#53 - Fuzzy Bitar - Putting Safety Back in the Line: On Proportionality, Supervisor Leverage & Point-of-Work AI

continuously learn, recognize that things will go wrong, but you have to learn and make sure that those mistakes teach you what to do differently next time. Okay, is the first thing. So having that learning, uh, mindset and that humility to learn, but then have the confidence and the conviction to achieve your goals, your missions, your agenda, your vision As you said, so something I would call perhaps confident humility is something that I think is a good formula to, to set as a, as an organizational tone for success.

You are listening to the Safety Heroes Podcast, the podcast where we delve into the world of safety professionals and explore the critical role they play in ensuring every human goes home safely. Our guests are the unsung heroes and natural leaders of the safety space. If you're in the safety space or have no clue what happens in safety functions, this podcast is for you. Join us as we celebrate these heroes, hear their stories, and discover the human side of safety and make sure it's constantly evolving for the safety of our people. My name is Moussa. I'm the founder and CEO of Pixera and your host for these episodes. Because when it comes to safety, every hero deserves a voice. So welcome to the Safety Heroes podcast. Fuzzy.

Musa, how you doing?

Thank you so much for being here.

Thanks for having me.

Background story. When I was 22, 23, I worked for BP, and I used to work in their Iraq operation. I worked very closely with operations team in Rumeda, and your name would always come up. Fuzzy Bitani would always come up in a very positive way as someone who's been very influential on the business in general. And, you know, fast forward, what is it now? You know, 15 years later, uh, have being able to spend time with you and really hear your journey and your story. And I became so passionate about safety in general because I got lucky to have spent time with the safety team when I was working in that operation. And, you know, every time I heard you speak, it taught me a lot and it helped center me and, and connect me back to why I'm in the safety space. So I'm so happy and grateful that you found the time to do this with us. Thank you for being here.

No, thank you very much for having me. I appreciate it.

Thanks, Fazie. And honestly, if you can share a few things about your journey, you know, like what, how did you get into this space? You know, you're, you're, you're, the passion resonates so clearly. How did you get here?

I've been in the industry now, what, probably over 35 years. And unfortunately, when, when you go through your work over this time, tragic things happen. And I've had, and I call these pivotal moments in your careers. And the first pivotal moment for me was when I was working in the Gulf of Suez in Egypt, and I was on a diving vessel overseeing a diving operation on the monitor, and we had a diver 50 meters in the water, uh, doing, working a subsea. And unfortunately, uh, for whatever reason, his helmet came off and he started taking in water. And, uh, very tragically, You could see that he drowned in front of us. Of course, we immediately launched the rescue diver, but by the time he got to him, it was too late. So, when you see the impact that this has on, first of all, the widowed wife, the fatherless children, it's just devastating. And then, of course, on the team itself. So, I always thought of myself as a good leader, but my relationship with safety was completely transformed after really understanding the human impact of that. Now, of course, we don't want everyone to have to go through something like that to change their attitude towards safety. So, our challenge as safety professionals, safety leaders, or leaders in general is how do we achieve that without having to go through events like this?

I'm sure these pivotal moments unfortunately must have happened Over and over again?

Well, there's been 3 in my career. So that was the first one. The second one was when I was working in Indonesia. I was the project manager for our first LNG project in Papua, and we had something close to 10,000 people on the ground from all walks of life, you know, from people from Japan, from Indonesia, from Australia, from the US, UK, and so on. And You know, one of our Japanese colleagues was working on one of the towers and through a miscommunication, a language miscommunication, crossed the barrier and tragically fell through the open— through an open grating. And of course, again, you see the impact that that left on the family and the team. And the final pivotal moment for me has been really, these all occurred under sort of my overall responsibility, was in the North Sea when I was head of operations. I looked after BP's global operations, and this was a fatality offshore on one of the installations in the North Sea. And they're just simply devastating events that really bring to life and to home the human impact of safety.

Yeah, thanks for sharing that. And you being someone who, you know, was in a leadership position, I'm sure you had a lot of time to reflect on, you know, the fundamentals of what's happening in operations that lead to these devastating events. And I'm sure throughout your journey, your understanding kept evolving and maturing. How would you describe what's happening that leads to these within organizations?

