Culture, Criticality & Control: Ethics & Quality Assurance
RISK! ENGINEERS TALK GOVERNANCE PODCAST
SEASON 8, SEASON 9
In this episode of Risk! Engineers Talk Governance, due diligence engineers Richard Robinson and Gaye Francis discuss Culture, Criticality and Controls in terms of Ethics and Quality Assurance.
Starting from Thomas Kuhn’s idea of paradigm shifts, they look at why Australia’s defence exports are largely defensive and how that protective instinct is reflected in WHS legislation.
They also cover how splitting the world into narrow domains weakens decision-making, why the order of project success criteria changes stakeholder thinking, and why quality assurance is needed to confirm the controls actually work.
If you’d like us to cover a specific topic or have any feedback we’d love to hear from you.
Summary notes
00:41 – The three Cs: culture, criticality, controls
00:56 – Paradigms and Kuhn’s generational change
02:33 – Australia’s defensive defence exports
05:15 – WHS intent and the protective culture
06:19 – Siloed domains and due diligence
09:15 – Budget as the last success criterion
09:59 – Quality assurance: did controls work?
11:16 – Compulsory voting and embracing culture
Episode transcript
Megan (Producer) (00:00):
Welcome to Risk! Engineers Talk Governance. In this episode, due diligence engineers Richard Robinson and Gaye Francis discuss Culture, Criticality and Controls in terms of ethics and quality assurance.
(00:15):
We hope you enjoy their chat. If you do, please support our work by giving us a rating and subscribing on your favourite podcast platform. And if you'd like more information on R2A, our newsletter and resources, or have any feedback or topic ideas, head to the website www.r2a.com.au.
Gaye Francis (00:36):
Hello, Richard. Welcome to a podcast session.
Richard Robinson (00:39):
Hi Gaye. It's good to be back again.
Gaye Francis (00:41):
Today we're going to talk about culture criticality and control, the three Cs, and also how it relates to ethics or how ethics feeds into it and also Quality Assurance. So I think...
Richard Robinson (00:56):
You're going to let me chip it. Yeah, I've got that. This was partly because I was watching some podcasts on something or other, and I noticed when I looked it up that a lot of people are doing it. They're talking about culture paradigms, and it has a lot to do with the culture wars and all the rest that's been going on in recent times around the place. Now we use the word paradigm, and I think that's where they're getting it from, following Thomas Kuhn's work, The Structural Scientific Revolutions. And a paradigm is a recognised knowledge system that drive solutions and problems and things like that. Now, what this guy was pointing out, and this seems to be general agreement from what I can see, is that there are different paradigms in different areas. And the key ones they talk about is there's technological paradigms and AI and things like that. There's scientific paradigms, the ones we normally talk about, which are going from Newtonian to Armsteinian onto quantum mechanics. And typically, and that's Thomas Kuhn's thing, he says typically it really takes a generation to make that change.
(01:55):
Now we've noticed this in the WHS business because Victoria started it all in 2004 and we're just a bit out to a generation which is typically about 25 years. And we've noticed a rather sort of interesting change in Victoria, for example, the management of major hazards going to criticality driven rather than in likelihood sense at all. Now that then leads on to economic models, which is really what Marxism is about in the history of... He was always talking about economic models and other proletariat versus all the rest of it, which we don't go into much and we don't care much about. But then they were talking about how culture wars tend to dominate this thing.
(02:33):
And I was reflecting on this because we do a reasonable amount of training for defense and I was reflecting on looking at defense and how we go about doing things in Australia. And one of the things I noticed was that the export, Australian exports in military terms, it's very defensive in nature. Our biggest exports to date, from what I'm aware, is the Nulka missile, which all American ships have. And the Nulka missile is basically a defensive missile. And the idea is if somebody fires a missile or something at you and you become aware that this missile is arriving and then you do everything you can to avoid the situation and you fire a Nulka missile off to behave as a decoy and this Nulka missile jumps out the back of a ship and then hovers. Now the notion of a hovering missile is a pretty weird idea to say the least. And this missile behaves like a ship and the ship does everything it can to not be a ship. And so the incoming missile picks the Nulka missile.
