Engineers TV

Thomas Murphy is a reliability, asset management, project management professional with a strong electrical background and 20 years’ experience across a range of industrial sectors. He has vast experience on large-scale projects with global leaders in the data centre, power generation, FMCG and bio-pharmaceutical areas.

Thomas Murphy.

He has gained experience in many areas of the business including safety, quality, engineering, maintenance and operations with key responsibilities including developing asset management and performance site strategy, driving continuous improvement philosophy, providing operational leadership and execution of projects.

Murphy has been working in the biologics industry for the past number of years. He  worked as an electrician and is also a former graduate of Dublin Institute of Technology, Bolton Street, and has a degree in engineering reliability management and PMP^® certification. He is the chair of MEETA Asset Management. He is a member of Engineers Ireland and the Project Management Institute.

1) When did you first become interested in engineering? 

Throughout my school years, I always enjoyed maths and science subjects, and growing up on a farm there was plenty of machines and tasks to generate interest in how they worked, and trigger problem-solving skills and attain some important life lessons. One of those lessons came while feeding cattle and learning about the working of electricity by pouring water into a cattle trough over an electric fence while holding a metal bucket!

I didn’t take the traditional third level route into engineering, I went the trade route, qualifying as an electrician and heading back to college on a part-time basis to complete degrees in reliability engineering and sustainable energy engineering through Dublin Institute of Technology, Bolton Street, and Technological University Dublin, respectively.

2) Who were the mentors who helped you on your way? 

I’ve been extremely lucky to have many great mentors in all my roles to date who have provided excellent support and advice on my career development, which helped me grow as an engineer and inspired me to push boundaries and challenge the status quo.

3) Your engineer hero, or the nearest you have to one?

I don’t have a standout engineering hero, but there are a number of innovations throughout the years that I have admiration for; the invention of the light bulb by Thomas Edison had a big influence on modern life.

Harry Ferguson who hailed from Co Down also made a big contribution to farming life by coming up with the three-point linkage system, which allowed agricultural implements to be attached to the tractor rather than trailing behind. The basis of this system is still to the forefront of farm work today.

The biotechnology world has seen vast innovation change with the emergence of cell therapy treatment in recent times. Cell therapy refers to placing new, healthy cells into the body to replace diseased or damaged ones. This will have a huge impact for the outlook for patients with some of today’s most serious and life-limiting diseases.

4) What are your favourite engineering feats? 

Having recently visited London, I was fascinated by its transport infrastructure, in particular the London Underground. The Tube dates back to 1863 and now carries 1.35 billion passengers annually over a 402km network.

Mary McAleese Boyne Valley Bridge.

In Ireland we have made wise investment in our road/motorway network, which allows relative ease of travel to most of the country. Two important engineering feats aiding movement are the Mary McAleese Boyne Valley Bridge located on the M1, providing a connection with the north of Ireland, and allowing the journey to be completed in a little less than two hours.

Dublin Port Tunnel is also a wonderful feat, aimed at reducing HGVs in the city centre as well as reducing pollution and noise; it drastically reduces the journey time to the city centre, albeit at a cost.

 

With an electrical background I’ve always been fascinated with Ardnacrusha, it is an engineering feat which has stood the test of time and was an important driver in rural electrification in Ireland.

5) What is/are the most important trend/s in engineering right now? 

The main important trends emerging in engineering at present are sustainability and digitalisation. First, regarding sustainability, there is now a very clear focus on climate change and the impact to the environment. A growing emphasis on waste reduction, use of plastics, use of renewable energies is now becoming the norm in modern life.

Digital transformation/industry 4.0 is also having a big impact on industry and revolutionising our ways of working by optimising processes and improving productivity through data analytics and artificial intelligence. Robotics is also advancing rapidly, particularly in areas like manufacturing and healthcare settings.

6) Regarding data centres, how do we continue to attract inward investment in this area while ‘avoiding blackouts or using up too much electricity’?  

It is fantastic that Ireland can attract major foreign investment from some of the world’s biggest companies. In this digital age, there is a massive demand for reliable data storage and with Ireland’s location on the edge of Europe, attractive corporate tax rates and its suitable climate.

It has become a sough-after location for data centres. This should be embraced but obviously a consequence of all this is that data centres are an extremely significant consumer of electricity, and they are currently attributed with usage of about 20% of the total usage.

With the problem identified and well highlighted, now it’s time to task the data centre providers with finding a solution through infrastructure planning. Peak demand times and when there is little renewable electricity available are proving to be problematic times.