I think one of the most fundamental points is actually, you know, when you think about safety leadership, it's actually not safety leadership, it's just leadership, okay, in general. And In BP, as you, as you know, we've had our fair share of, uh, of significant incidents, you know, whether it was Deepwater Horizon or whether it's Texas City. Um, and these have been defining moments in, in our history, and we've learned a lot from them. And actually, we've shared with the industry many of the lessons learned because we felt it was our, our responsibility and duty to do so. But. I think there's many things that lead to a disaster like that or tragic events. And my strong encouragement, you know, is to look beyond the individual. Look more at the system, what broke down in the system, what broke down, um, what broke down in our culture, uh, that potentially could lead To to incidents occurring, so I think the biggest learning over time is how do you create the right environment for safety to thrive? What is the cultural that you need to do that? And then how do you design your systems? Because people, as we know, will make mistakes. But how do you design the system so that people, if you like, fail safe? I don't like the word fail particularly, but how do they fail safe there?

And why do you not like this word particularly?

Well, I think the word fail sometimes is absolute. Failure is not absolute. I prefer the word maybe falling. When you fall, you get back up again. And I think that's the key here is we're going to make mistakes. We're human, we're fallible. We need to recognize that people do not come to work to deliberately do bad stuff, right? And of course, we're gonna make these mistakes, and then we're gonna learn from them, and we're gonna get up and we're gonna keep going. You can't keep dwelling on the past. You have to learn from the past, but you can't keep dwelling on it.

Particularly for the individuals, it seems like they shouldn't feel guilty, or like they should be able to get back up and—

I do like a little bit of tension, okay, in the system. I'm not, you know, I could be criticized for that by some people, but, you know, people should feel a responsibility when something goes wrong. think again, where is that, where does that responsibility, accountability lie? We should not always go to the site, to the individual, because often those mistakes are a symptom of a greater challenge that's going on.

I love what you said at the beginning when you said safety leadership is just leadership. And something like the team and I always talk about, it's like within the world of safety, when you frame things around safety, the mistake or psychological safety issues or errors that happen can cause major incidents and fatalities. But everything that applies to safety is completely irrelevant when it comes to normal office operation. You know, like the things are dynamic. That's what I did, and I caused psychological— like people weren't psychologically safe, and these errors started happening within the business, and we started, you know, moving in the wrong direction as a team as well. It's always something that I realize. It's like you're in such a critical realm when you're talking about safety and operational activities, but everything that's learned there is extremely valuable for organization as a whole.

It is, and I think this is part of the challenge when talking about safety. There's pros and cons to everything, and a lot of it depends on the maturity of the organization. The reality is, Good operations is good safety. So I actually like to think that just safety is inherently part of running a plant operationally sound, rigorously, you know, what you would call perhaps operational excellence. Okay. And of course, when you put safety on the side, you could tend to sort of take away sometimes accountability from where it should belong. I.e., it belongs with the safety team or the safety professionals or whatever. But actually, safety is first and foremost is a line accountability. Of course, the supporting teams like HSE have a role, but you want safety firmly owned in the line. So the con, of course, of it is if you don't talk about safety separately, uh, it gets deemphasized or people don't see it as a priority. Are you— they— because you're gonna talk about production, you're gonna talk about cash. costs, right? And if you don't talk about safety, sometimes you do need to sort of have this big focus on safety. So I think you need both. You need that strong line ownership, but also I do feel we need to emphasize safety. Very few organizations, I think, will shift to a place where it's just inherently built into the day-to-day of what you do.

You know, an interesting thing to explore with you as you're talking about this, we're in a lucky position where we work with oil and gas, But then we also work with companies that are operating data centers, where it's a much faster-paced environment, much lower emphasis on safety policies. And of course, you start seeing the spectrum of cultures that are embedding safety in everything they talk about, et cetera. And it sometimes tilts more towards— it's outside of operations, it is becoming a bit overly maybe emphasized than it being a core part of operational excellence in a way that's part of the culture. And then you see Areas that are completely disconnected from thinking about it or caring about it. They're just operational. And what's interesting is it seems like they will eventually move to a place closer to the middle. Do you have takes on that? If you think about industries outside of oil and gas, do you see that eventually everyone has to hit a certain level of maturity and safety culturally?

Well, I think the most important thing is to ensure that whatever you do, is proportional to the risk. Because I have seen, and I've worked with industries outside of oil and gas as well, and sometimes you can over-process, for example, activities that perhaps do not need such high level of checks and balances of control. And actually that can make you less safe. And so I think—

Adds complexity to your operations.

You add complexity, you see risk assessments upon risk assessments, and you think by adding paper and process, you're getting safer. But actually my strong belief, and I have seen this, I've spent a lot of time on the frontline myself, I've seen this is that actually all you're doing is you're making certain, you're feeling comfortable with the signatures, but actually, are we managing paper or are we managing the risk? So I think you wanna just ensure that whatever, particularly whatever hits gets to the front line is proportional to the risk, is as simple as possible. And one thing to guard against is that when something goes wrong, and as we've just talked earlier, inevitably it will, our natural reaction is to add something. And I think, uh, you know, someone, I forgot the name, but, uh, a pilot once said, you know, perfection isn't when you keep adding stuff, it's actually taking away stuff until there's nothing left that you could take away and it's as simple as possible. Uh, there. So I think the biggest learning for me is just ensure whatever you do is proportional, uh, to the risk. Um, and it works both ways.

