POWER January 2016 - 49

WORKFORCE
Risk Management: Using
Resilience Engineering to Develop
a More Reliable Workforce
All power generating companies and plant operators value reliability, but they
may be paying too little attention to a critical variable: people.
Beth Lay
O
ne million. That's the approximate number
of people in the sky over the U.S. as
you read this article. Remarkably, all will
land safely. Aviation achieves among the highest
reliability of any industry. How did that happen?
The first significant step came with the
launch of the modern jet airplane. However,
the number of accidents leveled out to a stillunacceptable
rate, despite dramatic improvements
in mechanical reliability. Something
else was occurring that prevented a further
decrease in accident rate, so attention turned
to other sources of failure-namely, flight
crew actions. About 95% of aviation incidents
are related to breakdowns in human interactions
and understanding. The implementation
of Crew Resource Management began in the
1970s after a series of deadly accidents and
was a global standard by the late 90s; Highly
Reliable Organizing and Resilience Engineering
followed five to 10 years later, increasing
reliability to its current levels.
The interesting part about this is that reliability
is about people-their knowledge, decisionmaking,
and interaction. That means reliability
gains can be made at relatively low cost.
Now picture a power plant control room in
California, right across the bay from the San
Francisco airport and in the landing approach
to Oakland airport. In the middle of the room,
sits an operator staring at a bank of screens.
Every so often he moves to check another
screen or get a cup of coffee. It's quiet . . .
on the verge of boring . . . then all hell breaks
loose! Alarms blare, screens fill up, the operator's
heart races. Everything he didn't want
to happen just happened: The plant tripped.
Plant trips result in tangible costs to power
companies that are easy to calculate, such as
lost generation revenue and penalties. The intangible
costs can be staggering and include
wear and tear on equipment due to a severe
thermal transient. Likelihood of equipment
failure is high, posing safety risks as equipment
fails around you. Under certain conditions,
a plant trip can bring down a portion
of the grid. So how do you prepare a team to
January 2016 | POWER
handle the unexpected with minimal damage?
The operations manager from the plant
in California said, " We know we're going
to make mistakes; it's what we do to prevent
them from happening again. In the event
that we trip, the key is making sure we don't
wreck a $30 million turbine. "
What he described is called " failing safely, "
a concept from Highly Reliable Organizing
and Resilience Engineering. Highly reliable
and resilient organizations are typically found
where high risk and high effectiveness coexist,
such as wildland firefighting and aviation.
Highly Reliable Organizing and
Resilience Engineering Basics
Most quality and safety systems are designed
around factory work, where " [v]ariability is
the enemy of quality, " as quality management
guru W. Edwards Deming famously
pronounced. But power plant work is not like
factory work, where employees assemble the
same components, over and over. Instead,
it is complex and inherently variable (Figure
1). When work is variable, controlling
and constraining actions-through highly
detailed procedures, for example-can do
more harm than good. An approach known
as Highly Reliable Organizing (HRO), which
is achieved through resilience engineering
(RE), can offer a more effective alternative.
HRO and RE are actually two different
philosophies from two different groups
of people that began about the same time
(roughly 10 years ago) and developed in
parallel. There is some overlap and some differences.
In working with them at Calpine,
we've created a blend.
First, a couple of definitions:
■ Reliability is effective operations over a
period of time. Reliability is focused on
reducing failures.
■ Resilience is the ability to succeed under
varying conditions. Resilience is focused
on spotting things going wrong in time to
correct course and recover or minimize
www.powermag.com
49
damage. Resilience engineering pays attention
to both failure and success. Resilience
is a system property.
The first book on HRO, Managing the Unexpected,
was written by Karl Weick and Kathleen
Sutcliffe in 2001 after studying safe operations
on the flight decks of aircraft carriers, nuclear
power plants, and air traffic control centers.
According to Weick and Sutcliffe, " [t]he common
problem faced by all three was a million
accidents waiting to happen that didn't. " They
found these common characteristics:
■ Preoccupation with failure. Small signals
are seen as possible signs of bigger
trouble, we talk about mistakes we don't
1. More complex than widgetmaking.
Power plant operation isn't as
predictable as assembly line work and, consequently,
needs a more flexible and robust approach
to reliability. Courtesy: Calpine Corp.
http://www.powermag.com
POWER January 2016

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