About

I build and steady HSE systems on demanding projects.

That is the short version of the last six years. When HSE performance needs attention on one of DRA Global’s mining construction projects in Africa, I get put on a plane. Sometimes the reports still look reassuring, but leadership no longer trusts what they say.

The work is the same each time. Find out what is actually happening, as opposed to what the documents say is happening. Work out whether the system needs updating, the work needs changing, or both.

How I got here

I started in 1995 as a medical officer with a fire and emergency service in Eswatini. It is a useful place to begin, because the first thing you learn when treating people after an incident is that it was never one failure. It is a run of ordinary decisions that each looked reasonable at the time, made by people who were not being careless.

From there, the work went offshore. Kazakhstan, Nigeria, Malaysia, Indonesia, Ghana, Angola. Drilling units and production platforms, where the margin for error is small, and everybody on board knows it. Then Sierra Leone with the US State Department, consulting back in South Africa, a drilling campaign out of Cairo, and rig crews in Abu Dhabi. Sixteen countries, twenty postings, and four returns home between them.

Between 2019 and 2021 I also held a freelance OPITO auditing and course facilitation contract alongside the day job, which is why two roles overlap in that period.

What the job actually is

On a construction project, the HSE manager owns three things that matter: whether the system on paper describes the work people are actually doing, whether the workforce has been trained well enough to do it safely, and whether an incident gets investigated honestly enough to stop the next one.

The first is where the difficulty sits. A safety management system is written before the project starts, by people who are not on site, for conditions that have not happened yet. Six months in, the schedule has moved, the contractor mix has changed, and the document describes an operation that no longer exists. Nobody decides to work around it. It drifts.

Most of what I do is close that gap: rebuild the system so it matches the work, train people on it properly rather than issuing it, and keep checking that it still fits as the project changes. In Liberia that meant designing an ISO 45001-aligned system from nothing for a $1.2 billion project and coaching over 2,000 staff onto it.

Behaviour, and what it is not

I spent two years as Behaviour Coach at DRA building a Behaviour Based Safety system. I am careful about how I describe that work, because the field has a reputation it has partly earned.

Behaviour-based safety done badly is a programme that counts observations and blames the worker. Done properly, it looks at what precedes a behaviour and what follows it, and then changes those conditions rather than lecturing the person standing in them. If a safe method takes twenty minutes longer and nobody has built twenty minutes into the plan, that is not a behaviour problem.

Writing, and outside work

I write. Mostly about people rather than procedures: why safety departments become scapegoats, what change fatigue does to a workforce, how managers lose the room. Twenty-two pieces so far, and a few of them are not about work at all.

I also run The Money Maze, a podcast and newsletter explaining South African company results and market mechanics for people who hold shares without ever having been taught to read a set of financials.

I’m beginning to study instrumentation and automation. It is a developing interest, not part of my current professional practice.