bit older, philosophy becomes a very present part of the the actual thinking process, because if you don’t understand the concept, it’s very hard to understand how it actually can come to reality.

Mark McBride-Wright 2:34
Well, it certainly gears you up for being a really good safety engineer question and the why on and you know why decisions are made and what we’re making these decisions for, rather than just the decision or design itself. Have you found that you know safety engineering then was a sort of natural fit, then, for your for that philosophical side of yourself?

Paulo Oliveira 2:58
It grew into it. So when I started my engineering studies and engineering profession, as you do during your career, as you’re learning, you have that feeling that you just want to do the things that will get you to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. However, as you start seeing things that you maybe think you might have an impact in, maybe I can make this a little bit better, or maybe I can see that person see this in a slightly different way. You start understanding the power of the why behind it, and certainly, since becoming more focused on safety and safety practices. The power of understanding what drives someone to do something, or what drives a certain concept is is fundamental to being able to conduct adequate, adequate influence. Because ultimately, in consultancy, that’s what we do. We influence other people to adopt things that make them safer. So yeah, it grew into who I am professionally, and certainly now it’s a big part of how I do my job.

Mark McBride-Wright 4:14
So let’s, let’s, let’s come back to the point there then, but go, let’s go back and then come back to the present. Let’s go back to the past and just just want to understand a little bit then about the young Paolo in Portugal. You know what brought you to the UK? Did you always want to be an engineer? Well, actually, maybe because you said when your parents, you know, had had that training and did it? You know, sometimes, though, we don’t want to do what our what our parents do, you know, we actively push against it and then end up succumbing to it. If we find actually, it’s a it. Could be a good option for me. Actually, that was that, was that yourself in your younger years, or did you always see it forward

Paulo Oliveira 5:07
a little bit? So if I go way, way back, I was initially my route was to to enter medical school. So I started with as many other people do. As you get into your teens, you have two or three routes that you can see, and the medical route was quite appealing at the time, and it drove some of my thinking. However, as as I went through, went through the latter stages of secondary school, starting to think about university, I started showing some aptitude on a certain type of thinking, logical thinking, that seemed to align well with engineering tasks. And as at the time, as as much as I wanted to say, no, no, I’m going to be completely different. You know, Dad, you you’re the engineer. Mom, you’re the teacher. I’m going to be doing something different. At some point, it started feeling very much like, actually, there’s something here. For me, the interesting bit came straight after that, as I enter the university, and I think it’s really pertinent to today’s conversation. Because it wasn’t so much a conscious drive of, I’ve always wanted to be an engineer. The first few years were difficult. Were very difficult mentally, and it forced me to almost having to come out of a mental paralysis of, why am I doing this? Because the drive to learn more, to want to know more, it’s almost like someone pressed pause, and everything else at the forefront. Luckily, I had a very, very strong support network of friends. And in answer to one of the questions you you mentioned during that period, I started talking to this young lady, young lovely lady from the UK, who is now my wife. So we started talking on the days of pen pals when they first moved on to the online domain. And we were exchanging messages just getting to know what I was curious about life in UK. She was curious about life in Portugal. And we started talking. And that started growing. And as that became a little bit more than just a contact, yeah, a communication site, there was a little bit of a light on that purpose and drive and focus, okay, and everything else seemed to go to the right level of focus in life. So thank very much. Grateful for for Angie’s appearance in my life, yeah, helped me deal with a difficult time, and to the friends that were around me at the time that supported me through that as well. That kind of started a whole momentum where I’d rediscovered that curiosity about what I wanted to do and what that meant, and the potential in front in front of me, and it brought me to the UK to complete my studies whilst working full time, which, again, in itself, was a challenge, but it felt like a constructive challenge, rather than a place where you you don’t really understand the way forward.

Mark McBride-Wright 8:45
That can that can pretty much typify the undergraduate or the first degree years? Can I remember being told when I started at university, you’re probably used to always being top of your class, and then when you come to university, it’s a refinement of a refinement, you know, you’re with all the people who were top of their class as well, you know, to get into here. And so, you know that can, that can start to play on your Well, I mean, for me, it certainly did, you know, like your sense of belonging, like, Were you good enough? Like, even though you don’t your place and got in, you know, you feeling like you can be drowning a little bit in the technical content, because it’s just so different to what you did. The step change from being at school to then studying engineering, the maths, the the chemistry, you know, whatever your branch of engineering might be that you then study those fundamental modules, thermodynamics, you know, it’s, it’s it, you know, it’s like witchcraft, you know. Or it feels like you’re like learning a new language, you know. And it can be quite hard to get your head. Around

