By Hendrik Lourens
Using Safety-II Principles to Resolve the Safety-Productivity Dilemma
Overview
The mining industry faces a persistent challenge: a stagnation in safety performance coupled with continued pressure on productivity. Despite significant efforts and investments, traditional approaches have yet to yield the desired improvements in safety outcomes and operational efficiency. This article explores how adopting a new paradigm — rooted in systems thinking and Safety-II principles — can break the perceived conflict between safety and productivity in mining operations.
Two decades of observations
Over 20 years and more than 90 Theory of Constraints (TOC)-based interventions, Stratflow has observed a consistent pattern: when productivity improvements are achieved through systems thinking, there is an immediate and notable enhancement in safety performance. Clients have reported winning safety awards and have even suggested rebranding these productivity interventions as safety initiatives. This correlation indicates that the key to advancing both safety and productivity lies in re-evaluating traditional management paradigms.
The article delves into the evolution of business paradigms from the Industrial Age, with its focus on hierarchical management and efficiency, through the Information Age’s data-driven optimisation attempts, to the current transition into the Ecological Age. Today’s mining executives grapple with balancing an ever-increasing array of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), including heightened safety standards, environmental considerations, and social responsibilities.
By examining the safety-productivity boundary proposed by Rasmussen and Cook, the article illustrates how traditional methods often force a trade-off between safety and productivity. However, Stratflow’s approach aims to shift this boundary outward, enabling higher productivity without compromising safety. This is achieved by reducing variability in operations and fostering stability through practices like the Flow Room — a space where cross-functional teams collaborate using real-time data to anticipate and address issues proactively.
The integration of Safety-II principles, which emphasise understanding systemic issues over blaming individual errors, further enhances this approach. By making work easier and empowering workers through learning teams and collective improvements, organisations can align “work as imagined” with “work as done.” This alignment improves safety and boosts morale, engagement, and overall operational effectiveness.
Can we make sense of these patterns using the foundational Safety Differently principles?
Evolving business paradigms
The Industrial Age delivered efficient hierarchical management, without which organisations would function poorly. The ideas of thinkers such as Taylor and Fayol, along with successful organisations developed by Henri Ford and DuPont, formed the foundation of dramatic improvement in productivity. This required a focus on efficiency and cost accounting for efficient resource allocation. The Information Age democratised information and intensified competition by making clients and middlemen aware of global price arbitrage opportunities.
With the cost of data reducing by orders of magnitude, it became possible to control and “optimise” every aspect of operations in real-time. In this manner, Industrial Age thinking was hardwired into our organisations. But operations is not a simple, linear system. It is a complicated, interdependent, adaptive system — and trying to manage it with traditional thinking, even with better data, is unlikely to stabilise your system and free up your time and attention.
By trying to optimise everything, understanding of the overall system fragments and causes stop-start production flow as the parts desynchronise. It’s evident that merely adding technology to an outdated paradigm doesn’t resolve the underlying issues — it often exacerbates them.
We have now reached another yellow bubble, one where the increasing expectations of society towards higher safety performance, increased environmental standards and social licence expectations require managers to balance an ever larger number of KPIs.
Output decreases, costs increase, and variability and interdependencies lead to constant firefighting. Your people struggle to see the impact of their efforts, crushing engagement and morale. All your time and energy get consumed just trying to keep things afloat.
Mining is stuck in an old paradigm
The second yellow bubble — non-stop productivity/safety trade-offs
What are the issues mine executives struggle with? With the advent of the information age and proximity to the ecological age, there has been an explosion in the number of KPIs executives need to satisfy: improving profits for shareholders while improving on the social licence, diversifying the composition of the workforce, improving safety performance, stricter environmental standards, and ever more onerous conditions for obtaining investment capital. In this example, we will look at the safety and productivity KPIs.
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 since the 2000s. When plotting the McKinsey MineLens Productivity Index against mining fatalities per 100,000 we see two curves that seem to overlay. An important question arises: is the relationship between the two curves causal, or associated with a third variable, or perhaps both?
When the government hosts hearings into deaths in mining, both workers and management tend to argue from a negative correlation point of view. Management states that output will be reduced whenever there is a risk to workers’ safety. Worker representatives usually give examples around month and year ends when this is not the case.
The safety-productivity boundary
Rasmussen proposed that organisations organise and plan work so that it is performed within the safe and efficient zone, well away from the boundary where efficiency is at a maximum but safety becomes marginal. Cook proposed that we can plot High-Reliability Organisations (HROs) as a narrowly spaced set of operating points, while lower-reliability organisations are more diffuse and at higher risk of breaking through the boundary.
What should a good solution do?
From our experience at Stratflow, we propose that the most effective intervention will involve shifting the safety-productivity boundary outwards. This will allow organisations to increase inherent safety at a higher level of efficiency and productivity — and we believe this is what we have done with the 90 interventions mentioned above.
What does an outward boundary shift look like?
