"We talk about what is important to us."
- Jacob Tetlow, APS
Regular safety meetings and striving for constant improvement are a sign that safety actually is important. APS has regular safety meetings where we try to proactively create safer working conditions. By sharing and talking about safety incidents we can learn from them before they happen to us. "The wise man learns from others' mistakes."
APS is implementing a new safety program called Safety Foward, based on the ideas of Todd Conklin, a retired senior safety adviser from Los Alamos National Lab. You can look up his talks on Youtube or look into his book “Pre Accident Investigations”. He talks about the difference between resilient and fragile systems. A fragile system is liable to a single point of failure, for example, an operator-dependent system where the only safeguard against risk is the behavior of the employee. Dr. Conklin says that such a system is basically "alligator wrestling" where you are telling the employee, "don't get bit!".
Some key ideas around moving Safety Forward
Create a resilient safety system: It's not IF an event occurs, but WHEN.
People are the solution: Employees doing the work are best suited to provide solutions to safety risks/hazards.
Focus on being a learning organization: Establish learning teams to collaborate and communicate learnings from an event or known risk.
Focus on leading indicators: Focus on safety observations and serious injury or fatality (SIF) potential.
More notes
• Failure is the mother of improvement – viewing an accident as an opportunity to improve processes, procedures, and overall culture
• All accidents are not preventable and don’t ask “if” questions – ask “when” questions – sets up individuals to recover better for when an incident happens
• Design a system that knows it will fail
• Detection and correction are the two most powerful tools in safety – getting at the idea of recoverability
• Three main controls to number of accidents include Compliance (procedures, rules, regulations), Design (engineering controls for safety) and human performance (place where work meets the worker)
• The new view of safety looks at workers as the solution rather than the problem
• Safety leaders should be asking what workers need in order to be safe instead of leading safety from a top-down approach
Friday, January 31, 2020
Wednesday, January 22, 2020
Tactical and Executive Leadership
Notes from a presentation at APS by Jason Gardner, Echelon Front, fomer Navy Sea Air and Land SEAL.
Sometimes good to let people fail so they can improve.
There is often the assumption that if you told someone what to do then it will work, but may not hold true in stressful situations.
Develop culture where everyone is included and understands that their contribution is important.
1. Cover and Move
If teammate fails, we all fail.
2. Keep it Simple
Everyone needs to understand the goal.
3. Prioritize and Execute
Detach from details. Don't be a robot, but don't forget to see yourself from the outside.
4. Decentralized Command
Everyone leads. Leadership is not just a title but an attitude.
Victory Mindset
-Default mode: aggressive. See and do. Often the most important things to do are in the places we least want to look.
-Innovate and Adapt - aggressively
-Humility: check your ego
-Influence up and down chain of command: develop relationships
-Lead and follow
-Discipline equals freedom
-Extreme ownership: no blame, no excuses.
Sometimes good to let people fail so they can improve.
There is often the assumption that if you told someone what to do then it will work, but may not hold true in stressful situations.
Develop culture where everyone is included and understands that their contribution is important.
1. Cover and Move
If teammate fails, we all fail.
2. Keep it Simple
Everyone needs to understand the goal.
3. Prioritize and Execute
Detach from details. Don't be a robot, but don't forget to see yourself from the outside.
4. Decentralized Command
Everyone leads. Leadership is not just a title but an attitude.
Victory Mindset
-Default mode: aggressive. See and do. Often the most important things to do are in the places we least want to look.
-Innovate and Adapt - aggressively
-Humility: check your ego
-Influence up and down chain of command: develop relationships
-Lead and follow
-Discipline equals freedom
-Extreme ownership: no blame, no excuses.
Monday, January 20, 2020
Australian Wildfires
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| Extremely large pyrocumulus clouds tower over bushfires in New South Wales and spread over the Pacific Ocean. Sentinel-2A image, December 31, 2019, processed by @andrewmiskelly. Source. |
"Fuels management cannot prevent fires but can change their behavior" but fuels management is limited by budgets and time to burn, especially in droughts." Source.