Paulo Oliveira 10:00
and your social interaction also drastically changes. You go from somewhere where the social boundaries are very well established, the routines are established, into a place where everything is open, you need to rewrite. You need to reset and rethink how you fit in something that is not been in a way, designed for you. It’s been designed for something much, much bigger. We certainly use we, because the contingent of that year for when I entered university life was very much looking around, going, where’s the safety rails? Where do we go to to know how to walk in the right direction? But like you say, it’s it’s such a overwhelming step for a lot of people getting into into the engineering world that we we see, we see it now, and I’m sure we’ll see it in the future. The need for that more aware, more intentional support to keep them in that positive space of it’s gonna be okay. Just keep going, you

Mark McBride-Wright 11:12
know? I mean, we just, let’s move on to that bit now, you know, I think you’re alluding to something that, just in my view, permeates everything that we need to do within safety. You know, it’s that being tuned into the psychological safety of the future engineers in the flow of them coming into then this new working this new learning environment, and then as they come out into a new working environment, into into industry, you know? And I think it’s been getting better, putting in support and adjustments and needs and and what have you, but I think there’s still a lot more we could do, and this is where really safety intersects with diversity, equity and inclusion. It’s about knowing what you need in order to thrive and but then also understanding that about your peers around you, and then figuring out how can you then align yourself and be curious about about their lived experience so it then becomes your learned experience. And I think as engineers, we don’t often bring up anything that’s going on in our minds. You know, we’re not, we’re not a profession that’s really trained to show emotion or to know. We’re very logical, we’re very fact based, we’re very right or wrong. And the gray area is a little bit ambiguous, and maybe that’s where, like within safety, we’ve got something to teach, like the rest of engineering professions, because we are sometimes in the gray area in the justification of why things are being done. You know, how do you see then, in modern in the work that you’re doing? So you studied your engineering, and then you moved into into safety. How do you see the differentiation within your work between like traditional technical safety, process safety, but then the movement into sort of psychological safety and more team dynamics and human factors and ergonomics. But I guess human factors and ergonomics is more the physicality of how you’re learning. But actually it’s, I mean, it’s been a while since I’ve been an actively practicing Safety Engineer on technical projects. It we still didn’t really talk much about the culture of how we talk about in inclusion and diversity and belonging. And I just, I wonder if there’s a bridge we can still make between the two,

Paulo Oliveira 13:45
absolutely and just kind of a segue from what you said. So as I transitioned into safety, I came from that very logical structure technical world where answers are there if you just know the right formula in combination, and you get to it, and you’re like, yeah, there you go. We’ve got the next thing. And as you actually start understanding the behind the scenes, influence of people, people that do the decision making, people that are affected by the systems you creating, people that are so far down the actual supply chain of events that you only see the impact months, years later on in the people around you you know, family, friends, and there is a clear need for understanding how the logical side of what we do in the safety engineering side connects with the emotional coefficient of everything we do. It’s it’s actually an ongoing discussion we’re having at the moment. So one really good example is, anyone that’s read the technical standard will will know the experience of having to go through. So those lines of very dry information and coming at the end thinking, I actually don’t know what this means, whilst, when you talk to someone that has gone through that process, and they can clearly communicate, well, the expectations are standard. This, this, this, this, based on their experience. The bridge between a little bit of technical information that’s core to what you need to do versus sharing your experience of applying it, learning and seeing the successes, completely connects the two sides, and that can’t happen in places where the logic is kind of the primacy held over everything else, where people see, you know, the mathematics, the numbers, give you every answer. Because in a place with a culture that focuses only on bottom line, results on the technical answer, they’re missing the point that you can’t get to that without the experience, the sharing, the actual ability to relate and not relate to certain things. To be curious why that’s different. I had a really interesting experience during my consulting phase my career, where I had to operate a number of workshops with a company that’s not in in the UK. So culturally, they’re very different, but within that place, there was multiple other cultures working together, and you could see at first how difficult it was, a friction and certain things that didn’t seem to connect, some difficulty in understanding where people were coming from or why they were putting certain things forward. But one when you’re curious enough to understand and you can start switching on those kind of points of leverage. There was moments in those discussions where you can see the level has been tenfold higher because you’re listening to people that look at things differently, yes, and without that, engineering just becomes an application of formulas and repeat and rinse and repeat and rinse and repeat. So there is a clear need for that cultural aspect to consider as a fundamental part of being successful in keeping people safe in every aspect the difference, the way we integrate that difference, and the way we give that difference the power it can have to drive us towards the right, the right direction. And I’ve actually seen that happen. I’ve seen that happen in that occasion. I’ve seen that happen with people that have come into a team thinking they don’t have much to offer, but just given the right pathway, they flourish, and they become one of the experts that people rely on. And it is fundamental.

