The phrase "Explain yourself" is one that in the wrong context can send shivers down my spine. It brings back memories of the Dean of Discipline in my secondary school, probing the extent of a fellow pupil's misdemeanour to help define the punishment.
In our professional context, though, it's something we probably do every day. And I'm thinking about it tonight as I just finished the draft of an article, and I'm hoping I got it right. From simply coaching a member of staff in a new concept, through to detailed justification of the results of our work, explaining is one of those skills that sets apart a consulting engineer from a good design engineer.
But like any skill, it can be improved. I'm not sure exactly why I first stumbled on Lee Lefever's book "The Art of Explanation", but once I bought it, it's been a significant contribution to how I approach explaining, and even to how I explain explaining.
One of the best bits of the book is an A-Z scale of explanation. As illustrated here, we do often live in a bubble where we expect that everyone else knows what we know. On an A-Z, we're maybe at W or X, and a lot of our peers are in a similar place. But not everyone is.
I remember after 3 years in chemical engineering being a bit amazed that some of the arts students we met didn't know what Reynold's number was, as it was in at least one lecture we had per week, or even at times one a day. For us, it was like someone not knowing that "A" was a letter, or even what an alphabet was. But normal people did live outside our bubble, and Re was not a big part of their life. What I now do is ask people on the scale where they are, and try to tailor my explanation accordingly.
Do check out the book, and see if it helps. My copy is on loan to another good explainer I know, but I've got the Kindle version on the iPad for emergencies.
[And by the way, Reynolds number is an expression of the ratio of inertial forces (how easily things flow) and viscous forces (how difficult other things make it to flow), and is a fundamental concept across chemical engineering. Actually, maybe I'm a little outside that bubble now, and could use someone else's explanation. Still remember the formula, though.]
Monday, 27 May 2013
Saturday, 11 May 2013
Learning and Exploring without wikis.
My daughter's homework the other weekend was to create an A-Z of Europe, but without countries or capital cities. The instructions suggested composers, landmarks, rivers, etc. She asked me to go onto the computer to do it, but to be honest, I couldn't see how you even start such a task on the computer, apart from of course copying someone else's A-Z.
So, at 5pm on a Saturday, we were off to WH Smith down the village for a book on Europe. No such luck, so we came back with a school atlas, and a Dorling Kindersley Child's Encyclopedia. We wiped clean the whiteboard, and by six o'clock we only had 3 letters to go, K, Q, and Y.
What I had was a very strong memory of my own childhood, and flicking through Childcraft, Children's Britannica, and various children's encyclopedias of science and nature. My daughter was quickly skimming through the book, dismissing anything that wasn't about Europe, but with a few "cool"'s, a few "look at this Dad", and longer than she strictly needed to at the horses section. She had a good look through all of it, and has brought it into school for further reading.
It reminded me that the first instinct of the current generation to go to the internet for everything may not always be the best. That a large colourful book can hold it's own fascination, and add a few facts in along the way. And that you can complete a homework research task without a computer.
(And by the way, we used "Lakes of Killarney", "Quimper" in Britanny and "Yves Saint Laurent" to finish the list. Sibelius was our random composer, although she's more familiar with Swedish House Mafia.)
So, at 5pm on a Saturday, we were off to WH Smith down the village for a book on Europe. No such luck, so we came back with a school atlas, and a Dorling Kindersley Child's Encyclopedia. We wiped clean the whiteboard, and by six o'clock we only had 3 letters to go, K, Q, and Y.
What I had was a very strong memory of my own childhood, and flicking through Childcraft, Children's Britannica, and various children's encyclopedias of science and nature. My daughter was quickly skimming through the book, dismissing anything that wasn't about Europe, but with a few "cool"'s, a few "look at this Dad", and longer than she strictly needed to at the horses section. She had a good look through all of it, and has brought it into school for further reading.
It reminded me that the first instinct of the current generation to go to the internet for everything may not always be the best. That a large colourful book can hold it's own fascination, and add a few facts in along the way. And that you can complete a homework research task without a computer.
(And by the way, we used "Lakes of Killarney", "Quimper" in Britanny and "Yves Saint Laurent" to finish the list. Sibelius was our random composer, although she's more familiar with Swedish House Mafia.)
