Tim Bannerman's Theatre Chronicles – Part Eight: “Chronic Unease”
Strapped in, sort of, and ready to roll. After the will-we-won’t-we wait for the break in the monsoon dump – now it’s “go!”.
Glad of ear-plugs, pottering awkwardly forward like a comedy car, pilots wiping condensation from inside the screen with hands and soggy hankie. Can’t see a bloody thing!
Handbrake on for final checks. Eight of us squeezed in behind the pilots, me between two too big men – not the best should we need to escape upside down through tall, thin windows either side…
Too late now. Handbrake off – and up we float, a rattling, shaking, flimsy thing, like a paper balloon. Tilt forward suddenly into the still gusting wind along the runway. Then up. Higher, higher.
Way down below glimpse shanty town rooves, green trees but mostly white, wet, opaque as a momentary squall sweeps rattling back until – there, the sea, the clear expanse opening below. The grey-blue-green Arabian sea, stretching far, far to the horizon where we head. Flying to a spot somewhere way out ahead.
Humans in helicopters, holding our flimsy little lives in our flimsy little hands. Halfway between heaven and hell, we fly between sea and sky, East to West, hoping our different faiths hold good.
I am with my client, on 16 June 2013, on our way to where something terrible had happened almost exactly five years before. Something that should not have happened, where a man died – the reason why, prior to my first ride in a helicopter, my first trip out to an off-shore platform, I attended the obligatory Helicopter Underwater Escape Training Course back in the UK.
It was not a pleasant experience.
In order to go off-shore, everyone has to know what to do should the highest risk involved in already sky high risky, off-shore work materialise: a helicopter falling into the sea. So you find yourself in what for many, self, oh, very much included, is your worst nightmare.
Imagine being strapped into a metal mock-up shell of a helicopter, suspended over a pool of a suitable depth for you and it to be fully submerged when lowered into it. From this you have to escape through a perspex window by your side. But if you’re in the middle seat, between two too big men. Hmmm.
You are carefully briefed beforehand so you know clearly what’s involved, what to expect. There are frogmen standing by to rescue you should things go wrong. As always, theory and practice are different things, no matter how carefully you are prepared for what you need to do. The window? You’ll be fine, they say.
First time, you have to hold your breath. Hold my breath? you ask. Yes. Don’t worry, you’ll be fine, they say. Nobody’s died. Not yet anyway. Now, time to go.
Down, hit water, shock, cold, under, deeper, stay calm, hold breath, fumble, straps, buckle, can’t see, can’t find, panic, feel again, find it, fight, stay calm, there, got it, open, chest hurts, need to breathe, release damn you, gives, push straps free, feel for window, look, can’t see, need to breathe, for God’s sake, let air go, push out window, pull at frame, head through, now shoulders, arms, kick legs, free, need to fucking breathe, bursting, please, up, break surface, air, sweet air and gasping, still alive, strange joy, swim, the edge, there, hold, and strong hands pull you up and out. Alive.
Then again. And again. With ‘rebreather’ now that lets you breath your breath. Old breath, getting older each time you rebreathe it. To keep you alive under water till the breath runs out. Just CO2 then. No life left.
But now. This time. Upside down. Because that’s what happens. The weight above, engine, rotors. Turns turtle. And now you don’t know where you are.
Window’s gone. Up is down. Down is up. Left is right. Right is left. Where am I? Breathe your breath. But lost. You’re lost. Who am I? Where? All gone wrong. Dark. No, wait. There. Window. Belts! The buckle. Fuck. Breath going, getting staler. Need to get out. Get out! Release. Shit. Again. Now free. Push, pull, out, up. Breathe. Fresh air. Alive. No joy now. Just dizzy. Tired. Not again. Please. Not again.
When it’s all over, the nightmare, played out again and again until the instructors are satisfied we can all do what’s required “in the unlikely event…”, the certificate is signed and now we can do what we need to do to do our job. For most of my nearly all, young, fit companions, this was working off-shore on drilling rigs and oil and gas processing platforms, or on wind farms, anything professionally requiring helicopters to get there and do the job.