Mark McBride-Wright 18:10
And this is exactly square in the area where you know representation, the ability to speak up if you feel you need to speak up or want to speak up and reciprocally being aware when you’re taking up too much space and you need to like let others or invite others in to share their perspective. This is all about inclusion and equity and having diversity around the design table and in the design team from the different projects, the different communities, the different types of engineers. And I just, I’m curious if this is where our work, this is where our work needs to sit in the coming years, with the kind of pendulum swing back on diverse, equity and inclusion measures with the new administration in the United States. You know, engineering businesses, in my view, shouldn’t see that as now we license to stop doing what we’re doing, because actually, we should just continue to do what we have been trying to do, or I hope we’re trying to do, which is diversify the profession with bringing new people in, because we have a shortage on talent. But then once we’ve got people in, actually having the safety within teams that we can do the best type of engineering, the best we can engineer the best designs, and everyone can share their perspectives and not be shut down for fear of these power dynamics, or the fear of asking the wrong question or saying the wrong thing or appearing stupid, or being the only person of. Particular background or gender or sex or sexual orientation or whatever, in a group, you know, and then feeling like the only one, and therefore like not having agency, not having equity and voice. Yeah, it’s fascinating. I think there’s an element of each of us as well knowing where we’re maybe having an impact on others, and then where we need to do that self reflection to to change our behaviors. You know, I

Paulo Oliveira 20:29
totally agree, and I had the discussion pre kind of events of this weekend, and I think it will follow that that tied into that. I think we had a really fruitful period of initiatives for diversity, equity and integration. But an initiative, by its nature, is a starting point. It’s that initial impetus to change perspectives. I actually think that the signals we’re seeing from certain governments don’t necessarily mean now there’s a big barrier. I think it means, if this is the right thing to do, we take the word initiative out of the way and we do what’s right. We kind of carry the flag, but at the same time, see that as the new normal. This is how we think, this is what’s bringing that value. And I picked up on an article a few weeks back where someone was talking about what’s true value in an organization, and it kept coming back to the same thing, is recognizing the things that make that organization stand out, those things that make that organization contribute the way it does. And if we segment ourselves to a certain type of people with a certain set of characteristics in a certain context, what we’re creating is an echo chamber, yeah, and people will think same. They’ll do the same thing time and time again. And then, as Albert Einstein said, you can’t solve problems with the same thinking, yes, that created them. So where we are now, the challenges we have are very different to the what they were in 1950s 1980s we have a climate climate change challenge that’s tremendous. We have social challenges that will be born from that, and that will potentially affect the way we look at engineering as a whole. So to to me, people in leadership positions across sectors, across disciplines. They should see this as a okay, we’ve done the initiative this. We all know this is the right thing to do. Let’s now just do it. Let’s now embed that thinking instead of making it a signal, yeah, I’m going to commit to this. I’ve already committed to that. Let’s do it. Let’s do it. Yeah, but

Mark McBride-Wright 23:07
implement and it’s about influence and process, influencing procedure, looking at how we already do things through this lens of inclusion and thinking, Are we keeping people safe. I just think it all comes back to safety. Honestly, it really, it really, really does, you know, in building out the safe leader training course that’s linked to, you know, my book The Safe leader, it just there’s so many like engineering idioms, engineering graphics that we’ve repurposed and retooled to talk about culture. And it’s just, it’s, it’s, it’s there, you know, it’s just, it’s just there. It’s already, we already have the the mindset. I just, I just hope that there are enough engineers in leadership roles. And leadership doesn’t mean like, you know, you manage people leadership. You could be a new graduate and you have leadership because you create followship around you. I hope there’s enough people enter in the profession, or at all levels, and that are in their profession that really see this as the way forward and the way, the way to do it, because in engineering is one of the most, I think, in a survey in the UK, I think after dentistry or something, it was the most trusted profession. Or maybe that was a P, P that was, I think that was a different I’m mixing up surveys. There was a survey that was done, it was like, of the most professions where you’re trusted the most engineering came right up there, you know, in the top three as a profession where people people are trusted. So if society trusts us, then we should be role modeling these behaviors and how we do our work and how we show

