Don't Have to Trade Off Safety for ...

EHS Safety Talk

Wednesday, November 29th, 3:30pm - 4:30pm
Dr. John Carrier, Senior Lecturer
MIT Sloan School

The greatest challenge to developing and sustaining a safety culture is the mindset that in order to achieve a safe working environment, a price in productivity must be paid – in other words, we are trading off a portion of today’s productivity to prevent an infrequent, but catastrophic event. Then, the job of the lab PI is to optimize multiple outputs - performance, safety, and staff morale – using separate inputs.

While this may be true in a theoretical sense, it is patently false in practice. Most systems are running in a condition that is both unproductive and unsafe. However, there are many examples from industrial practice where productivity, safety, and morale simultaneously improved, most notably Alcoa under Paul O’Neill’s leadership and the NUMMI auto facility jointly run by Toyota and GM.

As powerful as these examples are, they are generally not sufficient to change laboratory operating behavior, because “our system is different”. In this talk, we will discuss a generalized theory that explains how to simultaneously improve productivity, safety, and morale through the detection and elimination of hidden factories, which are the hardened aggregates of quick fixes, workarounds, and undisciplined work habits that over time form a second system within your laboratory that produces poor quality work in an unsafe manner very slowly, while degrading lab staff skills.

The good news is that we can reverse these hidden factories if we know how to detect and then eliminate them. Dr. Carrier will show examples from his extensive field work, including offshore blowout preventer maintenance (driven by the Deepwater Horizon tragedy) and his long-running project with the EHS department at MIT. Productivity improvement of up to 30% can be achieved while reducing safety incidents by 50-90%

Unless you are running a perfect system, there need not be tradeoff between productivity and safety – unless our own thinking makes it that way.