Sunday, 24 February 2013
Tomatoes and Fruit Salad
We're about to kick off an exercise internally with the goal of creating a paper for a major safety conference effectively by internally crowdsourcing. We have a team of about 25 volunteers from across the various parts of Atkins Energy group, including power, nuclear and oil and gas, of every age group from graduate to 40 years of experience, and we're going to try use the talents and experience of this diverse group to examine what we have and haven't learned from Piper.
The Piper Alpha disaster happened 25 years ago in July, and was a real game-changer in the offshore industry, and in high hazard industries worldwide. What we are trying to do is to examine whether the lessons of Piper have been learned, what we could do to increase that understanding, and how to make the lessons really be learned. It all turns into a presentation and probably technical article to be delivered by Martin Grant, CEO of our energy division, in June here in Aberdeen.
It's interesting to me in a number of ways. I guess in the first place, my entire career was affected by Piper, in that my first job in Aberdeen came as a direct result of the requirement to develop a safety case for offshore operations, and my subsequent career progression while not always directly in process safety, has always had a flavour of that in it somewhere.
The second is the assertion that the oil industry can be very insular in practice, and that we don't often look outside of our industry for greater understanding, or checking that we are in line with modern processes or approaches. From a management of major accident hazard point of view, it could be argued that as we had the worst few disasters within our industry, Piper Alpha, Texas City, Macondo, we have little to learn from others. I can't imagine that assertion holding up to much real scrutiny, however.
The final place I'm looking forward to learning here is how to actually produce such knowledge and understanding in a networked, globally distributed team. We did some very interesting training in Poyry on global networks, and I've read a bit since then on them, but it'll be fun to see how the interactions, the project management, and the knowledge development work in a team spread all the way around the world.
I'll come back to this over the next few months and see how it's going. As a lack of spoiler alert, the output won't be shared until after the conference.
And as for the title of the post, the first person I heard of say this line was Brian O'Driscoll, Irish Captain before they won the Rugby Six Nations Grand-Slam, in reply to some detailed question. "Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is leaving it out of a fruit salad". (And for wisdom, I also use "understanding")
The Piper Alpha disaster happened 25 years ago in July, and was a real game-changer in the offshore industry, and in high hazard industries worldwide. What we are trying to do is to examine whether the lessons of Piper have been learned, what we could do to increase that understanding, and how to make the lessons really be learned. It all turns into a presentation and probably technical article to be delivered by Martin Grant, CEO of our energy division, in June here in Aberdeen.
It's interesting to me in a number of ways. I guess in the first place, my entire career was affected by Piper, in that my first job in Aberdeen came as a direct result of the requirement to develop a safety case for offshore operations, and my subsequent career progression while not always directly in process safety, has always had a flavour of that in it somewhere.
The second is the assertion that the oil industry can be very insular in practice, and that we don't often look outside of our industry for greater understanding, or checking that we are in line with modern processes or approaches. From a management of major accident hazard point of view, it could be argued that as we had the worst few disasters within our industry, Piper Alpha, Texas City, Macondo, we have little to learn from others. I can't imagine that assertion holding up to much real scrutiny, however.
The final place I'm looking forward to learning here is how to actually produce such knowledge and understanding in a networked, globally distributed team. We did some very interesting training in Poyry on global networks, and I've read a bit since then on them, but it'll be fun to see how the interactions, the project management, and the knowledge development work in a team spread all the way around the world.
I'll come back to this over the next few months and see how it's going. As a lack of spoiler alert, the output won't be shared until after the conference.
And as for the title of the post, the first person I heard of say this line was Brian O'Driscoll, Irish Captain before they won the Rugby Six Nations Grand-Slam, in reply to some detailed question. "Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is leaving it out of a fruit salad". (And for wisdom, I also use "understanding")
Wednesday, 24 October 2012
Red Letter Days
Today is a big day for us here in Aberdeen. A red letter day.
Today we formally launch our I.Chem.E. Accredited Company Training Scheme in Aberdeen. We've got a celebration planned. The champagne is on ice. The food is ordered, and it's not pies and bacon rolls.
Today is a big deal for us. We've worked hard over the years to develop our junior engineers to chartered status. From today, we are committing to do just as much to support people, with the added commitment that we are prepared to be audited on how well we're doing.
Today is a significant step on our vision to be the best staff consultancy in Aberdeen. Part of the best design consultancy in the world.
