SFAIRP: Moral Imperative vs Commercial Reality

In this episode of Risk! Engineers Talk Governance, due diligence engineers Richard Robinson and Gaye Francis discuss this season’s theme of SFAIRP: Moral Imperative versus Commercial Reality and that SFAIRP is hard. 

They discuss the tension between the legal and moral weight of “so far as is reasonably practicable” and the commercial pressures organisations face every day, including:

• How SFAIRP is an objective test, but objective to whom, and determined when?
• Why leaving the "i" out of SFAIRP matters more than you might think.
• The danger of delaying design decisions until elimination options are no longer viable.
• The misuse of HAZOP as a substitute for early-stage critical hazard thinking. 
• Why the WHS legislation may actually be trying to bring creativity and innovation back into engineering.

The season will also cover topics on AI and the human effort required to verify it, the integration of the risk curve, risk language and the creeping rigidity in how terms are used, resilient and adaptation strategies.

If you’d like us to cover a specific topic or have any feedback we’d love to hear from you. Email admin@r2a.com.au.

For further information on Richard and Gaye’s consulting work with R2A, head to https://www.r2a.com.au, where you’ll also find their booklets (store) and a sign-up for their quarterly newsletter to keep informed of their latest news and events. 

Gaye is also founder of Australian women’s safety workwear company Apto PPE https://www.aptoppe.com.au.

Transcript

Megan (Producer) (00:01):

Welcome to Season 7 of Risk! Engineers Talk Governance. In this first episode, due diligence engineers, Richard Robinson and Gaye Francis discuss the overall theme of the season: SFAIRP, Moral Imperative versus Commercial Reality.

(00:20):

We hope you enjoy the chat. If you do, please support our work and give us a rating and subscribe on your favourite podcast platform. And if you'd like more information on R2A or have any feedback or topic ideas, head to the website, www.r2a.com.au, where you can also sign up to our newsletter and purchase our books.

Gaye Francis (00:43):

Hi Richard. Welcome to another season - Season 7 of our podcast.

Richard Robinson (00:47):

Happy New Year Gaye!

Gaye Francis (00:49):

Yes, we're well and truly in the thick of it, aren't we? We just had a discussion this morning about what we were actually going to call this season after six seasons already, and is there anything else that we can particularly cover? And I think one of the key things that came out of our (live forum) event last year was the difficulty or the challenges that SFAIRP brings to an organisation. So we've titled this particular season SFAIRP: Moral Imperative and Commercial Reality. And I think the key out of this was SFAIRP's hard!

Richard Robinson (01:26):

SFAIRP's hard because the first part of it is, and that's what our lawyer at our (live event) basically said: It's so far as you can, not so far as you want, not so far as you think you can afford or your client can afford, it's so far as you can. And that's a moral imperative in a very Kantien (philisophical) sense. We might have a chance to talk about it in this podcast season.

Gaye Francis (01:49):

We might. We might. Some of your favorite rants that you like to go and talk about.

Richard Robinson (01:53):

Yes. We might get into the groundwork of the metaphysical morals that he wrote in order to clarify and explain to people what his critique of pure reason was actually about.

Gaye Francis (02:03):

It's alright, audience. I'll give you a warning before we do that podcast.<laughs>

(02:10):

And some of the things that we've been asked questions about is; and part of that is testing the optimum bias. A couple of times we got asked during the event was, we don't actually have the money to do this, so how do we justify not doing something? And then how much money do we need to spend on it? So as we said, the moral imperative versus the commercial reality, there's a lot of things that input into that decision.

Richard Robinson (02:43):

And we've heard lots of lawyers who said that, and it's one of those questions I'm always puzzled about. They keep saying that SFAIRP is an objective test. Now, objective to whom? Because if you say you have a limited amount of money and you just can't afford it, that I would've thought on one level was an objective test. But when they mean objective tests, they mean objective tests as determined by the courts. And the legal system.

Gaye Francis (03:04):

After the fact though.

Richard Robinson (03:05):

Well, very often after the fact, although the lawyers obviously think it's an objective test before the fact too, and that's from a design imperative. But that then led onto, which we've seen a fair bit of, is that during the design process, they don't consider the elimination option early in the design process when obviously it's the most cost effective.