I love that. And honestly, something, something that I, that, that I find interesting, I spent, I spent a lot of time with the team at BP, you know, Clint, Craig Skinner, Graham, and, and their team. And I love the way they frame safety. It taught us a lot as an organization. And they always say, They think of it as a pyramid where you have to start with leadership, make sure there's a culture that's set, leaders understand that people will make mistakes, they understand the human principles, they understand how to communicate, and then focus the organization on SIFs, and then kind of start focusing on the people on the ground that are doing the work, the frontline workers. And the majority of the time it's contractors, not internal resources in a huge proportion. Maybe you can share kind of your philosophy when you think of that. And I'd love us to go a bit into the frontline because especially when it's a very large organization and you have so much happening in parallel. It seems like the people that are operating and at risk are these frontline workers, and I want to zoom into them after you share your thoughts.

You're right, and Clint and the team are right that it does start with leadership because leadership sets the tone that leads to the individual beliefs and behaviors and ultimately the culture of the people in the company. Because I always say leadership drives behavior and behavior drives Culture, so the tone is set from the top. And of course, that's very important. But also what's critically important is the leaders at every level, particularly I would even say the site level, right? Because the site level is probably the site leadership, whether it's the site manager or the supervisors, more importantly, because the supervisors is that interface between the front line and management, and they need to have that trusting relationship where there's that connection. Where you could pass information up and down. Okay, they're where the rubber hits the road. So I think it's all important messaging. But I am, you know, one thing I've learned is choosing the right site leadership is critical to a successful operation because that then defines how you work with the frontline. Um, and, and really the tone and culture of that's very localized. site, you will see different cultures in different— in BP across the world, we have inconsistency in our cultures, and a lot of it is defined by local leadership.

Very interesting thing when you talk about supervisors. We're trying, when we keep asking ourselves the question of how can we actually add value to the people on the frontline because they're the ones who are at risk, and a lot of what happens in the world today through technology as well is so far removed from the frontline workers, be it like you're monitoring the contractor himself, the contractor to organization, or you're looking at procedures and policies, or you're doing a one-size-fits-all training. But the interesting thing about the supervisor, as you were saying, is creating enablement programs focused on them. How do they understand their level of impact on the work, on the team they work with? How their communication can impact culture and psychological safety and what that can do, but also giving them tools where Suddenly, imagine if that supervisor can record their toolbox talk and that information gets analyzed and broken down and he can be given feedback. Hey, you didn't involve your team enough, or did you notice this risk? And you have that communication funnel between the organization and the person on the lead in the frontline. It sounds like more love and more work needs to be done there, if anything, but do you have any thoughts around it?

I do. I've thought about this a lot because one of my biggest regrets And when I looked after operations globally in BP was, uh, perhaps did not invest enough time or capability building with the supervisor. So if you think of a site, typical structure would be you have the site leader, uh, the site manager, very important. You have the, the supervisor, and then you have a sec— uh, the operators, technicians, right? And I think we focused on, on the site managers a lot, and that was, that was hugely important. But actually, I think even more important, and, and I think many studies have shown that, you know, where you have that strong capability at that supervisor level, actually you make a big difference. So I think you're onto something when you wanna focus on building capability or providing enabling technology. To the supervisor to allow them to do their jobs better is great. Now, what we're seeing actually is perhaps a little bit of the opposite is perhaps we're putting more administrative tasks onto the supervisors, which is taking away time from them being able to spend it with their teams on site managing the risks. So I think anything that actually frees up their wrench time to focus on, on the day-to-day supervision, the day-to-day interactions, uh, the better.

Absolutely. Interestingly, so the team created this prototype and, and they said, they went to supervisors with some of the customers we work with and they said, just record your toolbox talk. We've done quite a bit of discovery to think of exactly what you said. How can we do something that they want versus something that's pushed up down, top down to them? And what we told them is Once you record it, you're going to see this page that summarizes it, just transcribes it with AI and says, based on the activity that you mentioned, did you consider the following risks? But then the more they do it, it gives them points and shares it with the site manager. And we wanted to do a few per company we worked with. And every one of them, when we stopped, kept doing it consistently and saying, like, has the data been shared? Like, just the excitement of them being seen. by the site manager and their work being recognized and observed created this motivation and excitement where they didn't— they wanted to keep going with it, which even made it seem like they're less— they feel less observed or less heard in some cases. I don't know if that's true in your opinion.

