Tony Traynor shares his insight and passion for safety

Tony was the former CEO of Petroineos, a €20billion tourn over company, the operations director for the whole of Ineos and the CEO of Ineos Phenol business, €3 billion turnover, petrochemicals business. His career has been spent managing complex chemical and refining operations. A key to this has been the need to focus leadership teams on high standards of safety and environment and the delivery of reliable cost competitive performances. Tony chaired the influential Buncefield Standards Task Group in response to the catastrophic Buncefield major accident in the UK.

Tony, welcome and thank you, thank you very much for spending some time out and sharing your insights on process safety and process safety management from your very long and distinguished career in the industry. You have been at the sharp end of making process safety a reality in the chemical industry.
Was there a light bulb moment for you when you realised the importance of process safety?

I started working for ICI a very big company at the time in Europe. I'm an engineer and had responsibility for people and unfortunately one guy lost a couple of fingers because he bypassed safety systems on a palletiser and he got his hand trapped. Then when I was working in a soda ash plant we had a major leak on our ammonia system where the equipment was totally enclosed in buildings with no natural ventilation. A lot of people got gassed. Fortunately, nobody was killed. The cause was poor maintenance. So that was one of the first moments when I realised that we had to stop this happening.

We couldn’t get that guy's fingers back and if, during the ammonia leak, people were killed, we couldn't bring them back to life. These were my initial experiences that said to me, if you're in a position of responsibility, you have to act responsibly.

Was there anyone who stands out as being inspirational to you in terms of your approach to managing risk?

Back in the late ICI days we bought an acrylics company from DuPont. The Operations Director was Thomas Jefferson Davis. He would frequently walk around the site with you and I recall he pointed to an eye protection sign and asked me whether it was important and if it was, why it was cracked and dirty, rather than being in pristine condition and prominently displayed? He pressed me on if an important sign was being neglected what confidence could he have that we were adhering to key safety procedures in areas he wasn’t checking? He inspired me not to accept things that weren't right. He was the Bill Shankly of operations management.

Was there anyone who stands out as being inspirational to you in terms of your approach to managing risk?

This is the message good leaders have to get across. You can't repair damage to people and can’t, bring people back to life. When operating hazardous processes, things will go wrong, unless you make sure they don't. So, make sure you've got the right people in the right places to make the right decisions. There should never be an environment where people feel it's okay to take a chance. Eventually, their luck will run out.

Was there anyone who stands out as being inspirational to you in terms of your approach to managing risk?

It was a significant challenge to bring so many different groups together, each with a potentially different viewpoint and to get us all to focus on making hazardous industries safer. That was what was driving me, I was so pleased how people responded. When people focus in on the right goal, and they pull together, everyone walks forward in unison.

In terms of process safety, what kind of best practice did you encountered or discover during your career?

A major influence for me, was Andrew Hopkins’ book ‘The Lessons from Longford’ as it was a significant eye opener about safety culture. I'll never forget the paragraph in the book that talked about the process supervisor, who was looking out of his control room, when the plant was on fire, hesitating to shut it down, because he thought he might get in trouble. That shocked me, it absolutely shocked me and changed my outlook on things to constantly ask ‘Do we have the right perspective, the right importance and priority to safety?’ You can always shut the plant down and start it up again. You might lose a bit of money but, if you damage people, you can never make that right again. So don't go there, ever!

Are there any further insights you can share about how you manage competing priorities and still successfully drive forward change?

You need the right people with the right expertise and insight. You can't guess at safety you need people who understand what the issues are. If you don’t have that resource within the business you need to look to elsewhere. A good example of change management is in the automotive industry where even the slightest change in design or function is scrutinised from every angle before they decide to go ahead with a change. The only thing we have to keep us safe is our intellect and our ability to anticipate and react to difficulties. So, we need to be ever vigilant about risks.

I would say the safest plants are the oldest plants where we've already learned such a lot about how to operate them safely, whereas with new plants we are constantly trying to understand how they can go wrong. If it can go wrong, it will, unless you're doing something to make sure it doesn't.

Are there any further insights you can share about how you manage competing priorities and still successfully drive forward change?

The trick is to try and get a uniform approach and always comply with the local legislation, which can be less rigorous than our standards. We had a set of core safety principles for the businesses to comply with, as we couldn't possibly put one big engineering standard together for the whole 50,000 people who worked in 200 different plants around the world. We had a rigorous audit programme and made it clear that if a business didn't comply with the core principles they would be shut down.

Are there any further insights you can share about how you manage competing priorities and still successfully drive forward change?

We need to be using technology more and data management to monitor processes more accurately than we are at the moment. Then there's safety culture which needs to be a major issue for business - earning a profit whilst keeping people safe. Don't take risks, use your expertise, engineering knowledge and experience to manage the risks so you don't put people in jeopardy. The more we can develop artificial intelligence the better we will become in predicting and anticipating problems by providing insights into how safely assets are performing. At the moment, our only way of understanding asset safety is by periodic inspection. But if there was some way of continuous inspection that would be a great step forward.

I recall visiting an old refinery in Japan, built in1960. I asked the control room operator how many alarms does he get in a day? He looked at me as if I'm stupid and replied, ‘We don't get any’. I thought that there is something strange going on because this is not normal. It turned out they got maybe two to three alarms in a day on the whole refinery, whereas I was used to typically 20 an hour. So, I enquired about how many modifications or changes they had made over the years, and there were none. My insight was that if you don't change the plant and process, you don't change the risk, and you get to know everything you need to stay in control, I asked how many loops they had in auto, the answer was all of them!. They had refined and refined their understanding of the process and got it flat lined, and it was left alone to run just by itself. I was blown away by this as it taught me just where you can get to.

Thank you, Tony that was brilliant. I know all of this comes from your heart and I know the deep sincerity you had for safety throughout your career. Everyone who got to work with you or under your jurisdiction will reflect positively on your guardianship. They may never have said thank you, but I'm going to say thank you on their behalf to somebody who's so focused and so dedicated to looking after people.