Paulo Oliveira 24:57
up. Absolutely, absolutely. One, one of the points I often make, and I’ve experienced that in different environments, from very, very heavy industry to technology leading companies. When you talk to engineering teams, there’s a sense of meritocracy. So you earn your badges by doing the job right, by working in the constraints of what you have in creating that value. And when you kind of peel the layers of that, you see that there is a clear view that if you’re talented, or if you develop the talent, I’m a firm believer that talent alone gets you nowhere. Hard work to maintain that level of competency is really important, but when you peel the layers, you can see the need to maintain that open and safe space for people to thrive and develop. And when I had a discussion earlier in the year about the safety profession, the safety professional, what’s in the future, what were my views? And I I pitched the idea that a safety professional in the past was was more of an auditor. Came in. They checked what you were doing, provided recommendations, identified non conformances, and continued that cycle, the continuous improvement cycle, that is part of safety systems. I said, I think things are changing, and I think now what we need is safety entrepreneurs. Whether you’re staffing a company or you’re self employed, we need people capable of creating, following, creating influence well past the boundaries of what they do. For example, a person that within your organization can create a brand, a self brand, of this person understands safety. This person helps us be safer, and it actually makes our lives a little bit easier and better that that person is creating a tide of change. Regardless of what policies and procedures are in place, people will gravitate to the right things. So to me, that that’s where the future lies for us is the safety entrepreneur, the idea that we don’t just check what other people are doing and tell them to do it right. We actually understand the people. We understand the difficulties, the challenges, the opportunities. We put that blanket of psychological safety around them to get the best out, and then we put ourselves as the mechanism for which they can rely on to create that change without ever needing to go and saying, You’re doing this wrong. Yeah, it’s just creates that tide I’ve seen. I’ve seen a couple of really good examples with young people that come from a much more media savvy kind of experience, yeah, where they’ve stitched two things together that a few years back, people wouldn’t pick it up. So they they saw someone doing an unsafe practice, and they thought, You know what, I’m not going to intervene. Like we used to kind of stop what you’re doing, tell me what you’re doing. This is how you should do it, and you should think about this as well. What they did was they created an interaction with the permission of the person doing it, where they were talking about what they were doing, and then they told him, Look, I’d like to post this. The person saw what they what they were doing, and said, Oh, I didn’t realize I was doing that. The conversation just spiraled. Oh, really interesting. Just spiraled completely. And I thought that is more powerful than any risk assessment written by the most competent risk assessor in the world, that person, that moment where they went, Oh, I didn’t realize I was putting my foot there, or I was actually my hand. And that was through that almost innocuous intervention of, can I share what you’re doing? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it comes back to that, let me share your experience. Share it with me. I’ll share what I know with you, yeah, and let’s see what we can learn from it.

Mark McBride-Wright 29:26
I love that idea of the safety entrepreneur and safety being a kind of glue, a binding force that brings everyone together. One One thing I noticed when I started working at UCL, doing some teaching was actually a bias that I had as a chemical engineer in terms of my understanding of safety, in that I assumed that everyone saw safety through the same way as me, as being a safety engineer. But actually safety means. Something different to different branches of engineering, especially when you’re a student, and you haven’t necessarily worked with engineers from other subjects, from other disciplines. Now, when I worked in industry, I worked in the concept design phase. So projects were high throughput, you know, they were, they were, you know, quite short, you know, six weeks maximum for a project, maybe a bit longer. And you worked with all the disciplines, you know, piping, instrumentation, environment, safety, process, civil, structural, etc, you know, reliability. So you got to sort of understand this interdisciplinary need when working on a design project and how safety was understood by the other disciplines, or they also got good contact time with a safety engineer or the safety team. But when you’re when you’re teaching safety to students, here I was as a chemical engineer teaching safety to at UCL. It’s an integrated engineering program as well in the earlier years. So, you know, the chemical engineering students kind of vaguely knew what I was referring to. But safety meant something completely different to the to the systems engineers and to the to the electronics engineers and electrical engineers and and what have you. So I just I wonder. It made me really pause and think, Oh, here’s me thinking that safety can be this common binding force between engineers, but actually, maybe the foundation isn’t as harmonized as as what I thought it was,

Paulo Oliveira 31:43
that that is so visible nowadays. We’ve had a few examples of that in recent years. I remember being at one of the hazards conference, and Dame Judith Hackett was presenting on Grenfell, yeah, and she made a point that I thought was really interesting. She said, people in the chemical industry and oil and gas understands system safety, safety of systems really well. They understand the multi variable aspect of safety, but when you look at construction, the understanding is much narrower. It’s about the activity conducting at that point and the thing that it actually holding. And she asked the question, why is it so hard to connect the knowledge we have in one sector to another to prevent something like this happening? And it goes straight to the point you’re making. We don’t start with the same level of perception of risk when we grow up, we all have different experiences to shape the things that we’re kind of I’m not doing that versus the things. I’ll give it a go and just there. We’re all completely different. We all have a fingerprint of our risk understanding that is unique to you and to your experience through life. When you get in front of people that are being shaped in terms of the thinking that they have to have, so systems engineers, chemical engineers, mechanical engineers, they will use that fingerprint to color code what they’re learning and for example, in systems engineering, safety has to do with a level of validation constraints on what’s actually being developed. Whilst in chemical engineering, it’s an output of the stuff that we’re actually trying to create, and the mechanical guys will have a different kind of perception,

Mark McBride-Wright 33:42
aspect, extra vessels, yeah, exactly, vision, yeah, exactly. And when,