Have a look at the variability in Run of Mine (ROM) production below (this is an actual mine production example). The left side of this graph is typical for most mines — daily ROM production well below the budgeted target, showing high variability. It is unusual for the mine plan to stay intact for more than a few days under these circumstances. In this environment, managers and supervisors must continually adjust their plans and reallocate resources, shortening the planning horizon.
Work becomes difficult, and planning becomes less effective in ensuring the system’s safety. In some cases, the environment is such that workers and managers use the term “firefighting” to describe their experience. Managers’ attention spans get overloaded, and they make primarily reactive decisions aimed at the present.
Under these conditions, safety initiatives such as Safety-II and High-Reliability Organisations struggle to deliver. In Safety-II, a prime area of focus is to identify areas and times when work is difficult and to improve the ease of getting work done. For HRO organisations, managers need to develop “chronic unease” and always be on the lookout for changing conditions and potential problems. It is difficult for managers to keep many balls in the air.
The safe production edge
Have a look now at the blue curve from after the TOC-based intervention. Daily ROM output is more stable and predictable (reduced variability). Our 20 years of experience show that when the mine achieves “superflow in a spirit of calmness,” the safety performance immediately improves. We now have predictability and stability; this removes the pressure on supervisors at month and year-end to try to force more work through the system than it can safely cope with. The mine plan has a much longer shelf life, planning is more effective, and managers can delegate responsibility with much lower risk.
The managerial span of attention expands, and more time is spent in the daily cross-functional meeting on safety. Management can now practice “chronic unease” and spend time addressing situations that make the flow of work difficult. In this environment, the ideal conditions for implementing Safety-II and HRO systems are set.
How can we generate the shift?
Flow Room
We must intervene in the operational system to ensure that variability reduces while output increases. This requires counterintuitive actions — the bottleneck alone should be managed for maximum efficiency, and the remaining operations departments need protective (excess) capacity. This goes against many Industrial and Information Age ideas. (See Hendrik Lourens’s related LinkedIn post on re-humanisation of the workplace.)
At Stratflow, we have developed a dual operating system we call the Productivity Platform that delivers the missing functionality (agility) without detracting from the benefits of a traditional hierarchy. The Productivity Platform is based on TOC principles and Dialogic Organisation Development, and it fits into the current management system with minimal interference while reducing the overall workload.
The Flow Room is where the heads of departments, middle managers, and selected employees get up-to-date visual information on what is happening across the business and implement the Productivity Platform. Setting up a Flow Room enables teamwork across layers and functions. Colour codes identify where attention should be focused and where help from support functions, such as HR and maintenance, is required.
The Flow Room moves the company out of firefighting by highlighting problems before they occur and putting in shock absorbers (buffers) to handle variation and interdependence.
It also adds the agility that most hierarchical organisations lack by enabling the formation and dissolution of cross-functional teams as needed, facilitating rapid problem-solving and collaboration. The Flow Room encourages continuous monitoring and rapid feedback loops, allowing for real-time adjustments in plans and operations. This is crucial in mining, where delays in response can lead to significant safety risks, production losses, and increased costs.
Mining companies can effectively manage the tension between stability and agility by integrating the Flow Room into the existing Management Operating System (MOS). This combined approach allows smoother day-to-day operations while being nimble enough to handle unexpected challenges, thereby increasing overall operational resilience.
Learning teams and collective improvements
The increased stability and reduced risk allow managers to delegate more opportunities for improvement, enabling workers to achieve purpose, mastery, and autonomy.
Collective improvements and learning teams allow management and frontline workers to develop a joint understanding of the interrelated challenges that combine to make work difficult. Work as done becomes visible, and management can design work as imagined to match. It identifies the crucial leverage points (seldom more than two) that need to be addressed to improve the flow of work. By allowing resources to focus on only a few leverage points, the resource constraint is alleviated, and the alignment between work as done and work as imagined multiplies the impact. By providing a common vision of what needs to be done, management and workers can align what they do and support one another. Momentum is built and maintained by achieving success early in the project, and a positive feedback loop ensues.
Conclusion
The longstanding conflict between safety and productivity in the mining industry is not an inevitability but a product of outdated mental models and management paradigms. By embracing systems thinking and integrating Safety-II principles, mining organisations can break free from this perceived trade-off. The key lies in shifting the safety-productivity boundary outward through interventions that reduce operational variability and enhance stability.
Stratflow’s experience over the past two decades suggests that when mining operations achieve “superflow in a spirit of calmness,” safety performance naturally improves alongside productivity. Tools like the Flow Room and methodologies that encourage cross-functional collaboration enable managers and workers to proactively address challenges, reduce firefighting, and create a safer, more efficient working environment.
This paradigm shift requires courage and a willingness to question established practices. However, as Peter Senge aptly stated, “Today’s problems come from yesterday’s solutions.” By interrogating and evolving our mental models, we can create a future where safety and productivity are not opposing forces but synergistic components of a thriving mining operation. The path forward is clear and achievable: adopt a new mindset that values systemic understanding, empowers workers, and leverages the principles of Safety-II to create lasting, positive change in the industry.
Written by Hendrik Lourens, Stratflow.
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