Sacrificing Safety: Lessons for Chief Executives

Anglo American’s Grosvenor coal mine explosion in Queensland in 2020 is ultimately attributable to overwhelming production pressures. Underground coal mining is a particularly dangerous activity, requiring delicate engineering judgements to manage a variety of hazards in an ever-changing geological environment. These judgements need to be protected from commercial pressures. However, Anglo had set production targets and provided incentives to reach and exceed these targets, which inevitably corrupted judgements about how to produce coal safely. The Grosvenor explosion demonstrates how disastrous these targets and incentives can be in highly hazardous environments.

Large companies are carefully designed to maximise profit. If they are exposed to catastrophic risks, they must also be carefully designed to ensure that these risks are effectively managed. This imperative must be built into their organisational structure just as fundamentally as is the profit motive. This book shows how to do this. It provides a model that CEOs and their senior executives should apply to their own organisations.

Sacrificing Safety draws on the Board of Inquiry Report into the Grosvenor accident, and also on insights from other hazardous industries, particularly the oil and gas industry. The author was originally appointed to the Board of Inquiry, but withdrew, in circumstances that are explained in an appendix.