Paulo Oliveira 33:47
when I’ve actually experienced in one of the companies I worked in as a member of staff, where we had the conversation once, and that we had the asset integrity team, I was part of the process safety team, and we had an advisor, consultant that came in to have a look at Broad asset management in the company. And we sat down and talked about risk matrices, what’s the risk acceptance criteria? And from a process safety point of view, there was one from an asset integrity that was another from a business continuity. That was another. And the consultant just sat there smiling. And I remember thinking at the time, I’m not really getting the value of this pedestrian. You should tell us which one’s Wright. And now, as a consultant, I know exactly where that smile comes from. It’s him not seeing the penny drop moment of this is why it’s hard. All of you are talking different perceptions of risk and trying to manage it in one way. And I think it’s that that is a challenge, especially now with newer technology, with threats like cyber security threats. With artificial intelligence coming in and blurring every single boundary we have to be able to articulate risk in a way that’s relatable and manageable is going to be one of the key aspects of these safety entrepreneurs, because if we continue just reverting back to that’s how it was that the conversations moved on. The conversations moved on from that dimension.

Mark McBride-Wright 35:29
I wonder. There’s a few things going through my mind. One of the things I’m in the middle of exploring, which we could talk about later as well, offline, is the need to try and create a the working title is like process, safety educator, network. You know, you know, I went to Imperial. I’m a visiting professor at UCL. I’ve recently relocated to Brooklyn. I’ve got the Tandon School of Engineering on my doorstep, like I’ve met with the process safety lead there. You know, all these different places do teach safety to chemical engineers in a different way. And then we’ve also got the conversation we’ve just had about different types of engineering, learning about safety, and then the impact that these engineers are going to have when they move into industry. So I’ve just been toying with the idea of, could I create a network of connected professionals that are academics, they work in teaching safety, and then we have, I have a sort of conduit through which I can flow these ideas that are in the safe leader framework of because I’ve tested it a bit at UCL, in my in my visiting professorship. You know, there’s, there’s sort of two ways to influence engineers on diversity, equity and inclusion. It’s the the process of doing your engineering. So the experience in a team, how included you feel, the ability to say what you really think, and then it’s the consideration of the engineering that you’re doing. So the end communities, that the thing that you’re designing, the process that you’re creating, the product that you’re making, you know, are you thinking about the end stakeholder, the end communities that are going to be affected by it, or they’re going to have to use it as early on in the design process as possible, not too late in the design process, when all your degrees of freedom are fixed, you’ve got less flexibility to move, and all of a sudden you realize that the thing you’ve designed doesn’t actually work for the community or the user, you know. So it really gets the students thinking about inclusion. And because I used to work in concept design, one of the things that was really big there was inherent safety, inherent safety design assessments, you know, because as you know, what you don’t have, can’t kill you type thing, you know, Trevor Klett style quotes. So I’ve been wondering is that, is there a scope for, like, an inherently inclusive design assessment? You know, where, when we’re doing our designs, we’re looking at through the lens of inclusion, accessibility, user experience. So I developed some tools that we used with the students in their second year, which worked quite well. It basically took the stakeholder map and exercise that they had to do, but made it a bit deeper, a bit chunkier, a bit a bit meatier, and had, you know, it was a bit like doing on a quality impact assessment that they often do in the built environment, but they often get done too late. So there’s design tools that are already used in industry that I see a benefit of bringing into the flow of education. But I think I don’t know it’s really it’s a work in progress, but I love your idea of this safety entrepreneur and safety professionals being a kind of glue that I think there’s work to do in helping before we go out and try and help others, we almost like need to help the safety entrepreneurs understand one another’s perception of safety, because obviously that’s what’s not been done in the example you gave when there was different perceptions of risk. So, yeah, it’s a

Paulo Oliveira 39:26
it’s a at the same time, such a threat and such an opportunity. We all know that the safety community is a very driven, very focused, very open community. They the factors, the things that drive them are people that they want people to be safe. They want people to have their jobs for a long, long time and take the value and benefit from having those jobs without having to suffer severe consequences to their health. It’s the. A how you measure the impact of what you’re doing. In the past, it was about kind of injury rates, etc. But right now, we’ve been exposed to something that’s a little bit more immediate, which is this influencing idea the followers, the whole idea that people listen to a message you have to give. Give. Now, if we can imagine, quoting John Lennon, a world where there’s a understanding that we operate within a business that’s that’s generate money, that within it, there’s functions that sustain that business continuity, and right at the center, there’s an element of care for people that is a structured way, in a structured way, delivering that care that looks at, as you said, from the inward. How are we actually integrating people and providing that level of empowerment and maintaining a healthy level of diversity in our thinking, in our viewpoints. But also, how are we actually influencing the other businesses that look at us and say, those guys are doing something right? What is it? And how visible it is that this is a big part of it. I think the safety, safety entrepreneur is, is that is the visibility of the intangible, the visibility of how we get the best of our people. And it’s a big, big challenge, a big, big threat. Because once you start realizing the level of impact you can have by doing that, you can also start realizing the negative impact if you can, you can have, if you are attacking things in a certain way that maybe is not as considerate broadly as it can and should be.