So why, in my case, a 61 year-old grandpa, fond of a fag and a drink if still miraculously not too unfit after a life spent working in and with theatre one way or another over the last 35 years or so – a not untypical “luvvie” all in all – was I putting myself through this?
It had started, in a sense, by accident.
We set up our organisational-learning-through-theatre company in its own right back in ’96, three of us taking a deep breath as we left the relative safety of our jobbing lives as actors, directors, writers and the like, in all the forms of theatre we could find to earn a crust over the preceding years – to run a business.
Three musketeers we saw ourselves as back then, tackling fickle fate full on with not much more than our rapier wit, our swashbuckling chutzpah, we liked to think, to back us in the biggest risk any of us had taken to date. With no capital or subsidy behind us, we needed to find the cash-flow, find it fast, for a business that would not only be true to our values, our ambitions, our combined creative energies and desires but would keep us afloat, feed our families, pay our mortgages, all the usual stuff – it was not évident as the French would say.
Being still a relatively new idea, people in big organisations, from Government bodies to major corporations which is where the work and the money was, understandably took a while to “get it” and be prepared to trust in what we had to offer. Why should they part with the dosh we needed to survive as an independent, commercial business if they didn’t know what we were about?
Many was the time I would knock on doors only to be looked at, despite wearing my best suit and tie, as some kind of left-field weirdo who should be wearing tights and spouting Shakespeare (which I have to admit I did from time to time, still do on occasion – Shakespeare, not the tights). The idea that we might be able to, say, help improve performance, change the culture, develop skills, identify blocks and barriers to realising potential and so on, seemed a big step when you couldn’t see what it was we did, what role theatre could play, why you should risk something different, even dangerous, in the serious business of business, without evidence of effectiveness and, that scary phrase, return on investment.
Fortunately, there were some people out there with the imagination and self-belief – after all, their job could be on the line if it all went horribly wrong – to take a chance on us. This was helped by coming to see us in action at various invitation events hosted by our kindly kick-start guardian consultancy which had taken a chance on me at the very beginning of the journey along the way.
So we started with a handful of brave souls back in the early ‘90s, non-risk-averse visionaries by and large, excited by something innovative and different, who helped us understand that the key to any sustainable success in our unusual field was the relationship with the commissioning client, the person who placed his or her trust in you personally and held the budget, the more senior the better.
This was the time of Total Quality Management or “TQM”, Business Excellence and Continuous Improvement and many other buzzy phrases that people believed would transform their business, if not overnight, then in due time and if they thought we could help them with that, then so much the better!
I knew very little about business, let alone TQM and all the rest of it, but what we could and did do, thanks in great part to French Industrial Consultant and polymath, the late, great Michel Fustier, my mentor and partner in those early days, was make it human. Michel’s plays that I had translated from the French right at the beginning of things when we lived in France, which was how I met him in the first place, brought all these mysterious buzzwords and confusing business theories to life.
In the classic tradition of good theatre, if somewhat quirky in Michel’s case, they used humour, pathos and engaging characters to build a universal story of a typical organisation in areas of industry and commerce. The plays showed how they struggled with challenges both from within and without until they used one or other of these new business theories as the catalyst to find a way through.
By the time we were ready to set up our own company, after our apprenticeship with our guardian consultancy and Michel, we had already built a small network of relationships and a growing reputation for our original approach. We called it “Culture Modelling”, which had nice businessy ring to it, or so we hoped, but, essentially, it may not surprise you, it was Shakespeare’s phrase from Hamlet:
“The play’s thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King”
- that remained at the heart of everything we did.
We were not “role players” as some other early competitors in our field styled themselves. As we developed our own bespoke approach to the needs of our clients, we became specialist playwrights, fashioning a metaphor for the worlds we encountered in original, crafted scripts around the themes in question. We then hired a skilled team of professional actors, including us in the early days, to put across in both scripted and improvised interactions with our usually delighted audiences. Delighted because, for once, they found that learning and training could not only be acutely relevant to them – they could see people “just like me” in our engaging theatrical mirror – it could actually be fun.
It was one of our actors who said to us one day a couple of years on: “You know, my Dad would love this.”
“Oh yes?” I said. “Why? What does he do?”