Gaye Francis (03:25):

Correct.

Richard Robinson (03:25):

Because if you come up with a possible elimination option when you get down to the final design.

Gaye Francis (03:30):

It's never going to be SFAIRP.

Richard Robinson (03:31):

Because it's just going to be too expensive to go back and redesign the whole thing.

Gaye Francis (03:35):

I think that is another topic for podcasts is that whole safety and design and what that actually means. I think it's almost got to the point of like HAZOP and HAZID and things like that. It's got a terminology around it and a particular process that people say, this is the safety and design process or applicational technique, rather than it being a process to think through what all those high level critical hazards are.

Richard Robinson (04:06):

Yeah. Well, I think the point, I don't know if it's going to be quite deliberate, but if you have that view that HAZOP and HAZOP, from our point of view, is late in the design process when design's more or less fixed and you're testing in a very real sense more for operability than critical hazards, which you should have dealt with on the earlier in the design.

Gaye Francis (04:23):

Well long ago.

Richard Robinson (04:24):

But you sometimes start to think that it's actually been a deliberate... We don't know that. And we're not saying that's the case, but you sometimes get the feeling that it might've been deliberate because they knew that if they did think about it early, they would've had to have done it another way.

Gaye Francis (04:41):

Other things about it. And I think that's another one, isn't it? Delaying decisions so that an option is no longer SFAIRP. And we've seen that in a number of cases and organisations are grappling with that or engineers are grappling with that of we delay the decision so long, and as you said, the design's moved on from being preliminary design to more a detailed design. And of course you're never going to get ... Well, very rarely do you get the elimination option up at a detailed design stage.

Richard Robinson (05:12):

You might recall our experience with the Australian Government solicitor and Western Sydney Airport and whether it should be in Western Sydney at all.

Gaye Francis (05:19):

Yes, you were game to ask that question. Should we move the airport? And the answer was very quickly, no, it is where it is and that is it.

Richard Robinson (05:27):

But the Minister basically decided that, which the Minister's entitled to do. But if you're just doing it from an engineering viewpoint, you wouldn't put it there, you would put it in Canberra.

Gaye Francis (05:35):

So there's an elimination option. One of Richard's favourite things, and I think a topic that's becoming more and more relevant, and we're seeing more of it is AI and the human effort required to verify AI and what it does for you. So I think we'll do a session on AI.

Richard Robinson (05:57):

Likely the next session, I suspect, if you haven't been preparing, just to give you an indication of how ill prepared for these things, Gaye is, she's got a holiday in the next holiday in New Zealand booked, but she hasn't got accommodation yet.

Gaye Francis (06:10):

Now you're really telling all my secrets. I don't know about that. People have said they like the naturalness of our podcast, Richard, how they just flow. Now I'm stuck for words because you tripped me up.

(06:24):

Another thing we're going to talk about is ignorance is endemic.

Richard Robinson (06:33):

That actually flows onto ... Remember I told you when I was running some courses at RMIT and I was running an undergraduate courses in, I think it was the maker and the made, I think it was, RMIT had this thing about they should humanise engineers in some way by giving them one subject. And I remember one of the fourth year students looking at me if we'd done this blast, it was a fourth year engineering student because we had combination of art students and all sorts of interesting people in the room. And one of the fourth year engineering students looked at me and something along the line, "You might all be born creative, but you can be trained out of it". Which I thought was a reference on engineering education.

Gaye Francis (07:08):

And maybe that's what the SFAIRP provisions of the WHS legislation is trying to do. It's trying to get that creativity and innovation back into engineering and into design.

Richard Robinson (07:21):

I can remember as a mechanical engineering student, design was always about creativity. And you have these sort of kids coming up with absolutely weird ideas like some guy was having a hard time for his project for the year and you know how automatic sprinklers normally do a circle.

Gaye Francis (07:36):

Yeah.

Richard Robinson (07:36):

But most yards are square.

Gaye Francis (07:38):

Yeah.