Mark McBride-Wright 41:52
Yeah, very true. But then the risk of not doing the work means that you have, you know, you’re not increasing the probability of surfacing up your unknown unknowns, you know, which is one of the core bits of safety practice, isn’t it? I always it’s been a while since I’ve been done doing any active practice of safety management tools, you know, doing a quantitative risk assessment or a qualitative risk assessment, or generating bow tie diagrams to include in a coma report or an offshore safety case, or, you know, to get licenses to operate, or whatever. I do wonder if, within, as we shift, or as we diversify, how we do what we do, how should these tools evolve? You know, is there, is there additional chapters we could be adding into some of these tools to try and surface up some of these findings, you know, you make the point about logic being the primacy and numbers being the dominant thing that engineers want. Well, that, I mean, obviously that’s quantitative risk assessment, you know, because it’s quantitative, but then do we then have more opportunity in the qualitative risk assessment types of things by doing more listening exercises with the workforce or and then tying that up to all the package stuff that nowadays we think of as Dei, about workforce, engagement, productivity, you know, etc, etc, etc. And then how’s it all within that? And then we’ve got dei almost sitting within an element of it, sitting within our approach to safety management and well being of our workforce. But the key though is, what indicators do we pull out? Because people still want leading and lagging indicators, and have yet to kind of really articulate what we ought to add on to an HSE matrix, you know, of what’s being tracked. Are there some additional lines that we could add on from a data perspective, that give a leadership team a good handle on how the business, the team, the organization, the asset, are performing on this less intangible, more intangible, sort of stuff. Have you got any experience on that? I Well,

Paulo Oliveira 44:27
it’s, it’s that perennial question, isn’t i? We? How do we quantify the quantifiable and when, when we look at safety incidents across decades, even, even centuries, if we could go back that that far, far back, there’s very little that’s to do with failure rates. Very little have to do with the stuff we spend a lot of time quantifying. So the whole integrity of that pipe failed because we thought it was 10 to the minus. Seven, and it actually was six to the 10 to minus three. Very rarely. It’s to do with that most of the times systematic. It’s something we’ve done at some point that drove us in a certain pathway. Now, those are easily measured because you have your you can best practices. You have your your approved pathways for design and testing and validation, verifications that literally, like the one I work in, made their their lives, as confirming that what you’re saying is going to happen will happen when we come to the actual human component of that, it becomes, comes increasingly tricky to say, Oh, actually, we had a diverse discussion here that was a much higher quality of kind of exposure to thinking that led us to a much narrower pathway in terms of introducing a systemic error. So indicators are great, because unfortunately or fortunately, industry, 100% bought into something that’s apparently often misquoted from Charles Deming, which is what’s measured gets managed. What he was intending to do, what to say is be careful, because if you measure something, you will manage it to the ends degree, and maybe forget about the other stuff that make it happen, but we do need something to tell us actually it is working. So I, in the past, thought of the definition of diversity, equity, in integrate, integrity, integration sometimes gets coated in other discussions, and to take them out, it’s it has to be done in a way that clearly understands what diversity means in that context. Yes, equity in that context, what’s integrating in that context. And you picked up on a few examples. Diversity is it could be as simple as we have the right disciplines around the table talking about this thing that affects that group and peers and the stakeholders they are involved with, or it could be we have these people that bring completely different type of thinking, because culturally they’re exposed to different pressures. Or it could be that these people, they all do the same job, but they actually experience different circumstances. Those are all things we should be thinking and starting to look carefully, both as safety managers, as the entrepreneur or safety practitioners to start picking up on, wait a minute, I’m in an assessment for a fairly complex system, but it’s only me, the systems engineer and the control systems guy. Where’s the chemical engineer? Where’s the mechanical engineer? Where’s the operations representative that operates on night shift during startup. The other side to this dei thinking is the equity aspect is really not challenging, but it’s very it’s a hard effort. And what I mean with this is we work in organizations are structured levels of competence, level seniority, etc, and to flatten the argument, to get a junior ish person that has some fantastic ideas and some really good energy and made a completely different perspective, to feel comfortable in front of a 20 year tenured engineer in that same field to say, I don’t agree with that. That’s all about psychological safety. That’s all about being clear that once we’re in that environment, you’re bringing something that a 20 year, 10 year person can’t bring, which is a fresh pair of eyes. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And then that little bit of in a bit forcing the coin to say, I want this junior person in these meetings. I want this junior person experiencing commissioning. It integrates that thinking. It challenges that echo chamber that tends to happen once we get a bit a bit complacent with our own competency. So I think the key indicator one is, in your organization, how often do you have processes that bring cross departmental collaboration? I think that’s a strong, strong indicator of. Your thinking in that way, and your lagging indicator is, how many of the things that have gone right slash wrong, Can you trace back to a team that was a little bit of an echo chamber? Yeah, I don’t see that happening in root cause analysis. They tend to go to the technical answer, yeah. They tend to go to some organizations tend to stop way too short, and there’s a huge human error. So let’s point there. But what I don’t often see is they’re going wait a minute, this assessment, this decision making, didn’t work. Why didn’t it? And was it actually through a lens that allowed a wide point of view. Did we calibrate this against fresh pair of eyes, or was it the same people designed the same thing? So maybe there’s something in those two fields, how you’re structured and often you engage them, and when you do things right and when you don’t do things right. How often do we ask that question? Did we have diverse viewpoints? Did we actually integrate those viewpoints? Did we give people the opportunity creating that equity kind of baseline to contribute to this decision to allow us to move towards safety?