(03:29):
Now that's a very defensive thing to do. And culturally that seems to be very Australian because the other sort of major exports we seem to have are bushmasters, which are basically devices to get Australian soldiers around the place safely in case anything unpleasant comes near them. And apparently we're exporting lots of those, particularly after all the sort of things been going on in the Middle East. Apparently these things survive, the explosive devices people dreamed up. Good heavens, I can't remember the actual abbreviation, but anyway.
Gaye Francis (04:06):
That's alright
Richard Robinson (04:07):
But basically it does alll these clever things, people survive and if you're in one of these things, apparently you survive. And they've been giving a whole lot of these things to Ukrainian and all sorts of dreadful things have happened to it and everybody inside survives. That's a very defensive thing to do.
(04:20):
The other two things we seem to be exporting is the Canadians just bought basically a jindalee over the horizon radar to look at their northern coast, what might come over the Arctic from Russian sources perhaps. And that's very defensive. You just try to figure out what's coming your way. And the other thing I was just watching, we apparently are selling some multiphasic ray from some very smart cookie from Canberra who spent 40 years of his life designing this thing and all the Americans and English were queued up to get it and we're hanging onto our IP very closely if we're happy to sell the devices.
(04:54):
Again, this is all defensive stuff. Now if you think of that in the context of the WHS legislation, for example...
Gaye Francis (05:00):
It's all about control.
Richard Robinson (05:01):
It's all about criticality and control, which is what all these things are. So that cultural thing, and I can remember being taught as a kid, the soldier was so innovative in the first World War in the trenches about figuring out ways to protect their guys from bad things happening to them.
Gaye Francis (05:15):
Well, I think if you go back to legislation as well wasn't the intent, it sort of says it's the highest level of protection that's reasonably practical. So it is about that criticality and that control focus. And Australians, our culture, we do like to look out for our mates, our people. And so when you go to projects now and you... I don't know that that's front of mind anymore.
Richard Robinson (05:41):
No, I think it's gradually eroding. I mean, we're just talking about the Victoria Division of Engineers Australia. We're just talking about all the guys that came back from the Second World War and all chairman usually were one of those. And one of them <had> a plaque on the wall with him and all it had underneath was he served. Didn't say anything about how much money he made, just that he served. And I don't remember who he was. I'm sure the plaque's around somewhere still.
Gaye Francis (06:04):
So I think there's a lot of discussions around the WHS space now about ethics and well, ethics in that cultural sense about what else you could do and what is the "right thing to do". And that's getting trickier and trickier.
Richard Robinson (06:19):
Well, we sort of touched on the last podcast of the projects and things like that, but one of the things that's been happening is that we keep breaking the world up into smaller, smaller parts. And everybody's got their own little sub-domain, but in order to have the right decision, you've got to put all those domains together, which how does that happen? And the answer is we're not very good at it, but that's what the due diligence part's supposed to do for you.
Gaye Francis (06:41):
And like we've touched on many, many times, it's about getting all of those key stakeholders in the same room to have this discussion from the start.
Richard Robinson (06:49):
Yeah. And it's not about chest beating because you've got to figure out a solution that works for everybody because if it doesn't work for everybody... Well, that's the other point. I mean, I remember talking about, I'm speaking as a mechanical engineer as I was trained, but I remember reading all these things about pointing out that once upon a time psychology was very much a domain of mechanical engineers because they were the man-machine interface. And the first professor of psychology at Monash, Ron Cumming, he was a mechanical engineer. And the reason why he was in that position was because he designed this landing system that interfaced with the way in which the pilot coming in could see the lights if you're too low, the lights went red and if you're too high, the lights did some other color. And if you're in the right flight path, the lights were green. And he spent an awful lot of time trying to work on how pilots respond to, but he was actually designing a mechanical system. And there was a man-machine interface and mechanical engineers used to be particularly strong on the industrial psychology. Well, as far as I can tell, that's pretty much disappeared.