The logical option is to increase more generation, but this would have a negative environmental impact. To alleviate this issue, I would explore the idea of the data centre installing renewable sources such as solar and wind power to negate some of the pressure on the grid. This would mean dispersing to suitable parts of the country in order to achieve this, and possibly working together in clusters. As battery storage technology develops, this should be looked at too.

7) What are your favourite book/s? And what are you currently reading?

I like to read and enjoy the separation from devices and screens. A interesting book I’ve read in recent times is The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt and Jeff Cox. It is written in a fast-paced, thriller style; it is the gripping novel which guides management thinking through a process of ongoing improvement!

I also enjoy crime thrillers, with a particular appeal for authors Harlan Coben and Lee Child. I am currently reading Fool me Once by Harlan Coben. The book is an international bestseller and has featured as an eight-part series on Netflix starring actress Michelle Keegan.

8) What is the one piece of advice you would give to somebody starting out in the profession?

Have a learning mindset and approach every situation with a good attitude. You can only control the controllables, and attitude is one you can control.

Engineering is a profession that is changing and evolving quickly, with new methodologies and technologies coming on stream regularly, so it is very important to stay updated with the latest advances.

Ensure you map out objectives for yourself as a look-ahead and, equally, don’t fear reflecting on your day/week /month/year to evaluate what worked well and what could be improved. Your career is one of continuous improvement.

9) Are there any other measures that we need to take in order to help improve the gender balance within the profession?

The biggest challenge for gender balance in engineering is breaking the perception. The perception that you have to be a certain type of person to be an engineer. Whether that be good at maths or be a certain physical side, some cohorts are misinformed about the profession and the range of skills needed. Language plays a big part in all of this.

Gender bias is a huge societal issue, and not just in engineering. People are surprised if they come across a female trades person such as a plumber or mechanic, the same surprise is expressed if there was male childcare worker or a male midwife. This thinking exists from within the home from a young age, if a child played with Meccano or a farm they would be considered 'boyish'. Until this mindset subsides and changes, the gender gap will struggle to close.

Schools have a big part to play in the gender balance in engineering, with young girls exposed to STEM activities, interaction from companies within the industry to promote the various elements of the profession and act as role models for aspiring young people. Unless young people are informed about what types of engineering exist and the opportunities within them.

There is a positive move towards transparency with the reporting gender data and metrics, which will help drive awareness and encourage companies to take action towards achieving gender balance.

10) Looking back over your career, is there any project, or particular time in your life, that stands out?

I’ve been extremely lucky to work on many rewarding projects throughout my career. The one stand-out one was in an iron ore mine in Gällivare, Sweden. Gällivare is a small town 100km north of the Arctic Circle and provided the experience of the spectacular spectacle of dancing light known as Aurora Borealis or Northern Lights. Nighttime temperatures reached  -33°C during my stay, which was an experience.

Aurora Borealis or Northern Lights in Gällivare, Sweden

11) Is there any engineer you wish was better known? 

There are many great emerging Irish engineers and one that is fresh in the mind is Eoin Casserly who was awarded Engineer’s Ireland prestigious Chartered Engineer of the year 2023. Eoin has established a structural engineering consultancy and has been making an impact on different projects around the world.

12) What is a typical day for you?

It may be a bit of cliché but there is no such thing as a typical day for me. There is a good variety to my work changing from project to project, but I find I spend a portion of my time in project meetings, either with individuals or interacting with cross-functional stakeholders.

The challenge can be finding time to action tasks and outputs from the various meetings. I am lucky to have a hybrid style of working, which eliminates the commute when project needs allow.

13) What are your favourite films/TV dramas?

When time permits, I am prone to tucking into Netflix series mainly on a sports topic I should add. Some of the ones I have watched are basketball’s The Last Dance, Formula 1: Drive to Survive, and Sunderland ‘Til I Die. I am currently watching Six Nations: Full Contact.

14) What is the best piece of advice that you have ever been given?

'Your career is not linear', which is so true and indeed very apt for life itself. You can plan as much as possible but there will always be a disruption which when need a response and a realignment. And don’t fear the change but instead embrace it and see where it takes you. As Mike Tyson once said, “Everyone has a plan: until they get punched in the face”.

15) What do you do to relax?

I like to cycle and run in my spare time and happy been lucky to complete on some of the famous cycle routes across Europe. I also enjoy the GAA and I am involved as a performance analyst with a number of teams.

