A year after NERC and its regional entities worked to set up human performance training sessions — only to see them cancelled by the COVID-19 pandemic — the Texas Reliability Entity scheduled the training on its own.
“We’re trying to give the people what they want. [That’s] Marketing 101,” Matt Barbour, the Texas RE’s training and communications manager, said after the last week’s session.
The Talk with Texas RE webinar featured Jake Mazulewicz, director of JMA Human Reliability Strategies, who is experienced in working with personnel in “high-hazard” fields who want to improve reliability and safety.
Drawing on his background as an emergency medical technician, firefighter, Army paratrooper, and a human-performance improvement lead for Dominion Energy, Mazulewicz shared tips on how to reduce human error and improve performance.
“To err is human. It doesn’t matter how much education you have, how much experience you have; everybody makes mistakes,” Mazulewicz told his virtual audience. “I don’t know of any exceptions. I don’t know of any organization or team that has been error-free for any length of time.”
Mazulewicz offered “practical techniques for reducing human error, “but also managing it.” He explained the differences between a control-based approach to reducing errors (expect perfection, root out failures, hold individuals responsible) and a learning-based approach (expect humans to be humans, expand successes, focus on systems and teams, not individuals). He also shared examples of how “this stuff works.”
“People doing front-line work … stuff goes wrong,” he said. “Most of the things that go wrong in a high-hazard industry are because of a consolidation of subtleties. Things just don’t work out quite right. If you want to change the game, stop punishing people for making mistakes.”
An impromptu survey of the more than 70 attendees revealed 56% said this was a new approach for them. Mazulewicz said he was only giving a high-level overview, but that more in-depth training was available for anyone willing to pay for the services. He quoted a study that said Fortune 500 companies spend $37 billion a year to reduce errors.
Barbour agreed that while human-performance improvement may not be a normal subject for industry training, surveys of Texas RE’s members indicated that is exactly what they want.
“We’ve tried to broaden [our training] in the last couple of years,” he said, noting that the 70 participants are about par for a Texas RE course. “Our feedback tells us that REs want to hear more from industry experts and other REs.”
On April 15, the Texas RE held another talk, this one with a pair of SERC representatives discussing recent changes to NERC rules triggering certification reviews for operating and certified reliability coordinators, balancing authorities and transmission operators.
At the next Talk with Texas RE, scheduled April 29, FERC’s David DeFalaise and Mark Hegerle will review recent events at the commission.