The BBC has a good overview:
"We’re seeing recurrent fires in tall, wet eucalypt forests, which normally only burn very rarely. A swamp dried out near Port Macquarie, and organic sediments in the ground caught on fire. When you drop the water table, the soil is so rich in organic matter it will burn. We’ve seen swamps burning all around."
"Even Australia’s fire-adapted forest ecosystems are struggling because they are facing increasingly frequent events. In Tasmania, over the past few years we have seen environments burning that historically see fires very rarely, perhaps every 1000 years. The increasing tempo, spatial scale, and frequency of fires could see ecosystems extinguished." Source.
More Info.
Australian Fire Center
Case Study / Educational Info
Tuesday, January 07, 2020
What We Need More Of, Is Science
No Heroes or Villains
Dodds has a nickname for us humans: Homo narrativus. Dodds, a professor at the University of Vermont, uses mathematics to study social networks. He has argued that people see the stories of heroes and villains, where there are really just networks and graphs. It’s our desire for narrative, he says, that makes us believe that something like fame is the result of merit or destiny and not a network model quirk. (From http://nautil.us/issue/47/Consciousness/to-fix-the-climate-tell-better-stories)
Scientific narratives, if they’re done right, are some of the most powerful of all. They teach us more than facts, mechanisms, and procedures. They convey a worldview of skeptical empiricism and indefinite revision, show us how to negotiate the boundary between our rational and emotional selves, teach us to suspend judgment and consider all the possibilities, and remind us that a belief in objective truth is a deep kind of optimism with massive dividends.
Kirk Johnson, director of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, puts it this way: “If you look at how the media treats scientific discoveries, they’ll go to the wonder. ... [They’ll say] ‘here’s this thing that’s been discovered,’ not the process of how we figured it out. And I think that understanding of how we know what we know is so critical ... If you don’t help people understand what those processes are, [if] you just say ‘here’s the answer,’ now they can go onto the web and dial up an alternate answer. I think we’re seeing an erosion of credibility of science to the public because of this huge flood of technology and information.”
This erosion is essential to understanding the modern climate debate. In the words of the philosopher Richard Rorty, “We understand knowledge when we understand the social justification of belief, and thus have no need to view it as accuracy of representation.”4 In the absence of social justification, the public ends up being called on to be the judge of accuracy of representation—in other words, of scientific content
Dodds has a nickname for us humans: Homo narrativus. Dodds, a professor at the University of Vermont, uses mathematics to study social networks. He has argued that people see the stories of heroes and villains, where there are really just networks and graphs. It’s our desire for narrative, he says, that makes us believe that something like fame is the result of merit or destiny and not a network model quirk. (From http://nautil.us/issue/47/Consciousness/to-fix-the-climate-tell-better-stories)
Scientific narratives, if they’re done right, are some of the most powerful of all. They teach us more than facts, mechanisms, and procedures. They convey a worldview of skeptical empiricism and indefinite revision, show us how to negotiate the boundary between our rational and emotional selves, teach us to suspend judgment and consider all the possibilities, and remind us that a belief in objective truth is a deep kind of optimism with massive dividends.
Kirk Johnson, director of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, puts it this way: “If you look at how the media treats scientific discoveries, they’ll go to the wonder. ... [They’ll say] ‘here’s this thing that’s been discovered,’ not the process of how we figured it out. And I think that understanding of how we know what we know is so critical ... If you don’t help people understand what those processes are, [if] you just say ‘here’s the answer,’ now they can go onto the web and dial up an alternate answer. I think we’re seeing an erosion of credibility of science to the public because of this huge flood of technology and information.”