“He’s a Loss Prevention Officer”, she said.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“He works for a drilling company in Aberdeen. His job is to stop accidents happening off-shore.”
“Really?” I said. “Sounds interesting. But what’s that got to do with us? We don’t know anything about that kind of thing. That’s not what we do, is it?”
“Leave it with me,” said Ellie. “I’ll have a word with him and see what he says.”
It started with a job designed to help three small drilling companies that had recently combined to become one big company. This involved bringing the new executive board together to look at how they might define a set of corporate values they could all buy into, share and own, as a way of working together more effectively in developing their business strategy.
The research was undertaken, the play written and duly performed by a small team of actors to the audience-cum-participants of the board, no more than 9 or 10 people, in a day’s workshop in a small room which we facilitated with our hearts in our mouths. There was a lot at stake.
So it was we started working with a man, let’s call him Brian, who changed our lives. Folk fiddler, whisky lover, humorist of the driest Aberdonian, if not Doric, kind, he had a passion for keeping people alive and unharmed in one of the most hazardous working environments on this earth. To our joy, he saw the potential for us to help him do just that. And give his daughter a bit of work in the process.
This first job must have done the trick because the next enquiry from Brian was whether we could help their team of supervisors, and particularly a newly promoted manager from within their ranks, become true professionals in their critical role in managing what they called “Personal Responsibility for Safety” to help change the “Safety Culture” for the better in all things off-shore.
Thanks to a brilliant idea, one of an endless (and continuing) stream from the creative genius of one of my fellow musketeers, I ended up extending the football metaphor he’d chosen for the supervisors into playing real 5-a-side football at 7 in the morning on Day Two of our repeated two-day programme.
Imagine a not-so-macho facilitator, responsible for achieving good value outcomes for our trusting client, trying to herd a bunch of burly drilling supervisors into the gym of a nearby girls school at an early hour. Several of them, I discovered, the supervisors not the girls, had been carousing the night away in downtown Aberdeen and had not been to bed at all.
I learned the meaning of the “red-eye”, as they call the early flight out to the rig, at close and literal quarters in several near homicidal battles for the ball, without the semi-anaesthetised advantage they had over a very sober, scared and skinny me. Just because they adhere to a strict code of personal responsibility off-shore doesn’t mean that always translates to the same standards on “The Beach”, as they call home and the place where the softies work on-shore.
As I have said many times since: how I survived, I don’t know. But we not only survived, we were then asked if we would design a major Safety Leadership programme for the whole company, which we duly did.
A succession of 3-day programmes, two per week, unfolded over a period of some three months all told and, during the process, we were rigorously assessed and awarded the much sought after accreditation by the leading industry safety standard setters of the time.
Yet, of course, for all our belief that we were firmly on the side of the angels in the work we were doing, we were undeniably complicit in the business of carbon extraction which, 20 years on, is viewed in an even worse light now than it was then where the well-being in general of the planet is concerned.
Overshadowing this, however, it is important to understand that in a world dependent on carbon as its principal energy source, as it certainly was then and still is to a large extent, it’s when things go wrong that people sit up and take notice of just what it takes to provide what they normally take for granted – fuel for their cookers, cars and the planes that take them to their holidays abroad.
We know about Deepwater Horizon in 2010, the 11 lives lost, the pollution of the Bay of Mexico, thanks to Hollywood and because it’s still relatively recent in our minds. Back in 2001, the scars of an even worse disaster that had occurred 13 years before still pulsed their livid wounds everywhere one looked in the oil and gas industry of the ‘90s and early ‘00s. No more so than in Aberdeen and in the eyes of everyone who worked in the North Sea Oil Field at that time.
167 people died on 6th July 1988 in what is still the worst loss of life in a single incident in the oil industry to date. Everyone knew someone who had worked and, in so many cases, died on Piper Alpha on or before that tragic day in 1988. All the people who came on our courses in 2001 carried the memory of family and friends lost on that day and those who had joined the industry and gone off-shore since that date knew intimately what had happened, to whom and how.