Mark McBride-Wright 51:15
Were we inclusive and how we designed the mode of engagement such that those that may not feel comfortable offering their view in a certain environment could through an additional means. Were the people running such sessions like well versed in inclusive leadership and therefore getting the best out of the teams around them. One thing that also dawned on me as you were talking there was we also focus on quite rightly, you know, when things go wrong, and identifying root causes and this and that in the HR world, the equivalent of that, from a culture perspective, are exit interviews. Now, obviously that’s quite late in the process, when someone’s decided to leave and they’re walking out the door. Some organizations don’t even conduct exit interviews, so they miss an entire data source. Those that do do it, how effective they do it, then dictates the value that they get out of the data that’s yielded. One organization that was in a diversity call with recently brought up this idea that they do staying interviews so people who’ve chosen to stay in the organization, so annually, when they engage with them, and then they find out such great information about what makes the employees sticky, and keep them there, and they can identify any undertones of people who are just staying there because they have to, versus being really passionate and engaged and loving the work. So then you can take earlier action to try and better align, you know, career ambitions, or whatever it is that maybe people making people be just a bit passive, you know? So I wonder if there’s something in that with when we do assessments and analysis, like where things have gone, right, where things have gone, well, sort of celebrating that and sharing, sharing those views,

Paulo Oliveira 53:17
I’m still to see a root cause analysis for success. We all, we all kind of do it because we all want to jump on the winning bandwagon. But no one has actually gone I’m going to spend significant proportion of my time breaking down what was the key root cause for this success. And I think if we did that, we would start painting a very clear picture that there is a really clear role of dei in successful projects and successful engineering. But like you say, we tend to have that continuous improvement mentality that focuses on fixing the wrong rather than embedding the right. You mentioned what makes employees stay talent retention is a challenge in engineering. It’s hard to get engineers, it’s hard to keep them, it’s hard to do successful projects, impactful projects, and it’s really hard to replicate them time and time again, so the principles are exactly the same, yeah.

Mark McBride-Wright 54:27
Oh, I love that. Oh, definitely lots of follow up conversation to have Wright. Okay, some quick fire questions. So what’s your favorite engineering standard or guideline to work with?

Paulo Oliveira 54:46
Oh Christ. So the best constructed standard I’ve worked with, though it’s very comprehensive, i. Is six on 508 it took 20 years to get off the ground, and you can see why. But I do have to make a mention on the AMS, one group work on the ISO 5000 55,000, standards for asset management. It was a topic that everyone talked about, and everyone said it’s impossible to put into a guidance document that people can use and do a fantastic job at creating that

Mark McBride-Wright 55:30
fantastic Are you an early bird or a night owl?

Paulo Oliveira 55:35
Oh, I try to be an early bird and end up being a night owl, so I consciously try to wake up early and have a number of routines and rituals to start my day. Not necessarily kind of working, but things like it can range. It could be exercise. I could go for a run, or I could do some stretching. I could do some breathing. I’d like to have time with Angie. First thing in the morning, breakfast kind of sets the day going. The problem is then to not become a night owl at the same time, which sometimes happens, but more naturally inclined to be a night owl, working hard to be an early bird. Got

Mark McBride-Wright 56:21
you what’s the best prep, best professional advice you’ve ever received?

