Roads to Resilience

they’re very careful … On the other side stepping off a kerb, twisting your ankle [people are less careful] ” (Generation Team Section Head). Key risk scenarios are identified and plans for dealing with them identified. For example, “ The fire brigade have a predetermined call out of three pumps and a turntable ladder and that’s been worked out previously ” (Generation Team Section Head). If an incident happens, procedures define who has the role of ‘Incident Manager’. Here again behavioural insights help and so for this role Drax select, “ people who can recognise risk and apportion the correct risk to an incident, they can look beyond the obvious, they can see it may be minor but this could escalate, they’re good at risk assessment ” (Generation Manager). Similarly, incident managers must be able to take the initiative in difficult situations.

Risk management processes Throughout Drax there are many processes, tools and techniques used to

manage risk and two will be described in more detail: • tools, near-misses, visualisation and scenarios • working with contractors

Practice 1: Tools, Near-misses, Visualisation and Scenarios. Formal risk assessment tools are widely applied at Drax: “ We have a very, detailed risk assessment matrix where we identify the risk, the risk owner, we try to weight the issue in terms of probability and impact, we then look at ways to mitigate the named risk ” (SVP Corporate Development). The process achieves a consistency of approach across functions and departments, thus stimulating learning: “ Every Thursday we have … a safety brief … [where] experience [gets] passed on... ” (Generation Team Section Head). At Drax, hundreds of different risks are analysed and documented, different in type and form: “ The types of risks we look at range from retaining key people, not securing a proper permit, lack of the security around the internet … we are looking at risk across every element of the business ” (SVP Corporate Development). Identifying potential risks and communicating them is incentivised at Drax: “ we award vouchers for people who put in near misses … it is about the accolade of receiving the voucher, it gets publicised with people talking about it ” (Generation Manager). Safety ‘near misses’, are photographed and the story of how they occurred is documented. The benefits of visualisation are obvious: “ Because people can relate to pictures ” (Generation Team Section Head). The real value of near miss reporting is that it also has a predictive angle: “ We have got safety statistics and we look at near misses, they are allocated to plant areas, we look at the safety triangle, if you’re getting lots of near misses then it is likely that you’re going to have a hit. ” (Generation Manager). In addition to using photographs and near miss reporting to raise risk awareness, Drax use Scenario Planning extensively. “ We’ve got an on site fire team … that are trained for scenarios, [and] the external fire brigade come here and do training at Drax because we’ve got a good training facility. ” (Generation Manager). Despite the processes and formalism, the Drax organisation is also realistic and recognises that processes on their own are not sufficient: “ A risk assessment is not the words on a piece of paper, a risk assessment is the thinking … it is appreciating the risks ” (Generation Team Section Head).

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Appendix A Case study: Drax Group