Sa Calobra climb Mallorca

 

 

 

 

 

One of the most unnerving things a senior leader can face is when a significant event happens that feels totally out of the blue.

This could be anything from finding out too late about a major project in financial trouble to a serious accident that claims lives. You ask yourself things like, 'Weren’t there warning signs that this was going to happen?' or 'Why did the systems that we have in place not pick this up?'

Frustratingly, most of the time there were lots of warning signs of the drift towards failure, and the information was already known within the organisation. But these warning signs can be uncomfortable to raise – they feel like bad news.

However, receiving bad news early is like getting a head start in a race – it’s exactly what senior leaders need to hear in order to run their business reliably and safely.

Jodi Goodall is head of organisational reliability at Brady Heywood.

Receiving bad news keeps you in touch with the real performance of your business, and learning about that real performance helps you make informed decisions, which means you can innovate fast – without a major failure.

Bad news could be anything from a project missing a key milestone, near misses, repeat incidents, or unexplained anomalies in data. It could also be gaps in people’s risk knowledge, communication silos in your organisation, or even reports of bullying.

Individually, each of these things may seem insignificant, but together you begin to see patterns in your culture, issues with your systems, and weaknesses in your risk controls that you couldn’t see before.

As a senior leader, here are the top three things you can do to get more bad news flowing in your organisation:

1. Clarify the specific types of bad news you want to hear.
2. Encourage bad news in your messaging.
3. Design your reporting system to raise the bad news.

Receiving bad news early is like “getting a head start in a race” and is what senior leaders need to hear to run their business reliably and safely.

Clarify the specific types of bad news you want to hear

In my experience, most leaders haven’t considered the types of bad news they need to hear. If you want to hear more bad news about your high-consequence risks, then you must have a clear idea in your own head of the early warning signs of failure so they become vivid to you. This is often described as having chronic unease.

Being specific about the types of bad news you want to hear helps your organisation reframe its view of 'bad' news to 'helpful' news, which also means you naturally respond more positively when it is raised.

How can you start to define the specific types of bad news you want to hear? Here are three ways:

• Understand your major hazards, their controls and the effectiveness of those controls. Engage with technical experts, those doing the work, and the data to get a deep understanding of the high-potential risks, their causes, how each one is controlled, and what it looks like when each of those controls is performing effectively. A good risk register or set of bowties will hold the framework for this. This will help you identify the early warning signs of failure. 
• Socialise the question with other leaders in the business. Ask, 'what bad news do we need to hear about in order to manage our business better?' Encourage the group to consider a major failure scenario, and then consider what the early warning signs of failure could be across systems, risk controls, leadership, culture, etc. Display these lists in rooms and locations where you commonly make decisions or might hear bad news.
• Consider previous events and others’ stories of failures and accidents. Appreciatively inquire, 'What early warning signs would have helped prevent this?' 

Encourage bad news in your messaging

If you walk into a restaurant dreaming of oysters, a rare eye fillet and a glass of red, but only ask the waiter for 'food', don’t be surprised if you get soup and a beer. It’s the same with your own messaging. If you leave your communication to generic statements like 'safety is our priority' then people won’t really know what you want to hear. Being specific removes the ambiguity. Messaging is everything you say, give your attention to, measure and do. Here are some ways you can encourage people to give you their bad news:

• Carve out regular time to visit technical groups, planners, workers in the field and contractors. Specifically, ask about the risk controls and their relevance to your people’s work.
• Thank those who tell you openly about bad news. Remember how uncomfortable this can be. Where appropriate, reward such action.
• Consider what you reward. Do your people have bonuses and KPIs that inadvertently reward for not reporting near misses and high-potential issues upwards? This sends a message to your organisation about what is important to you.
• Reflect and seek feedback from your peers around your messaging. Ask, 'where do my actions, words or focus seem to be in conflict with seeking bad news?'