Paulo Oliveira 56:28
Stay curious. I had a really, really interesting short conversation with senior manager for a top 500 organization when they were doing a very, very well known strategic project associated with net zero in decarbonization. And the discussion was very positive, very, very energetic, because it you know, that whole energy of we’re changing the changing the world, making things better. And as a little bit of a sidebar, we were talking about resources, talking about things, who should be doing what? And he, halfway through the conversation, say, stay curious, because that curiosity is us making you ask the right questions, and what you’re learning is going to serve you for the rest of your life. So that would be my my advice to everyone, stay curious, don’t, don’t, don’t believe the stuff you believe. You know,

Mark McBride-Wright 57:33
what’s a safety related tool or method you couldn’t live without? Oh,

Paulo Oliveira 57:40
asking questions. I think it comes by as simple as that, not necessarily an assessment, but just the stopping from stopping yourself from having the answer, asking that question. First of, what is it that I need to know? What is that I need to do without that? It becomes that exercise of, are you complying with what we think is right? So that conversation that thinking, asking questions is the most powerful thing, because we could have Okay,

Mark McBride-Wright 58:12
favorite engineering or safety conference you’ve attended?

Paulo Oliveira 58:19
Oh, that’s a good one. I have a soft spot for hazards because of the diversity of topics, and they always do a fantastic job organizing it. The European process safety center conference is pretty powerful as well, and I was lucky enough to be invited to speak at a it was a kind of smaller group for the Middle Eastern Chapter of the Association, Association of safety engineers, American safety engineers associations, let’s say, and they, again, they’re very positive, very constructive. So there’s a lot, but I have a soft spot for hazards.

Mark McBride-Wright 59:04
What has who has been the most influential mentor in your career?

Paulo Oliveira 59:11
There’s a few. I think there’s from from a professional point of view. I I had? I’ve been very, very lucky to work with people that they saw my passion for the topic as a gift rather than a nuisance, people like my previous boss, when they’re still in manufacturing. His name is Mike wood. He’s a safety professional. He’s he still does exactly that, very pragmatic, feet on the ground. My current boss is a, is an old fashioned passion safety, safety engineer is he genuinely believes. Is, what are we doing, and the impact we’re having on people, and when we have our commercial conversations, it always goes back to that which is great to hear, but real, real influence is, to be honest, is the people I’ve been working through all these years, and they’ve, they’ve all inspired me in one way or another,

Mark McBride-Wright 1:00:19
brilliant, if you were not an engineer, what would you be doing? Oh,

Paulo Oliveira 1:00:27
20 years ago, I said I’ll be playing basketball in the NBA, although I’m only six foot. So that might have been a challenge. If I wasn’t an engineer. I think the medical profession has always appealed to me. I think it’s stuff to do with people and looking after people, I’m going to be honest. So I was an engineer, either that side, the medical side, sports, maybe again, people, performance, all those things kind of come together. But certainly people centric and

Mark McBride-Wright 1:01:02
people centric. And finally, then what’s a fun fact most people don’t know about here?

Paulo Oliveira 1:01:12
Well, there’s a few weird ones. The one I found out, I think it was about three years ago, post COVID, we did one of those DNA tracking things.

Mark McBride-Wright 1:01:23
Oh, yeah. And

Paulo Oliveira 1:01:26
I used to talk, when I talked to Angie, I used to say, look, let’s do it. Let’s find out what our roots are. And I found out that my heritage is very strongly linked to Celtic population. So I have strongly, because the Portugal is Celtiberian originally, but they’re strong, very defined, strong links to Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and then a element of Nordic, 1.5% finish. That one I haven’t got my head around yet,

Mark McBride-Wright 1:02:13
somewhere, somewhere in the past, somewhere it’s in there. I’ve done that as well. That 23andme and, yeah, yeah, I was 82% British, but yeah, large percentage, 10 or 12% from Eastern Europe, Poland and yeah. Now my great grandfather was Polish, so that’s okay, which is funny, because my mom, my mom and my uncle never, ever knew that my well, they found out later on in life that my gran was the the product of a fling, shall we say, that my great grandmother had with, with with a Polish soldier. So they found out through my, her, my, my grand birth certificate, this polish surname on it, that they were like, What is this? And so I sort of knew this, obviously, stories that we’ve been told grown up and but then when I did 23andme and then seeing that result come through, I’m like, Oh my God, that’s that side of the family coming out. Otherwise, if I didn’t have that context, that would have been like, what is this? Absolutely

Paulo Oliveira 1:03:29
it surprised me as well that the distribution I knew about the obviously, my there was African and Celtiberian, but I didn’t expect the kilt Ibn to be so strong, so strong, and I certainly didn’t expect one 1.5% finish.

Mark McBride-Wright 1:03:48
Brilliant. Thank you very much. I’ve really enjoyed the conversation today. If, if people want to get in touch with you on stuff that we’ve covered, or just reach out find out more. How, how can they do that,

Paulo Oliveira 1:04:00
they can find me on LinkedIn. I’m pretty, pretty open to talking to anyone, so drop me a message and we’ll

Mark McBride-Wright 1:04:08
put a link to your profile in the in the show notes. Then Wonderful. Thank you, Paolo, thank

Paulo Oliveira 1:04:15
you, Mark. Thanks for having me.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai