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Episode 191: Pipeline SMS Cultural Survey with Steve Allen

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This week’s Pipeliners Podcast episode features Steve Allen of Energy Worldnet (EWN) discussing Pipeline Safety Management Systems (Pipeline SMS) from the perspective of how to utilize cultural surveys to support pipeline safety on the path to zero incidents.

In this episode, you will learn about the latest progress using cultural assessments to advance pipeline safety, how to involve contractors in a positive safety culture, the need for cultural surveys to be optimized for pipeline safety information-gathering, how lessons learned from the airline industry can move the needle in pipeline safety improvements, the recommended practices that could be revised in the coming years, and more topics.

Pipeline SMS Cultural Survey: Show Notes, Links, and Insider Terms

Pipeline SMS Cultural Survey: Full Episode Transcript

Russel Treat:  Welcome to the Pipeliners Podcast, episode 191, sponsored by ROSEN, the global leader in cutting-edge solutions across all areas of the integrity process chain, providing operators the data they need to make the best Integrity Management decisions. Find out more about ROSEN at ROSEN-Group.com.

[background music]

Announcer:  The Pipeliners Podcast, where professionals, Bubba geeks, and industry insiders share their knowledge and experience about technology, projects, and pipeline operations. And now, your host, Russel Treat.

Russel:  Thanks for listening to the Pipeliners Podcast. I appreciate you taking the time, and to show the appreciation, we give away a cool, customized YETI tumbler to one listener every episode. This week, our winner is Edmund Baruque with Audubon Engineering. Congratulations, Edmund. Your YETI is on its way. To learn how you can win this signature prize, stick around until the end of the episode.

This week, Steve Allen, the Pipeline SMS advocate at Energy Worldnet, returns to talk about the state of SMS cultural surveys. Steve, welcome back to the Pipeliners Podcast.

Steve Allen:  Thanks, Russel. It’s great to be back.

Russel:  You’re becoming one of our perennial guests.

Steve:  [laughs] Yeah, I’m looking for the jacket like that they do on Saturday Night Live, you know? If you guest host so many times, you get a jacket.

Russel:  That’s actually not a bad idea. I need to come up with something on that.

Steve:  Maybe a special YETI cup just for us, how’s that?

Russel:  That’s a good idea, too. I’d have to think about what that would look like. That’s a good idea. I need to come up with something for the folks that have been on 5 times or more, and 10 times or more, or something like that. It’s a pretty exclusive list, I’ll tell you that.

Steve:  I appreciate you having me.

Russel:  Look, what have you been up to?

Steve:  Professionally, working a lot with contractors, trying to get their gap analysis programs and safety culture assessment programs in place. More recently here, as I have had my vaccinations, and the pandemic is starting to show up in our rear view mirror ever so slightly, I’m starting to fill my dance card up.

I think I’ve got a dozen engagements lined up between now, and, oh, I guess now and October, which requires a fair amount of flying time and travel. I’m actually looking forward to possibly even maintaining my elite status with American Airlines for this next year.

Russel:  Yeah, I’m with you. I’m starting to travel again myself. I’ve got a number of trips coming up in the next couple of months, and actually going out through October as well, so getting back to the same rigor. It was funny. I made my first trip in a year and a half, oh, I don’t know, two weeks ago. I flew 75,000 miles in 2019, but I had forgotten how to pack a bag. It’s like, I need to go slow, and make sure I’m getting everything in here that needs to go in here.

Steve:  That’s funny. Actually, I’m on a flight down to Houston next week for a roundtable with INGAA talking about physical and cyber security, so that’s going to be an interesting one day down there. You’re down in Houston. You ought to show up.

Russel:  Well, give me the details. I might just figure out how to do that.

Steve:  Okay, well, soon as we get off here, I’ll send them to you.

Russel:  That’d be awesome.

Steve:  Anyway, to answer the other question, on a more personal basis, my wife and I became grandparents for the first and only time in October of 2019. Then the pandemic got on top of us, and we just weren’t able to spend any time with the family and really get to enjoy this grandchild.

Over the course of the last probably six months, I would say, we are seeing this little boy all the time. Man, it’s like a game-changer. It’s wonderful, just absolutely wonderful.

Russel:  It’s one of the best parts of life is being a grandparent. It just really is.

Steve:  Anyhow.

Russel:  Look, I asked you to come on. I wanted to talk about cultural assessment. I know you spend your days talking SMS and working with people doing SMS stuff. I know that cultural assessment is becoming a buzzword. Maybe a buzzword’s the wrong way to say that, but certainly, a topic of interest in our business. I’m wondering, what do you see going on right now around cultural assessment?

Steve:  Let me preface it by saying that, or pointing out that, 1173 calls for an operator to promote a positive safety culture and then perform assessments over time to see, “Are you improving?” The whole notion of continuous improvement. I had mentioned to you in a previous discussion about this white paper that was completed by Dynamic Risk Assessment for Massachusetts.

Russel:  Yeah, the Merrimack Valley incident.

Steve:  Right. There was an appendix to that. It was a safety culture white paper. Dr. Mark Fleming, Chris Hart, and Curtis Parker were the authors of that. I think they did a really, really, really good job, and I would encourage any of your listeners to go check that white paper out.

It points out something that I think is really important. That being that a safety culture assessment is not simply doing a safety culture perception survey. I told you just before we started this recording that I just got off of a PSMS discussion group call with several pretty big people in the industry, including Jeff Wiese, previous Associate Administrator with PHMSA, and some other folks. Anyway, we were talking about this very subject, where a safety culture perception survey is just really just one piece.

In this white paper that I just mentioned, they go on to talk about you really need to do multiple things. You need to talk to the leadership, talk to individuals, review policies and procedures, and documentation. Try to figure out what the company is actually saying about safety culture. What are their expectations of their employees regarding safety culture? Then, yeah, you do want to do a safety culture perception survey, which basically is just that. It’s a perception survey.

The first step is what is the company saying? The second step is how are the employees perceiving all of this? The third step is you go out and you perform some field work, some actual observations to see what’s going on out on the job site, so to speak.

I’ve heard people say, “You can roll up on a job site and sit there and watch for a half an hour, and you can determine whether or not this organization has a well-functioning safety culture, or appreciation for safety culture, just by observing.”

Anyway, the idea of the assessment is you do those three steps. Then you try to see whether or not you have any sort of alignment between what the company is saying, what the employees perceive, and what’s actually going on in the field.

If you have a lot of gaps, then you’ve got a lot of opportunities to really improve your safety culture. If there’s a lot of alignment, then you’re probably onto something.

Russel:  I think, Steve, you make a really interesting point, and I had not thought about this. I think, if you roll up on a crew in the field, and you get there, like you’re the first one there, and you’re there when they show up, and when they’re having their tailgate talk, and as they’re starting the job… Then you could leave while they’re working, come back around lunchtime, watch them wind down for lunch, have lunch, go back to work after lunch, and then watch the end of the day. You watch those pieces.

You’re going to know more about their actual safety culture, what it really is, than probably any activity you could do. You don’t really even need to talk to anybody. All you’ve got to do is observe.

Steve:  Right. To go back to your original question, what’s going on in the industry, I don’t think that there is enough of the actual assessment going on, the full-blown assessment. The folks that I was talking about on this previous discussion an hour ago, most everyone concurred that an awful lot of the effort is with the safety culture surveys.

But you can get an awful lot out of a safety culture survey, and based on the results of that survey, you might have some areas of concern that then you form maybe an investigation group or whatnot to try to follow up on some of that stuff.

Anyway, the idea is that I don’t think there’s an awful lot of “assessments” going on. There are a lot of surveys. There’s not a lot of assessments. That’s my take. That’s my take.

Russel:  Well, I think we’re maturing in this whole thing around pipeline safety management. I think one of the things that a lot of operators are trying to clarify is what should be in the survey, and is the survey aligned with the program? That in itself is non-trivial.

Steve:  What a segue. Man, you almost beat me to the punch here, Russel.

Russel:  [laughs] Okay, you’re scaring me now, Steve.

Steve:  [laughs] I told you now, I do a lot of work with contractors. You ask a contractor, “Do you do safety culture surveys? Do you do any safety culture assessments?” “Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. We do surveys.” “Okay. Can I take a look at it?”

Well, you look at it, and the survey is almost entirely about occupational safety or personal safety. It’s not about the pipeline safety. It’s not about the asset safety.

Russel:  And it’s not about process safety.

Steve:  That’s correct, that’s correct.

Russel:  Yeah, that’s a big leap for a lot of people to make that leap.

Steve:  Yeah, absolutely. Again, you go back and look at 1173. Specifically, look at Section 15 of 1173, where it talks about how each element of PSMS contributes towards a positive safety culture. You know 1173 says you can have a positive safety culture without a PSMS program, but you cannot have an effective PSMS program without a positive safety culture. It’s that important.

A positive safety culture — as it relates to pipeline and the asset — is a real indicator of the safety performance of an organization. You really need to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s as it relates to what are some of the positive and negative safety culture indicators out there, and how do you measure performance based on each of the 10 elements.

I’m not going to get on my soapbox and start trying to sell something here, but we spent a lot of time last year developing a safety culture assessment program, including surveys that everything is tied back to the individual elements of 1173, as well as positive and negative safety culture indicators.

There are other surveys out there that are doing the same thing, or trying to do the same thing, maybe just a little different flavor or different dashboard or whatnot. INGAA has been at this for operators for a good long while. I think the first survey they did with operators in 2013, and then they did one in 2016. Then they were supposed to do one in 2019. I’m not sure if they did or didn’t. It may have been 2020. I’m not sure, but they’ve been around, and they’ve been doing that.

Now, the INGAA Foundation is getting ready to actually issue a safety culture survey for contractors. We’re actually also involved with that. We chose to get involved with that just for the learning experience and to see how we’re doing. There are programs out there where you can get a view of your safety culture, a la 1173.

Russel:  What are some of the indicators that you guys are finding are like the key safety culture indicators? Have you gotten far enough along in your maturing the things that you’re getting some clarity about that?

Steve:  It’s not really so much experiences. If you really look at 1173 itself, it talks about a number of positive and negative safety culture indicators. There’s other documents out there, the safety culture white paper I just mentioned a little while ago.

There’s a whole host of indicators out there, and I’m going to read them to you, because I’ve got them on another screen right next to me here, all right?

Russel:  Yeah, please do.

Steve:  Positive indicators would include things such as safety priority, accountability, empowerment and ownership, communications and transparency, procedural compliance, employee satisfaction, whether or not the company inspires, enables, and nurtures change when necessary, whether or not the company promotes a questioning and learning environment, and whether or not the company encourages non-punitive reporting.

Those are the positive safety culture indicators. It’s a pretty heavy list, to get right down to it.

Russel:  I’ll tell you the thing that comes up for me with all that is “How do you measure that?” I think one of the interesting things when you start talking about safety management versus manufacturing quality management, is the measurement, it’s a little bit looser, or it can be.

Ultimately, you can measure incidents and near misses. You can measure that, but a lot of the other things, it’s a little bit more difficult to know. Well, what is the thing I look at to know if that’s actually happening?

Steve:  A lot of this is very subjective, and it’s intangible, I guess. Like I said before, there are three steps to doing an assessment. You want to go out, and you want to see, does the company have a policy or a procedure in place that addresses some of those positive safety culture indicators? Does management walk the talk? You try, as far as measuring things like this.

I’m an auditor by trade. You need to gather evidence — the evidentiary matter that supports an opinion one way or another. You can do that by, like I said, looking at policies, procedures, documents, what is management saying in different communications, looking at the surveys, looking at the perceptions, and then going out in the field and seeing what’s actually going on.

You can tell whether or not safety is a priority by rolling up on a job site, like we were talking about earlier.

Russel:  I’m actually a believer that there are some things that…This may sound really trivial, but if you roll up on a job site, and if everybody’s got their shirts tucked in, they’ve got their safety equipment on, you’re not having to ask anybody to get it on, their safety equipment is in good shape, the trucks are all clean, the tools are put away and organized…

Steve:  I agree.

Russel:  Those kinds of things are indirect indicators of a level of attention to detail that tell you a great deal about a company’s safety culture, in my opinion.

Steve:  I agree, I agree. Let me go on and talk about some of the negative safety culture indicators. Now, the list isn’t near as long, but I think it’s still, it’s a good list. Again, a lot of these indicators are embedded within the RP itself.

If you read through it, “Oh, yeah, there’s an indicator there,” and, “Oh, here’s another one over here.” Negative safety culture indicators would be complacency. That’s a big one, the complacency. Fear of reprisal, overconfidence.

An employee that’s been doing the job for 30 years. “I’ve been doing it this way for 30 years, and I’ve never had a problem with it. I’m going to do it this way again,” even though he’s gotten lucky for 30 years, but he’s overconfident. Normalization of deviance.

Russel:  That’s a huge one.

Steve:  Oh, you bet it is, especially, and today, with the aging workforce, and as these old guys are going out the door, and they’re trying to train these young guys, you don’t want to train them in a manner that is not consistent with what the policies and procedures say.

You don’t want to get them normalizing deviance right off the bat. It’s a real important indicator at this point in time. Tolerance of inadequate systems and resources, and then production pressure. Production pressure is always, “Oh, gosh, we’ve got to get this job done. We’re past due. Maybe we can take some shortcuts.”

Those are all bad safety culture indicators. Anyway, those are the types of things that you need to measure, and you measure it by going out and asking questions, reviewing documents, doing the surveys, going to the job sites. When it’s all said and done, you should have a pretty good read on areas of opportunity for an operator and a contractor, and how they’re doing.

Russel:  When we were teeing this conversation up, Steve, one of the things we talked about is what’s gone on in the last 30 years in the airline business, and how they approach safety management and all that.

You had talked about a trip you did in O’Hare, and maybe you could share that story. That’ll tee up some more conversation about where we are aspiring to get to in the pipelining world?

Steve:  Man, I’m glad you remembered that, because I actually have that down here on my notes as something that I wanted to share with everybody. At the tail end of a long trip, my last leg of the flight to get home was in O’Hare.

I was in the back of the bus. I was at the very back of the plane, and we’re sitting there at the gate. I’m ready to go, and I’m sitting there, having a conversation with one of the flight attendants. She cocks her head, and she’s looking around.

She says to me, she goes, “Do you hear that?” I go, “No, I don’t hear that.” She kept looking around, and she stepped back in the lavatory, and the water was running. It was just, the faucet didn’t shut off. The water was running.

I’m thinking, “All right, that’s not really that big of a deal,” but she immediately gets on the horn with the captain. She saw something. You know, the whole notion of “see something, say something.” She saw something, and she said something. She said something to the captain about it, and of course, the last thing of that saying — the see something, say something — is then to do something.

Well, the captain took control, and he got on the speaker and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m sorry, but we’re going to have to delay takeoff for a little while. We have a little maintenance issue in the lavatory. We’ve got maintenance on the way to address it.” I just thought that that was an outstanding example of safety culture.

They have audit protocols, controls in place. Not only primary controls, but they have redundant controls and tertiary controls. We were talking about this before. When we were younger, back in the ’60s, you would hear of airplanes, big, major airline incidents every year, and maybe a couple times a year, hundreds and hundreds of people being killed. You don’t hear of that so much anymore, at least here in the United States. Knock on wood.

Russel:  If you look at worldwide safety performance in the airline industry, it’s radically different than where it was even 15 years ago, much less than 30.

Steve:  Right. That example there on that airline was you had the whole team pulling in the same direction. They were trained to recognize risk, and they were trained to say something if they saw something, without fear of retribution.

Management was responsible for taking action to address that risk. That’s exactly what we need in the pipeline industry. That’s going to be an uphill challenge to make sure that the boots on the ground really truly recognize the risks associated with what they do.

Russel:  We’ve been having some conversation with some airline folks who have been involved in airline safety management for 30 years, and it’s very instructive when they talk about the journey that their industry’s been through and what it took to get to where they are now. It starts inside a company, with the workers self-reporting, and with that being done in a way that it cannot be punitive, where it’s encouraged.

I had this gentlemen explain it to me. He said, “It’s like you’re driving down the road, and you run a stop sign.” Then the first police station you pass, you pull in the parking lot, you go in, and you say, “Hey, I wanted to let you know I ran this stop sign.” He goes, “Okay, well, here. Fill this form out.” You fill this form out, and he’s asking you, was it nighttime or daytime? Was it rainy or clear? Was there any obstruction? What were you doing in the car? Did you have other passengers? Were you listening to the radio? Were you talking on the phone?

Then you put all that in, and at the end of that, they say, “Well, look, thank you very much for submitting this report. This was very helpful. We’ve actually had five people run that stop sign in the last two weeks. Clearly, this is something that we need to elevate and take a look at, and we’ll let you know how that goes.” It’s like, okay. That’s what we’re talking about?

Steve:  That’s interesting.

Russel:  When you think about it, you’re like, “Well, that makes a lot of sense, because if five people ran that stop sign in the last two weeks, there’s probably something going on that’s beyond the person.” I’ve seen some other illustrations more specific and more airline specific. A lot of times, it’s a small little thing, like we’ve got a tree that’s grown up, and it’s obstructing the stop sign. We need to cut that thing back.

Steve:  The key to that is you have to capture that data. You have to capture that information. You have to have a process.

Russel:  Somebody has to see it.

Steve:  Exactly.

Russel:  Or somebody has to communicate the fact that they saw it, and then somebody has to do something with that report, because I think this is another big thing. I’ve had this conversation on other podcasts.

When I say I need to have confidence in two things, one, that there’s going to be no retribution. Two, that somebody’s going to do something with that, and I’m going to hear back with what happened with the information I put in. The communication actually needs to be round-tripped.

Steve:  Right. Oh, absolutely, because the worst thing is to have someone that sees something, say something, and then it just goes into a black hole, and they never hear about it. Then they don’t have any confidence that management is doing anything about it, so it’s like, well, why bother?

Why do I need to keep telling things, telling management that I’m seeing something, if they’re not doing anything about it?

Russel:  The other viewpoint to this — again, this is one of the things that this gentleman was sharing with me about the airline journey — is once you start taking these reports, processing them, and providing feedback, people actually start giving you more reports. The more reports you get, the more things you find, the more things you correct over time. You’re finding smaller and smaller and smaller stuff.

The thing I like about the story you talk about in O’Hare, of where a running faucet stops a flight of 100 something people going home, is that doesn’t seem like a big deal, but it could become a big deal. If you don’t take care of that, where do you draw the line?

Steve:  Exactly.

Russel:  I actually would want…The fact that the flight attendant heard it, saw it, did something with it, that’s like, yeah, I want that to be the case.

Steve:  Now, operators, I’m seeing more and more operators engaging their workforce and their contractors, a lot of times, making up 75 percent of their workforce or so.

They have these corrective action plans or corrective action programs in place, where they have put in place the communication channels that allow the workforce to communicate programs that they see, either anonymously or otherwise. That’s a good thing. We’re going down that path. I think that’s really, really good.

Russel:  What do you think is the next step for the industry? We’re looking at what are the solutions that we need to be trying to create? Where do you think we’re going to get to next? What are we going to be focusing on in the next 12 to 36 months around safety management, in your opinion?

Steve:  Every API recommended practice has to be reviewed every five years, I think it is. If they need to be edited, they’re edited. If they need to be dropped, they’re dropped, whatever. I think the first five years was last year, 2020. I think that the organization decided to give it two more years, but right now, the industry group is having some discussions as to whether or not there’s anything within the recommended practice that needs to be edited, revised, changed, or whatever.

I’ve been involved with APGA on some of these discussions on this, and it’s really very, very good. We came up with a potential list of items that might need to be addressed. I’m not going to go through that list, but I’ll share with you two items that I think probably need to be addressed.

I did have this conversation with Jeff Wiese, who was on the 1173 committee that wrote it. He told me that they had conversations and discussions about whether or not safety culture needed to be its own separate element, rather than having it really part of the leadership and management element, and then having aspects of that throughout the other elements.

I think it’s a big enough deal that there should be some consideration on making safety culture and safety culture assessment its own element. That’s me. That’s my opinion. Whether or not that happens or not, who knows.

The other thing, whether or not there are changes in the RP on this or not, we’re seeing changes all around us where operators are recognizing the importance of including their contractors in their journey. I can tell you that the Distribution Contractors Association and the APCA have developed a contractor SMS guidance document, where they’ve looked at elements of 1173. They’ve looked at quality management systems in RP 1177 and some other documents, and they’ve created what I think is a very, very fine approach for contractors to engage operators with pipeline safety management systems.

A lot of it is focused on quality. The notion, you think about the bathtub curve. As pipelines fail, they fail more frequently right after they’re installed because of quality issues, or human errors or mistakes, or so on, and so forth.

Then they tend to stabilize, and they operate just fine for 20, 30, 40 years, or whatever. Then, towards the end of their life, they start to tick up with failures. Well, I think that this DCA document goes a long way towards addressing some of the quality issues associated with pipeline and pipeline safety.

I think that in the next two to three years, we’re going to see an awful lot of attention being given to contractors and quality management. At least that’s my sincere hope.

Russel:  Yeah, I think that’s right, Steve. When you talk about that, you tend to think about the contractors that are doing the digs, the installations, and the maintenance activities first, but there’s a much broader range of contractors that are interacting with pipelines around automation, measurement, communications, and other things.

Ultimately, I think you want to see all those people have their own SMS program that supports what they do in the pipeline space.

Steve:  Which goes a long way towards addressing the holistic and intentional needs for an organization to explore with their PSMS programs.

Russel:  I’m sure we’re going to have you back at some point in the future, and we’ll compare notes. If we’re right, we’ll talk about it, and if we’re wrong, we won’t mention it. [laughs]

Steve:  Yeah, that’s fine. I appreciate it. I’ll be looking for that customized YETI, a jacket, or something. [laughs]

Russel:  I don’t know. I’ve got to have some conversation to figure out what the right thing to do is. I think like a jacket, a windbreaker, a nice windbreaker jacket with a big logo on the back of it that people can wear to conferences, so you can pick out the guys that have been podcast guests.

Steve:  There you go. I’m 2XLT, okay?

Russel:  Good to know. I’ll mark that right down. I’ll mark that right down. Look, Steve, it’s a pleasure to have you on, as always. Thanks so much for your time, and look forward to running into you when we’re at the same place at the same time.

Steve:  Hey, and I appreciate everything you do with this. I think it’s a great service to the industry, and keep it going.

Russel:  I’m going to do my best. I’m about to hit 200 episodes.

Steve:  I know. That’s something.

Russel:  Crazy.

Steve:  That is something.

Russel:  Look, thanks again, Steve.

Steve:  All right, and I’ll talk with you later, then, all right?

Russel:  All right. I hope you enjoyed this week’s episode of the Pipeliners Podcast and our conversation with Steve. Just a reminder before you go, you should register to win our customized Pipeliners Podcast YETI tumbler. Simply visit pipelinepodcastnetwork.com/win to enter yourself in the drawing.

If you’d like to support the podcast, please leave us a review on Apple Podcast, Google Play, or on your smart device podcast app. You could find instructions at pipelinepodcastnetwork.com.

[music]

Russel:  If you have ideas, questions, or topics you’d be interested in, please let me know on the Contact Us page at pipelinepodcastnetwork.com or reach out to me on LinkedIn. Thanks for listening. I’ll talk to you next week.

Transcription by CastingWords

Categories: Pipeline SMS, Pipeliners Podcast

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