(07:47):
And so when you break into all these subdivisions, it's a bit like land use planning. One of my previous business partner, he was an engineer who had a diploma in town planning and he was into planning. But that meant he had knowledge of how you might build things and how you might plan things. But now those two domains have been completely separated. Town planning is a separate course, separate judiciary as opposed to building and building control and design, which is another...
Gaye Francis (08:17):
And that's where some of the inefficiencies come in, isn't it? Because they don't have that background knowledge to be able to do it. And I think that's even in the space of where risk management is, that terminology that we use as risk management over future uncertainty. Risk is being broken out again, whereas risk should be part of every aspect of the engineering field that you do.
Richard Robinson (08:41):
Well, I mean, it's a bit like we know these paradigms of risk. There's the safety paradigm and there's the project paradigm and then there's the commercial paradigm, which is always upside downside risk. And because people want to make money, obviously the commercial one tends to hold sway, whereas sometimes it probably shouldn't. But unless you have the right people to think about these things, and what you tend to have happen is at the commercial, we were saying, oh, those safety people, they're all nervous nellies. Let us get on with life. But obviously if you get on with life and it sort of kills somebody, that's not so good.
Gaye Francis (09:15):
I think one of the most interesting ones that I've seen when you just said about money, it's not always about money. Really interesting when you look at a project and they often say the key deliverables are on time, to budget, to spec and achieving those things. We've actually done a couple of projects where they've put to budget as the last critical success outcome. And it's really interesting to see the stakeholders think about that differently when it's right at the end of the list rather than the start of the list.
Richard Robinson (09:44):
An awful lot of projects, and this is the way people make money, obviously, is you look at a project, you are casting around the world looking for some place where the opportunity to make money arises. You're not thinking about it from the point of view of solving all the other problems that society has.
Gaye Francis (09:59):
No. So that ethics and culture come in together. And I think the other thing about it is the quality assurance aspect. And I guess that's almost the overarching thing to make sure that what you're going to say or what you say you're going to do actually gets done. And I think that's becoming more and more important. For us, it's the two ends of a project or an organisation, isn't it? It's the initial identification of the credible critical issues and the controls that you put in place. And then it's the quality assurance system at the end to make sure that those controls that are supposed to be managing those critical things.
Richard Robinson (10:33):
Remember that job we did up north and we briefed the lawyer to what we've got to do to start with, and then we delivered the result and we gave it to him and he said, "You people actually did what you said you were going to do." We both looked at each other at him and said...
Gaye Francis (10:47):
Of course.
Richard Robinson (10:48):
What else are you supposed to do in life? The fact that a lawyer thought that was sufficiently surprising to comment on it does tell you something about where society's going.
Gaye Francis (11:00):
So I think most of the time Australia's got a great culture.
Richard Robinson (11:04):
Yeah, I think that's correct.
Gaye Francis (11:05):
And I think we do have a very protective culture that they're trying to protect and put the controls in place, but you have to harness it in a way that you get the right outcomes.
Richard Robinson (11:16):
Yeah, that's true. I mean, I was sort of watching. I mean, one of the things I've listened to people talk about can Australia develop autocracy and there's a lot of reasons why it might happen, but we have compulsory voting. So if you've got compulsory voting, the center always holds sway. Whereas people who don't have compulsory voting, you can have all sorts of strange things happening from the left and right, where you've got a society where the center's always going to hold sway. Yes, you can oscillate from side to side, but it's going to be very hard to move the culture.
Gaye Francis (11:48):
So I think embrace culture when you're doing this criticality stuff and understand what inside it can be.
Richard Robinson (11:55):
And the natural inclination of Australia is obviously to do that.
Gaye Francis (11:58):
To do the right thing.
Richard Robinson (11:59):
Well, hence what our exports are commercially in a military sense. It's all defensive, which is fascinating. And our WHS legislation, which obviously says you've got to look after people as a priority. You have no choice and you can't put money ahead of that.
Gaye Francis (12:16):
So I think on that note, can't sum it up any other way. Thanks for joining us, Richard.
Richard Robinson (12:21):
Thanks, Gaye.