Atkins is all about technical excellence. Consultancy excellence. Personal excellence. Chartership is a key part of demonstrating that we can achieve this.
It's not going to be easy, but nothing worthwhile ever is. We're committed to challenging our engineers to develop, to challenging ourselves to support them. It's a worthwhile goal, chartered engineer. Not many gas fitters (aka engineers) with those letters after their name.
Today is a big day.
Today we formally launch our I.Chem.E. Accredited Company Training Scheme in Aberdeen. We've got a celebration planned. The champagne is on ice. The food is ordered, and it's not pies and bacon rolls.
Today is a big deal for us. We've worked hard over the years to develop our junior engineers to chartered status. From today, we are committing to do just as much to support people, with the added commitment that we are prepared to be audited on how well we're doing.
Today is a significant step on our vision to be the best staff consultancy in Aberdeen. Part of the best design consultancy in the world.
Atkins is all about technical excellence. Consultancy excellence. Personal excellence. Chartership is a key part of demonstrating that we can achieve this.
It's not going to be easy, but nothing worthwhile ever is. We're committed to challenging our engineers to develop, to challenging ourselves to support them. It's a worthwhile goal, chartered engineer. Not many gas fitters (aka engineers) with those letters after their name.
Today is a big day.
Monday, 16 July 2012
Getting the Safety Message Across
I guess most of us have been there. You are finally moving off stand on an aeroplane, and they then persist in telling you that the emergency exit is on one or other side of the plane, it may be behind you, and that in the event of a loss of cabin pressure, please save yourself before your children. Occassionally, I do look around, and apart from those looking at the flight crew to see if they make an amusing mistake, lots of the plane are already into their crossword/magazine, or counting down to when they can switch back on their music player or other gadget. Some may even be chatting about the evening ahead.
We flew to our holiday last week on Thomson Airways, and it started with the same rigmarole, even with the air hostess asking us to watch it carefully. And then, the video showing the safety features of the plane was acted out by a 7-year old girl, with all the "passengers" on the video also more likely to watch CBeebies, or perhaps CBBC than BBC1. Same words as always, but somehow having a child's voice made it more urgent, more worth watching, and probably held all our attention much better than I can remember happening before. And the 2 seconds where they tried to avoid the toys falling out of the overhead lockers should be on Youtube, if it isn't already.
It was a good example for me that the way you deliver a message, as well as the meaning of it, can have a big impact.
We flew to our holiday last week on Thomson Airways, and it started with the same rigmarole, even with the air hostess asking us to watch it carefully. And then, the video showing the safety features of the plane was acted out by a 7-year old girl, with all the "passengers" on the video also more likely to watch CBeebies, or perhaps CBBC than BBC1. Same words as always, but somehow having a child's voice made it more urgent, more worth watching, and probably held all our attention much better than I can remember happening before. And the 2 seconds where they tried to avoid the toys falling out of the overhead lockers should be on Youtube, if it isn't already.
It was a good example for me that the way you deliver a message, as well as the meaning of it, can have a big impact.
Wednesday, 2 May 2012
42
At my birthday this year, I put an email around to the office to say the traditional cakes were at the coffee area. I made some comment in it about being that age that was "the answer to life, the universe and everything". A number of the young people in the office didn't get the reference at all. Some of the others knew that it was a reference to something or other, but didn't instantly know it was the "Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy".
I guess each generation has it's reference points, and Hitchhikers certainly informed mine. I vaguely remember the TV series, but the books were the main source for me. In my teens, they were required reading, along with "The Lord of The Rings", and I've re-read them often enough in the times since then to be broadly able to quote them at will. They've come to mind recently for a number of reasons, one due to the fact that one of clients replaced a decent coffee maker with a modern version "Klix" machine, which does a good job of producing a hot liquid almost completely unlike coffee when you want a coffee. Add the fact that with some of the work we are doing at the moment, it does feel that the designs have more than a touch of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation about them, in that the fundamental design flaws are being hidden by the superficial design flaws.
And also that the archive of "Desert Island Discs" has now gone back as far as when Douglas Adams was on. (see here). It was a little strange hearing him talking about the future of computers, where they would all be linked together in a global network, but the bit that resonated with me was that his book was the "Omnibus of Golfing Stories by P G Wodehouse", which only one other person had chosen (a personal favourite of mine, and along with the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and the Diaries of the Right Honorable James Hacker MP, one of the three contendors as my book if I was ever on the programme).