Richard Robinson (07:39):

He designed a sprinkler that would actually do a square.

Gaye Francis (07:42):

That's sort of cool. I've never seen one.

Richard Robinson (07:44):

And that's such an obvious thing to do. And this guy just dreamed it up in a week.

Gaye Francis (07:49):

He didn't obviously have the marketing tools that he needed to keep it going though.

Richard Robinson (07:53):

I have no idea what happened to him.

Gaye Francis (07:55):

Okay. That little section may need to be a little bit edited by our producer, and now we'll continue.

(08:03):

A couple of other topics that we're going to talk about, and it sort of fits in this whole SFAIRP moral imperative and commercial reality. It's about integration of the risk curve.

Richard Robinson (08:15):

That's right. Well, mathematically how to show it, but basically if you spot the dot on a typical risk curve, the integrated area under the risk curve is probably a factor of two at least. Greater than that, you've understated the risk badly.

Gaye Francis (08:29):

Yeah. And I think ... I've gone blank. What was the last one that we said?

Richard Robinson (08:35):

That rolls onto risk language, words, numbers, and pictures and so forth, which is the threat barrier diagrams and so forth, because that's really the question of large language model AIs, which I think is probably the next (episode) we're going to do much to Gaye's surprise.

Gaye Francis (08:49):

It is. But I also think that there's additional confusion coming into the language of risk and it's becoming more ... Robust isn't the right word, but people are using certain terms to only mean certain things. And so there's a terminology and a way that people are using the risk language that hasn't got any discussion in it anymore.

Richard Robinson (09:17):

That's right. I agree. And it's particularly frustrating. I mean, our legal system is using risk in a peculiar way, as far as we can tell, but that probably needs enlarging on too. But again, that's probably that session on risk language will be quite an interesting session.

Gaye Francis (09:32):

I think just going to the language thing, and that was one of the key takeaways from our event last year, especially when Joe (Coleiro, Lawyer) talked to us: If you're going to do a health and safety review in line with the WHS and OHS legislation, make sure you use the terminology that's in the legislation.

Richard Robinson (09:50):

Correct. There's no point using any other term.

Gaye Francis (09:53):

And we're even talking about the simple thing of leaving the "i" out of SFAIRP. We see a lot of people just summarise it as SFARP without the "i". And Joe really went into, and we've been into the importance of the "i" in another podcast (Season 6 Episode 8).

Richard Robinson (10:12):

Yeah. It's "as is", the time at which you make the decision. But again, and that's the reason why people can do something late in the design process, which means at that time it's no longer. Whereas if you'd done it earlier, it would have.

Gaye Francis (10:24):

Exactly. So I think with our podcast sessions, like everything, we're going to take some of the questions that we've taken from the event. Also, Richard and I do a lot of courses through Engineering Education Australia. We get a lot of questions in that. So we sort of want to try and make this (season) more about the practical problem solving. In our newsletter, we've got a little corner called Q&A with R2A. And so this is sort of an extension of that. And we've also had some nice notes come back in our email system and Richard got one on the weekend from the AMPI Pilots inviting him to deliver a conference paper for their upcoming conference in Darwin, but saying that he finds our podcast... What was it? "Our excellent podcast" and enjoying it very much. So if anyone else has got any questions out there, we would be happy to receive them either via the chat or via email.

(11:20):

So I think there's a lot to unpack in this season, just recapping it. SFAIRP the moral imperative versus the commercial reality. And I think that there's some headbutting in that space right at the moment and it's a very difficult problem to solve for organisations.

Richard Robinson (11:43):

Yeah. I think I've got one currently I'm trying to sort out and I think the client's not going to be very happy as a result, but that's all I can do.

Gaye Francis (11:49):

Yeah. And that puts engineers in a very, very difficult position as well because you've been asked to do something and paid to do something by a client. And the discussion about, do engineers have to walk away from some of these questions?

Richard Robinson (12:04):

Yes.

Gaye Francis (12:06):

That was very short and sharp. So we're looking forward to delivering this season. We hope you can join us next time, but thanks, Richard, and we'll see you soon.

Richard Robinson (12:15):

Thanks Gaye.