Design your reporting system to raise the bad news

High-consequence events happen rarely, so your reporting system needs to be sensitive to the early warning signs. Interestingly, these often have no immediate impact and can easily go unnoticed. Careful design of your system is key. Here are some common issues I see in reporting systems that you can check in yours:

• Is your event significance determined by 'actual outcome' instead of 'potential outcome'? If you are prioritising events based on what actually happened, rather than what could have happened, your system could be burying a rich source of failure data amid slip-trip type events. What types of events are getting the most attention, being reported to the CEO or given a full investigation? Are these injuries that couldn’t have been much worse, or are they related to your major hazards? If they are the former, reconsider your definition of what is significant.
• Is your reporting limited to incidents only? This is often because the system is seen as a 'safety incident reporting system'. Beware of this situation. There are many more sources of bad news to learn from than incidents, such as hazard reports, monitoring systems detecting exceedances of performance criteria, assurance checks, or even general cultural issues raised by teams. Separating failures into different reporting systems can mean that you miss patterns. Use one system to report all control failures, cultural and system gaps to increase your learning.
• Do your systems fail to categorise information in ways that allow it to be analysed? Being able to sort, trend and analyse your data can help you see patterns you couldn’t see before. Can your data be separated by the major hazard type? By potential risk? By control failure mode? Beware – improving these things will get you more bad news. But bad news gives you rich opportunities for learning. And those organisations who learn fastest reap the rewards. 

Author: Jodi Goodall is head of organisational reliability at Brady Heywood, Brisbane, Queensland. Sean Brady and Jodi Goodall’s thoughts about serious accidents, mine safety and High Reliability Organisations can also be found at bradyheywood.com.au/insights. This article first appeared in Quarry in April 2022.

Following a serious accident in his workshop, where one of his most experienced maintenance team members had both of his legs crushed, the workshop manager confided to me that it felt 'out of the blue'. His workshop had an excellent safety reputation.

The event occurred during a crane lift of a large steel pipe. The pipe dislodged, knocked a nearby team member to the floor and rolled onto his legs. He would never walk again.

Afterwards, when the investigation was complete, what frustrated the workshop manager most was that he already knew most of these issues. Similar incidents had happened, but with no bad outcome … They had a PO in the system to get the right lifting equipment ... He himself had observed that as they got busier there were too many jobs going on with too little space … The end of month bonus did encourage the team to take shortcuts to complete the jobs on time … The list went on.

Investigations are helpful for bringing out vital learnings from incidents. But in my experience investigations also cause good business leaders anguish over actions not taken in hindsight – not to mention the devastating impacts of the incidents themselves. So rather than waiting for people in our group to suffer before we take stock and act, we can instead understand the techniques that best-in-class businesses use to prevent serious accidents altogether.

There are organisations out there that manage to maintain near-accident-free performance over many decades, despite operating in high hazard and complex environments. They are called High Reliability Organisations (HROs). One of the five characteristics that helps them to achieve this feat is called chronic unease, or a preoccupation with failure.

Chronic unease

How long has it been since a major accident or failure in your business? Long periods of success can result in us taking our eye off the ball – we might even start celebrating our success. What we know about major accidents is that when organisations are in this mindset, they are often drifting towards failure. Accidents don’t just happen when things are going badly; they often happen when things appear to be going well.

Chronic unease is a strategy to combat this. It is a psychological state where individuals at all levels of an organisation feel a sense of constant discomfort and healthy scepticism about how risks are being managed. This leads them to relentlessly hunt for warning signs of potential failure. Then the trick is to make those warning signs more vivid, and act on them to prevent those failures occurring.

In September 2021, I delivered a webinar discussing chronic unease and how it can be applied in practice. There was a lot of interest in the topic; a lot of people are keen to incorporate chronic unease in their organisations.

A common misconception is that chronic unease is just about combatting complacency at the frontline. But exhibiting chronic unease is not the responsibility of one group. And in practice, chronic unease is only able to flourish in organisations in the long run when environmental factors are structured to support its presence.

There are four areas that are essential for an organisation to work on to create chronic unease and sustain it (see Figure 1):

1. A questioning attitude.
2. Psychological safety.
3. Risk competence.
4. Systems to detect and capture warning signs.

Adopting a questioning attitude

A questioning attitude is a curiosity about the signs in front of you and a commitment to looking deeper. It helps you explore risks, uncover warning signs, and understand what those warning signs might mean. It provides a clearer picture of what your organisation’s real performance is and where the real issues are. You should question your assumptions, any unintended outcomes (positive or negative) and anomalies.

Ask questions like:

• Do we understand why we got that result?
• What could be the worst outcome?
• How could that control fail?
• What is our backup plan if it does?

Creating psychological safety

Psychological safety is a cultural environment where people feel like they will not be personally judged or punished for speaking up about warning signs or issues – especially by their seniors in the organisation. Psychological safety is important if you want to make sure you have a chance of receiving the benefit of everybody’s observations. You don’t want anything left unsaid, such as:

• People’s own mistakes and errors;
• Near misses;
• Things that look strange or different.