This erosion is essential to understanding the modern climate debate. In the words of the philosopher Richard Rorty, “We understand knowledge when we understand the social justification of belief, and thus have no need to view it as accuracy of representation.”4 In the absence of social justification, the public ends up being called on to be the judge of accuracy of representation—in other words, of scientific content
Sunday, January 05, 2020
Climate Change Belief Tree
An article in Nautilus magazine analogizes beliefs about climate change to branches on a tree. I like that the tree diagram emphasizes the unity of thinking about climate change, even if we may be on different branches. Also, I think it is OK for one person's beliefs to span different branches: belief about the future does not need to be certain but can be probabilistic and can change from one day to the next.
 |
| Diagram and original article by Summer Praetorius. |
The article concludes: "What if instead of feeling threatened by differences in opinion, we were to reconceptualize them in much the same way a tree will distribute a canopy to collect as much sunlight as possible—as a multi-pronged approach to getting the job done? In the same sense that both fast and slow processes contribute to Earth change, both steady progress and immediate local action will contribute to climate solutions. Let’s take stock of our pace and work together, thankful there is someone else to fill the space we can’t. After all, we are not lone trees, but a living, connected forest, and balance is essential for stability."
Wednesday, January 01, 2020
Top 2019 conservation news
Multiple stories of widespread wild animal population declines:
From 10 billion down to 7 billion birds.
The population of birds in North American has fallen by a third in 50 years. Science.
Statistic of the decade: amount of rainforest lost in Amazon.
"Insect apocalypse" in the New York Times Magazine garnered widespread attention.
In the United States, scientists recently found the population of monarch butterflies fell by 90 percent in the last 20 years, a loss of 900 million individuals; the rusty-patched bumblebee, which once lived in 28 states, dropped by 87 percent over the same period.
the overall abundance of flying insects in German nature reserves had decreased by 75 percent over just 27 years. If you looked at midsummer population peaks, the drop was 82 percent.
It is estimated that, since 1970, Earth’s various populations of wild land animals have lost, on average, 60 percent of their members.
What we’re losing is not just the diversity part of biodiversity, but the bio part: life in sheer quantity....Finding reassurance in the survival of a few symbolic standard-bearers ignores the value of abundance, of a natural world that thrives on richness and complexity and interaction.
Scientists have begun to speak of functional extinction (as opposed to the more familiar kind, numerical extinction). Functionally extinct animals and plants are still present but no longer prevalent enough to affect how an ecosystem works. Some phrase this as the extinction not of a species but of all its former interactions with its environment — an extinction of seed dispersal and predation and pollination and all the other ecological functions an animal once had...
Other News (Link)
Last female Yangzte Giant Softshell Turtle died
Last Sumatran Rhino in Malaysia died
Jaguar and Koala populations hit by wildfires in Brazil and Australia
From 10 billion down to 7 billion birds.
The population of birds in North American has fallen by a third in 50 years. Science.
Statistic of the decade: amount of rainforest lost in Amazon.
"Insect apocalypse" in the New York Times Magazine garnered widespread attention.
In the United States, scientists recently found the population of monarch butterflies fell by 90 percent in the last 20 years, a loss of 900 million individuals; the rusty-patched bumblebee, which once lived in 28 states, dropped by 87 percent over the same period.
the overall abundance of flying insects in German nature reserves had decreased by 75 percent over just 27 years. If you looked at midsummer population peaks, the drop was 82 percent.
It is estimated that, since 1970, Earth’s various populations of wild land animals have lost, on average, 60 percent of their members.
What we’re losing is not just the diversity part of biodiversity, but the bio part: life in sheer quantity....Finding reassurance in the survival of a few symbolic standard-bearers ignores the value of abundance, of a natural world that thrives on richness and complexity and interaction.
Scientists have begun to speak of functional extinction (as opposed to the more familiar kind, numerical extinction). Functionally extinct animals and plants are still present but no longer prevalent enough to affect how an ecosystem works. Some phrase this as the extinction not of a species but of all its former interactions with its environment — an extinction of seed dispersal and predation and pollination and all the other ecological functions an animal once had...
Other News (Link)
Last female Yangzte Giant Softshell Turtle died
Last Sumatran Rhino in Malaysia died
Jaguar and Koala populations hit by wildfires in Brazil and Australia
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