Well, maybe you didn’t ask. But here is the answer anyway.

A New Order of Things

“There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.”

– Niccolò Machiavelli

By noon on February 8, 2017, all the experiences and skills acquired throughout my life started to coalesce. My path to creating scalable organizational greatness, a new order of things had begun. I was working for a medium-sized oil and gas construction company, where I had started three years earlier, as a part-time safety technician. I was the guy that stood on a catwalk, 200 feet up the side of a (you pick your favorite danger) flammable, caustic, explosive, killer gas-filled tank, container, silo, or giant-cylinder-waiting-to-become-an-impromptu-rocket, hoping something does not happen to the workers inside said hellhole, that requires my expertise, for hours at a time. Oh, and all overnight. And usually in a snowstorm, or at least torrential wind and rain.

I had worked my way through the organization and was currently a full-timer that had been “promoted” to the darkest depths of cubiclism. It was bad. The cubicles were over 6’2” tall and made with a light-sucking dark purplish-blue colored fabric. The entrance to my little spot of darkness required a buttonhook turn around the wall. It gave no hint that someone was entering until they were a foot from my face. It was on this Tuesday, somewhere around 8am, that the director of our safety program performed the required buttonhook into my little cave for the first time. The director, we will call him Raymond, because that is his name, was surprised at how small the quality control/quality assurance manager/project manager/estimator’s workspace was he let me know that I was summoned to appear before the organization’s president Ezra, in his office. Never been there before. Uh oh.

Upon entering his hallowed office and sitting in a firm leather-covered chair, Ezra asked me if I would be interested in building a corporate encompassing program to satisfy the demands of our biggest customer, Chevron. The only information Ezra could give me was that Chevron was expecting a program based on human performance. Never heard of it. Stopping drift. What is that? And something about mitigating hazards of high-risk tasks. And a book, that Chevron personnel were using in the field that had been acquired.

Though I had no idea how I was going to do this, I promptly said…Yes. From the doorway, the Senior Vice President asked, “When can you go live with the program?” Taking a mild pause for prayer performed under the guise of knowledgeable thought, I confidently answered: July 1. “Excellent.” he answered as he handed me the spiral-bound Chevron text, turned on a heel, and walked out. I looked to Ezra, “I do have one question. What is my budget?”  turning back to his computer, and without even a glance, he flatly stated, “Whatever it takes.” Thereby signaling the end of the conversation.

With that, I left the office, walked back to my blueishly purple cave, and started reading Chevron’s minimal information. By noon, I had sent multiple emails to my connections in our Texas office, where most of our Chevron work occurred at the time, and had them working on getting more information about the current Chevron program. By 3pm I had confirmation that more, collected information was on its way via Fed-Ex overnight.

By Friday afternoon I had collected enough information about the Chevron program, called which they call Verification & Validation (V&V) to have a good handle on what the processes were looking to provide the workers in the field, and what metric and data was being gained and monitored. The idea of V&V is to perform verification that work is being performed in the field to a standard and validation of the worker’s knowledge of what to do and why. Tasks which, during their performance, may include errant actions or events that result in unintended significant injury and fatality (SIF) outcomes to the worker, equipment, or the business (more on this later) are defined quickly and succinctly, maybe even a little morbidly, as: The tasks that can put you in the hospital, or the morgue.

Chevron had experienced a minimum of one death per year since its founding in 1879. In the San Juaquin Valley around Bakersfield, CA, (think the 2007 movie There Will Be Blood, without the bowling alley) Chevron fields were still seeing unforgiving numbers of SIF incidents. In the mid-2000s the rough ideas of V&V were thrown out in desperation in a massive leadership head shed and soon began to be implemented. Within the first year, SIF incidents were cut in half, and adaptations were made. The following year, SIF incidents fell to negligible numbers and no deaths occurred, more system improvements ensued, and safety numbers improved too.

Wanting to grow these processes and make the oil field a safer work environment, Chevron expanded the implementation of the V&V process into their Mid-Continent Business Unit (MCBU). The MCBU saw immediate safety improvements. MCBU leaders (Warning: Chevron loves their acronyms) made the decision to mandate all their sub-contractors utilize these systems as well. Chevron held quarterly meetings where all the bigwigs of the business partners (Chevron speak for sub-contractor) would hear all about what was going on. At one of these Business Partner Safety Improvement Council (BPSIC) meetings, the plan for all the partners to start their own internal V&V programs was announced.  After a few months of hemming and hawing about how to implement a program like this, Chevron called Ezra out about not moving forward with implementation fast enough. That is how this all landed in my lap.

As I researched, I found the reasoning behind Chevron’s push for this program. Being in the inherently dangerous business of sucking crude oil from the ground Chevron’s leadership identified 15 high-risk tasks performed in the field, examples include working at heights, working around and digging excavations, lifting and rigging, and working in areas with H2S gas exposure potential. Upon investigation, the Chevron was able to identify that a defined set of training and supporting resources were required to assist the workers to perform safe work, in a way that, should an unexpected event occur, like a crane trying to fall on your head, the hazards would be mitigated.

