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Beyond "Safety-I": A New Paradigm for Mining Productivity & Safety

Miners are under constant pressure to improve Safety. After years of fatality reduction, progress is now stagnant. We are in a difficult space -long periods of stability punctuated by sudden jumps in fatalities. At the same time productivity in mining has been declining. When plotting the McKinsey Mine Lens Productivity index against mining fatalities/100 000 we see two curves that seem to overlay. Are productivity and safety negatively correlated or are they just associated ( both caused by a third variable) or a combination of both?

When Government hosts hearings into deaths in mining both workers and management tend to argue from the negative correlation point of view.  Management states that output will be reduced in order to ensure the safety of workers. Worker representatives usually city examples around month end and year end where this is not the case.

At Stratflow we believe that the associated variable view allows us to break the apparent direct correlation between decreasing fatalities and lower productivity.

In mining, we have gone through 20 years of getting rid of excess capacity and material buffers trying to become more efficient. This approach leads to the creation of balanced capacity production chains, hoping that high efficiency can be achieved in all parts of the chain. In practice, the high variability and interdependency in mining interact with balanced capacity chains causing unstable production flow at lower output. This instability puts pressure on frontline management and workers to quickly adapt to changing conditions, and sometimes the demand exceeds the capacity available. (Mining experience around “planned work is safer work” shows why this is problematic). We end up with lower production, lower efficiency, more pressure to perform and less inherent Safety (greater risk) in the system.


The Limits of Traditional Safety Approaches

Traditional safety methods, often referred to as "Safety-I," have focused primarily on preventing errors and enforcing rules. While these approaches have brought us far, they may have reached their limit in our increasingly complex mining environments. As Todd Conklin and Professor Sidney Dekker point out in "Do Safety Differently," there's a fundamental flaw in the belief that accidents and deaths are primarily caused by worker error or failure to follow procedures.

The reality is that procedures and regulations cannot account for all aspects of work. The gap between "work as imagined" by management and the actual "work as done" by frontline workers is often significant. We rely on the ingenuity and adaptation of workers to get work done safely, especially when periodic work demands exceed available capacity.

But there is a second critical area that Safety Differently highlights. We need to ensure that the capacity in the system is sufficient to deal with the demand, especially during intermittent periods of peak demand. We can address the root cause of these issues by working towards achieving “superflow in a spirit of calmness” in our operations. And we do this by considering spare capacity and material buffers not as waste but as “protective capacity” and then running our bottleneck at maximum capacity. In this manner, we decrease cost/ton, increase productivity, improve the inherent Safety in mining operations and free up the time and attention of our managers and workers.

 

Embracing a New Safety Paradigm

To break free from the perceived safety-productivity trade-off, we need to evolve our safety paradigm. The concept of "Safety Differently" offers a promising path forward. This approach views safety not just as the absence of negative events, but as the presence of positive capacities. It recognizes that the same system conditions that allow for productivity also create safety.

Key elements of this new approach include:


  1. Building System Capacity: Focus on enhancing the system's overall ability to operate safely, even under varying conditions.

  2. Bridging the Work Gap: Use interventions like learning teams and decluttering exercises to address the disparity between "work as imagined" and "work as done."

  3. Managing Demand vs. Capacity: Ensure that the system has sufficient capacity to handle demand, especially during peak periods.

  4. Rethinking Efficiency: Consider spare capacity and material buffers not as waste, but as "protective capacity" that can enhance both safety and productivity.



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