No, I mean, I, again, I think, so I like what you said there is, first of all, that the user is very much involved in the development of the product because often we produce products thinking what the users want. But actually, it doesn't end up being useful to them. So starting with the user is the right place in my view. The second point I would say is whatever you do that, you know, when you have these observations that get reported somehow or used, you know, sometimes they could be used in a way to drive compliance in a disciplined way. And I think that's a mistake. I think, and I've seen it both where you have cameras and so on, but actually if you do it in a coaching and a development way, far more impactful. And then the final point, the real test, the real test of a product is its sustainability of use. Often I've seen many products that come out And we get excited by them, then do you say, have they been adopted at scale?

Exactly.

And if they haven't, then actually you start questioning, is it really impactful or are we just fabricating success?

Even with that, even with pre-job training being where you add value, it still feels like the most impact— we quickly realized that as a team. That's why we're investing there, is the most impact we can have is if we provide value to people who are at the job, because no matter how much I train a supervisor or the supervisor learns, or we get complacent, things get lost, we forget things. And if you have technology with you where you can identify information on the spot, you can have summaries of SOPs or be able to get microlearning stuff to talk to your team about and be like, look, this is something that happened, an incident a couple of months ago, and just be able to give them tools to enable them on the job. I think that's the future of learning and value with what AI is bringing too.

Before AI, digital analytics, advanced digital analytics, I think it was useful, it was helpful, but I never really saw it unlock the potential we thought it would. Now, I think AI will do that, or it certainly has the potential to. I already see evidence of that. occurring mainly so far in sort of productivity gains, searching lessons learned and databases, summarizing it, as you say, but actually beginning to see AI adopt to identify unsafe hacks and take action in the moment is also coming along. So I think back to your point though, is the key I believe would be, how do you Simplify things as far as possible at the point of execution, which is the operators and technicians, so that we don't clutter them up. Whatever they get is relevant for what they are doing in the moment. So I think that's the key, is simplify at the point of execution.

Built around them and them actually choosing when to use it. It's a tool that's there to support them, that trusts them, et cetera.

Yeah,

absolutely. If we take a step back, what's on the horizon for you now, Fazi? So what are you focused on? What are things you're trying to to spend time on?

I think we have to re— one thing again I've learned in operations mainly is that stability of agenda is important and stability of organization is, is important. But of course, companies go through org change, you know, sometimes constantly, sometimes too often, some more than others. But I guess the point I would make is when you put an agenda, a strategy together, it takes time to deliver it. And sometimes we're impatient, okay? And we want to change it before it has had time to yield the value. Now, some people might say, you know, Fuzzy, you're old-fashioned and you don't like change. It's the truth. But I think what, you know, what I've— and of course you have to keep updating yourself and you have to keep developing yourself. But you do need to let things

simmer

and have time, like to take something to embed it. The workforce I had was 40,000 people with contractors and subcontractors trying to embed things like life-saving rules or process safety fundamentals takes time, right? And often we're impatient. So I think right now my view would be, look, and then in BP, we are going through some work change like many companies. So, and again, you know, Just value, value stability more of agenda and structure. Let it yield its value and then keep updating yourself. Now, we do need to be open to new technology like AI, and we are, and we're bringing a lot of that in and trialing it and seeing what works and what's successful with some, with some success. So it's finding the right balance in all of this.

And by the way, I wouldn't say old-fashioned at all when it comes to that. Literally, the team that we were talking about, we were on an offsite yesterday. Leadership Offsite, and they call it the shiny object dilemma or the shiny object syndrome. And it's, you know, you try a new feature, you build a new feature very quickly because you're in a rush in a product business and you deploy it. And naturally when you deploy it, you have to obsess over why it's not working well and keep iterating on it. But the fact that there's another interesting feature you can build, it's very easy for people to say, okay, this didn't yield the things we were really excited about. Let me just push this new.

And this new one.

Feature out.

Yeah, sometimes you have to keep incrementalizing

to

get it to the right place.