The generation before mine seemed to always go on about Monty Python, and "you were lucky....!". We quote Douglas Adams. What's come in behind that? Terry Pratchett? Or more scarily "The Office"? What do you think?
I guess each generation has it's reference points, and Hitchhikers certainly informed mine. I vaguely remember the TV series, but the books were the main source for me. In my teens, they were required reading, along with "The Lord of The Rings", and I've re-read them often enough in the times since then to be broadly able to quote them at will. They've come to mind recently for a number of reasons, one due to the fact that one of clients replaced a decent coffee maker with a modern version "Klix" machine, which does a good job of producing a hot liquid almost completely unlike coffee when you want a coffee. Add the fact that with some of the work we are doing at the moment, it does feel that the designs have more than a touch of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation about them, in that the fundamental design flaws are being hidden by the superficial design flaws.
And also that the archive of "Desert Island Discs" has now gone back as far as when Douglas Adams was on. (see here). It was a little strange hearing him talking about the future of computers, where they would all be linked together in a global network, but the bit that resonated with me was that his book was the "Omnibus of Golfing Stories by P G Wodehouse", which only one other person had chosen (a personal favourite of mine, and along with the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and the Diaries of the Right Honorable James Hacker MP, one of the three contendors as my book if I was ever on the programme).
The generation before mine seemed to always go on about Monty Python, and "you were lucky....!". We quote Douglas Adams. What's come in behind that? Terry Pratchett? Or more scarily "The Office"? What do you think?
Tuesday, 20 March 2012
Reducing Hydrocarbon Releases
Last Thursday, I attended the Hydrocarbon Release Seminar, organised by Oil and Gas UK at AECC. Details of the event are here.
It was a particularly interesting event, I found. I hadn't done any significant work in the area since the days it was my job to fill in the OIR12 reporting forms and calculate/estimate/guess the release amount. The mix of people attending was quite diverse, quite a few offshore operations personnel, OIMs, technicians, team leaders, etc., as well as a good mix of operations and maintenance people. I was a bit surprised that there were not many consultancies such as Atkins represented, actually.
What was described to us was a classic problem. The industry has targeted a 50% reduction in the total number of leaks (reportable or higher) since the 2010 figure of 187 by March 2013. For an individual installation, in any given year, the target number of releases is zero. The expected number of releases if you do the stats probably works out at less than 1 per year. And apparently 60% of releases are attributable to human error during maintenance or operations, with 40% to technical factors. As we are looking at relatively low frequency events, it is easy to lose focus, or become complacent that the release won't happen on my watch.
The presenters were in many ways frank and honest. The HSE delegate described an industry with a "history of failure and a memory of success". The incidents described were in many ways repeats of what we have seen before: failures to isolate from high pressure sources; not following procedures; inadequate checking; loss of the ability of the pressure envelope to handle pressure. A number of speakers talked about there being no silver bullet to solve the problem (as an aside, if I'm correct, silver bullets are required for killing werewolves: in this case, there was no need to kill exotic creatures, the normal monsters are enough to cause the problem!). There were some complaints that the industry did not know its own standards. A rather cool high-tech camera was presented which could see gas clouds down to some grammes of flow per hour.
Some of the language was very success-oriented: "Lesson's Learned Bulletins" were circulated, but there was not much evidence that the learning opportunities were really sinking in. A lot of people talked about bringing people to Spadeadam to see the real fires and explosions, but as we are very good at understanding consequences, and rubbish at understanding risk, this might just be scaring people for scaring's sake.
What worried me a bit was that we might be chasing the wrong monsters, or at least too many of the small ones. When I presented at All-Energy last year, one of the other presenters, Guy Boyd, had talked about how in injuries to personnel, only 21% of minor incidents could have the potential to be any worse than that (see http://www.all-energy.com/Health_and_safety_across_the_sectors.html). I don't know for sure, but I don't imagine valve seepage leads to a major accident event very often, if ever. It looked to me like the approach being taken was the classic "shrink all the triangle and we'll be fine" approach, but maybe that's why the numbers are stubbornly higher than wanted. I'll need to read a bit more into this, but it would be nice to have an array of approaches to predict and find the real big ones BEFORE they happen, and permanently drive the release frequency down.
The consensus seemed to be that the target is achievable, but not easy. I hope they're right.
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