Drift was originally defined by Diane Vaughn in 1994 as being the normalization of deviance. Since Diane’s introduction of the idea, some significant research and the written word have been produced on the topic but predominantly aimed at the whole organization. Great examples are NASA with both the Challenger and Columbia catastrophes (Did you catch that? NASA failed twice, some people never learn), Enron’s epic failure, the Three Mile Island Accident and numerous infrastructure failures, plane crashes, and the gross inabilities for government entities to see a massive terrorist act in the making. But researchers have yet to study where drift is first recognizable. The frontline worker.

To combat drift, Chevron looked to the recently created Human Performance (HP) ideals. HP became a thing after the Three Mile Island accident in 1979. But it took the Department of Energy (DOE) almost 30 years of study and research to release a pair of handbooks about it. Utilizing many of the ideas gleaned from the DOE’s work, it was decided that keeping drift from occurring in the oil field required a defined path to perform each SIF task, and a collection of field coaches who observed the work being performed and supported the proper performance and use of the resources provided. Effectively, Chevron personnel created checklists to be used prior to the work being started to identify high threat activities within the work. These are patterned after the checklists pilots utilize before every flight.

These basic ideas of V&V that Chevron mandated were good. Really good. But I felt much more could be done for our organization through this program. But how? I began reading everything I could find on human behavior. Piles of investigations on train wrecks, plane crashes, ship collisions, engineering failures. Oodles of research papers on everything from cognitive processes to chaos theory. Scores of books, well over a hundred. One of those books, thankfully at the beginning of the list, was Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit, which includes a story about the positive organizational change Paul O’Neill, an obscure lawyer cum CEO of Alcoa made by using safety as a culture change’s foot in the door.

In 1987 O’Neill came into his CEO position hot and heavy with safety as the main thing. During his introduction to Wall Street investors and analysts, Paul stunned and scared the lot when he started as a matter of fact, “I intend to make Alcoa the safest company in America.” Some moments later O’Neill gave an overview of the plan, “If you [shareholders] want to understand how Alca is doing, you need to look at our workplace safety figures. If we bring our injury rates down, it won’t be because of cheerleading or the nonsense you sometimes hear from other CEOs. It will be because the individuals at this company have agreed to become part of something important: They’ve devoted themselves to creating a habit of excellence. Safety will be an indicator that we’re making progress in changing our habits across the institution. That’s how we should be judged.” Within a year of that speech, Alcoa’s profits hit an all-time high. And incidents, accidents, and deaths were at an all-time low.

EUREKA!

No, I did not actually say “Eureka”, but it did hit me that utilizing this proven V&V operations safety program as a foundation was the missing piece to culture change initiatives that usually have an 80% failure rate. I began to incorporate the V&V safety process with added proven culture-shaping processes and heightened communication up and down the hierarchy. The V&V field coaches became cheerleaders too. They would take pictures of crews doing great work and we would give accolades in the weekly newsletter I published, the Operations Excellence Newsletter. Original, I know. The newsletter brought consistent verbiage and communication to all employees, every Monday. I was able to finagle guest submittals from Ezra, the VP, and key divisional leaders every other week or so. I also created an email account outside of the corporate servers (thank you Gmail) that allowed employees the freedom to submit ideas and concerns without repercussions. I replied to each message and fixed or worked to adapt hot spots as needed.

Taking a lead from the police special operations community, I created a one-inch circular sticker our employees could put on their hardhats. The only thing on the sticker was, 1*. This translates to “one ass-to-risk”. As the coaches met up with crews in the field, they would give every worker a sticker. And tell them what it meant and that they only have 1*. This always brought laughs and pride to the worker. It meant something. It meant we cared about them as individuals. It was not a corporate advertisement like all the other stickers supplied to them. Workers in masse placed the stickers in prominent places and on their hardhats. If a worker replaced a hardhat, they would beg for a new sticker. New hires received them with their handbook. Once we had given one to every worker, I had larger versions made, three-inch circles. These were installed on the driver and passenger windows of every vehicle in the fleet. 1*.

 In recognizing that the disparate ideas of operational excellence, safety, and culture change do not effectively produce positive and lasting effects on organizations, I took full advantage of the opportunity of complete autonomy afforded me by creating a system of the best, proven ideals of all three using safety as the foundation. A little bragging here; Under my two-and-a-half-year tenure directing the program, the organization saw $10m in annual revenue tied directly to my program and shrank employee churn to minimal levels. I was able to scale the systems from the original employee base of 1,800 to over 8,000 after we were bought by a larger organization. I had created organization-wide morale growth and personal pride amongst the workers. Legacy divisions utilizing these systems collectively experienced only two recordable injuries during this time, down from the once-a-month average prior to the program’s implementation. Whereas corporate divisions where these systems were not yet implemented continued to see the one-injury-per-month average.

Chevron took notice. In November 2018 I was invited to speak about the design and results of the program plus partake in a Q&A session with Chevron’s Upper Management Team (UMT) at their annual gathering. I was repeatedly invited to partake in Chevron’s internal V&V program development meetings and never missed an opportunity. In November 2019, a year after speaking at the UMT, Chevron invited me to become the consultant for their Global Operation’s development and implementation of the V&V systems and adaptations I had built.

But this tale is not all rivulets and roses. Just as we were to start rolling out the updated systems to the global divisions and partners, March 2020 arrived with a bang bringing with it COVID-19. All Chevron operations were grounded overnight. Consultants, like me, were let go and the world’s uncertain future lay in wait.