100%. And that's why, like, our product lead says that very well. He says, that's why vision is so important though. Like, if we don't have that anchor of vision, because it allows you to say, no, I need to keep iterating because I need to, that's where I wanna get to, versus I'm just trying to follow successes that might work horizontally. And then you're kind of walking around the mountain without really moving upwards to the goal, from base camp to base camp. But I wouldn't say that's old-fashioned. If anything, as long as the vision is clear and the objective is, for example, standardization and alignment across the company, it's let's keep going at it. And at some point you just really see the results and you really understand that it's a product that works. And in your perspective, when it comes to It's something that I'm always fascinated by when it comes to very, very large organizations. What are fundamentals that you learned that you, you know, I'm sure you've made many mistakes as well. What did you learn as, as the approach that you can, do you need to follow to make sure that—

Yeah, I mean, I have a rule of thumb that I use generally for large organizations, and it really goes around structure, people, and process. And first of all, you need to choose the right organizational structure again for the context you're in. There's no perfect organizational structure. Okay? You will choose the one that meets the context that you're in today and the scale and size and complexity of your company. Right? So that's what we certainly learned after Deepwater Horizon and in BP and in upstream. We went to a functional organization because We, you know, we needed to do that for the scale and size that we were in and, and, and, uh, and where we were in our journey. The second thing on process is you reach a point of scale where you need a management system, an operating management system to run. And this needs to be more than a book on a shelf. It's gotta be something that you, that you live, that you apply day to day, that you, you monitor yourselves against, you self— You check yourselves against, are you delivering on the requirements or the standards that you have set yourself, whatever they are? Okay. So I think having a robust management system that is actually implemented rigorously is the second thing. And then the final thing would be our people. And that really is around capability and culture, making sure you've selected the right leaders, the right people, and actually have you set the right culture for both operations and safety to thrive would be key. So I think that's the rule of thumb that I think has stood the test of time for me. Others may have different formula, and I respect that, but those are some of the learnings I certainly took away.

Great. And as you were talking, the one thing that I was like, I'd love to understand a bit more, do you feel like you have to have a certain number of reporting lines at a maximum for this to be successful, particularly when the organization is massive, or Can you apply these management systems to large groups of people?

No, you can apply management to large groups of people. And people, you know, and I don't think there's a right or wrong on number of reports, but there's again pros and cons on everything. So you, I've seen us go through cycles like many companies where, you know, when you have less number of direct reports, it's, you're, you, you sort of have that control structure. Okay. Now, if you go for a large number of direct reports, a flatter organization, you know, it tends, if you like, to be more free. But actually one of the downsides is you create a lot more interfaces, and interfaces can introduce complexity. So you have to find the right balance, but again, depending on the context that you're in.

Fuzzy, honestly, this has been amazing. I really enjoyed every part of the conversation. I know you're spending a lot of time, something you're really passionate about, something you brought up a lot today is leadership. As we close out, what do you recommend an organization like us or any other organization digs into, be it, be it a particular book or a philosophy or in our, in our journey to become better leaders and improve our culture within the organization? What advice do you have for us?

I'm not sure I'm one to give advice, but I think one thing is we never stop learning. You know, I am the— I have learned through My own mistakes are the mistakes that we've made in BP. That's how we, and we continue to make mistakes. So I think you have to be humble enough to, you know, learn continuously, learn, recognize that things will go wrong, but you have to learn and make sure that those mistakes teach you what to do differently next time. Okay. Is the first thing. So having that learning mindset and that humility to learn, but then have the confidence and the conviction to achieve your goals, your missions, your agenda, your vision, as you said. So something I would call perhaps confident humility is something that I think is a good formula to, to set as a, as an organizational tone for success.

And resilience, I feel, and not giving up. I mean, with all the failures, it's, it's, it's easy for people to sometimes say, doubt themselves or doubt the vision or doubt the goal. I feel like resilience sticks, that comes in with that confidence piece.

Resilience is important on a personal level, but also on an organizational level. Our industry is going through massive change right now, massive change, and many people are impacted in many different ways, right? And it's hard, right? Because these are, there's a human connection to many of these people who are impacted. So I think it's how do you manage this as elegantly, as gracefully, um, as you can. And you have to watch out for that organizational resilience because in my experience, when you have serious accidents or something, it can be often linked or not directly linked, but I would say indirectly linked to perhaps the disruption The distractions that people that you're going in. We often look for these numerical leading indicators to tell us where the next incident is coming. But actually, I would actually encourage people to think, you know, where is there uncertainty in the organization? If you're divesting an asset, you should think, oh, maybe I'm at higher risk of something going wrong there, for example. So I think, I think you have to look at this more broadly than the sort of technical leading indicators. So organizational resilience and of course your own resilience. are critically important.

Amazing. Fazi, thank you so much for joining. I really, really enjoyed this. And yeah, we'll keep in touch. Hopefully we'll talk to you in the near future after a lot of things evolve and you go through the next phase of travel and events.

Well, Musa, thank you very much for having me. I hope it was useful today. Thank you.

Thank you, Fazi.

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