Ever heard the phrase 'that’s career limiting'? If your people feel they could be personally judged or punished for reporting incidents, making mistakes, or challenging decisions or directions they perceive as unsafe (especially to more senior people), they may choose not to raise issues – and rarely is it obvious if people are holding back.

Psychological safety is cultivated when leaders reward and recognise those who speak up, even if it turns out to be nothing, or even incorrect. Punitive approaches often discourage speaking up.

Risk competence is improved by a combination of technical knowledge and experience, gathered from a wide range of sources.

Improving risk competence

Everybody from the board to the frontline needs to have a clear understanding of the hazards and how they are managed – in other words, a high level of risk competence. If we cannot visualise what could go wrong, or if we do not have a clear picture of what our hazards look like when they are being well controlled, then it is easy to assume that things are going well.

I am not talking about classroom training in risk management. Risk competence is improved by a combination of technical knowledge and experience, gathered from a wide range of sources.

The more risk competence your organisation possesses, the more understanding there will be about any weaknesses in how the risks are controlled, and the more easily that warning signs can be noticed.

Capturing warning signs

Our systems for detecting and capturing warning signs may include:

• Systems to monitor physical risk such as strata, dust or gas monitoring systems;
• Reliability systems such as maintenance and inspection systems;
• Reporting systems for your people to tell you when unexpected things happen.

These systems should support the process of capturing, analysing and taking action on our warning signs. Even if we collect a lot of data, if the data is not turned into meaningful information or does not reach the right people, it cannot inform our decision-making.

Creating chronic unease

Practical ways to create chronic unease include:

Storytelling. This is hands down one of the best ways to create chronic unease. People are more likely to retain information if they hear it as part of a story. Also, as big failures do not happen very often, storytelling is the best way to recreate an experience for people that they can learn from and relate the details to their own situation. You can use stories or findings from your industry or other industries, use your own stories, or invite your technical experts to share theirs.

Technical experts taking a teaching role. Invite your experts (internal and external) to share their technical knowledge about a particular aspect of a risk or a control. You could have regular 15-minute presentations from these people instead of a toolbox talk.

Exploring your data. Take time in groups to explore your data (maintenance, incident, quality, production) with fresh eyes. Get 'fidelity' on the numbers by reading incident descriptions and asking experts. For example, start with your hazard reports. Get a deep understanding of the types of reports you are getting. For example, are they all related to one type of hazard? Are there blind spots elsewhere? Do all the reports come from one team?

Leaders spending time in the field. Field time is all about learning for everybody involved. Listen to those doing the work about what makes it successful and what makes it challenging. Take an expert or a set of fresh eyes with you (not a pack of people).

Using LEAN continuous improvement techniques to explore successful work. For example, 'learning teams' and Kaizen approaches. Leaders can use the knowledge discovered through these techniques to increase learning.

Using bowtie diagrams as shared risk knowledge. Organisations need a clear picture of their major hazards and something to anchor conversations to. Bowties enable everybody to speak the same language and to have a common understanding of hazards and controls – from the boardroom, to the planning team, to frontline workers.

Final thoughts

There are many factors working against us practising chronic unease. That is why telling people to 'report more', 'notice more', 'care more' or to 'have more chronic ease' does not work. Without the right organisational environment, chronic unease cannot survive the long haul.

Leaders must address the organisational factors that suppress chronic unease, and build practical influences into their organisation to encourage its continued presence at all levels. Organisations must ensure they are set up to incentivise wanted behaviours through their actions as well as their words.

The way we message, measure and reward within our organisations, the level of our understanding of hazards and controls, and the systems we put in place to capture information all have a profound effect on whether warning signs can rise to the surface, receive attention, and be acted upon.

Chronic unease takes effort to build into your organisation so that it sticks and becomes chronic. It is worth it. In the end it is all about finding multiple ways to amplify your warning signs and make them more vivid, so you can act on them before they lead to failure.

Author: Jodi Goodall is head of organisational reliability at Brady Heywood, Brisbane, Queensland. Brady Heywood has also developed the Queensland mining and quarrying podcast series 'Rethinking Safety' as part of the Brady Review. Sean Brady and Jodi Goodall’s thoughts about serious accidents, mine safety and High Reliability Organisations can also be found at bradyheywood.com.au/insights Check out the recording of the webinar 'What does chronic unease look like in practice?' on the Brady Heywood YouTube channel, where Goodall digs deeper into practices for risk competence and systems that capture warning signs.