Without going into the detail of what happened here, suffice it to know that “root cause analysis” revealed a catalogue of errors, many of which stretched back to the original design and the decisions that were taken at the highest level to reduce cost and manage the process in ways that drastically affected what happened on that day in 1988. Ultimately, though, like all catastrophic disasters where human activity is concerned, it was a chain of avoidable events, linked by fallible human behaviour, that led to an explosion and the consequent uncontrollable inferno indelibly printed in the memory of all who witnessed it.
A key part of our job, from these first forays into the world of what became known as “Behavioural Safety”, was, and is still, to ensure that this memory, and others of this ilk, is kept alive, however painful, and communicated to those who weren’t there, may not remember it or might not know anything about it. This is to prevent the ever-present danger of complacency, particularly in environments of extreme hazard, whether on land, at sea or in the air, even in space, which can cause harm and, at worst, multiple fatalities. And it was Brian who helped us understand how we might use the process of root cause analysis as a structure for our safety programmes, dramas included, so we could help people learn from the mistakes that were made, how and why, to prevent them being repeated.
A phrase you might often hear used in these hazardous, process- and profit- driven worlds of ever-present risk to human life and that of all organic life on earth is “Chronic Unease”. Not a comfortable phrase and one which some may associate with a state of extreme anxiety. But if taken as a constant reminder that, in situations of potential risk of harm to people and environment, it is essential to maintain an acute level of awareness in all our senses – sight, hearing, touch, smell, gut – alongside the laid-down procedures designed to keep you safe, then many, particularly those who live and work in hazardous environments, find it useful.
Sadly, we do repeat our mistakes and our level of awareness can slip which is why I came to use three simple questions I learned from our work in the nuclear industry to help me both in facilitating safety workshops and for my own safety in both familiar and unfamiliar situations; three questions to provoke and help sustain this state of Chronic Unease in high hazard environments.
They are:
What can go wrong?
What is the worst that can happen?
How much worse could it get?
As applied to the home – electrical equipment, say, heating or the use of tools, or children and fire, unguarded appliances, the list is endless – it’s a useful check to run through in a wide variety of situations. Or driving the car – tyres, a smell of petrol, a rattle that wasn’t there before, the weather, etc., etc. – you get the drift.
In a nuclear establishment, an environment we became very familiar with over the years, you can imagine how the stakes are raised. Yet, as always, familiarity can breed, if not contempt, then a level of complacency as, day after day, nothing happens. All seems well. And so the level of vigilance falls away. Or can do. And sometimes all you have to tell you that something might not be quite right are these things we learned to call “Weak Signals” – a leaking pipe, a loose nut, an exposed wire… What else might be happening here? What needs to be looked at more closely and dealt with now, before something much bigger might occur?
If you work in a nuclear environment, you will know that that, almost universally, you will hear the sound of an electronic pulse, a bit like an electric clock when you hear it lying in bed at night, but more insistent, louder. Although this pulse may vary, deliberately, in frequency from time to time, its constant presence is there so that, should it ever stop, you will know, instantly, that something is wrong. Yes, there are alarms for every kind of emergency that are tested on a regular basis but that “tock – tock – tock” haunted me and I listened for it consciously everywhere I went.
No such sound accompanied us on our 3-day Safety Leadership Workshop programme back in 2001. It was held in the unique environment of an Aberdeenshire pub called The Udny Arms (motto of the The Udny of Udny being: “All my hope is in God” – never more apt in this case), home of the Original Sticky Toffee Pudding, as claimed, with a cream-based cuisine guaranteed to cause heart failure in anyone after a week, let alone three months, all ruled with a rod of iron by a mater familias not to be denied. There, in the garden outside, we built a set to complement our chosen metaphor of a Highland Mountain Rescue Team, in the form of a scaffolding mountain from which we rescued those in peril in our story.
The scaffolding itself had to be inspected and tagged as safe – not as straightforward as it may sound in the context of off-shore regulations as applied in all things here – along with appropriate personal protection equipment, or “PPE”, let alone hard hats, harnesses, ropes and critical safety kit for all the actors involved. There was, truly, a mountain to be climbed in more ways than one to get the programme off the ground – and keep it there.
In fact we were often stretched to the limits of our professional endurance, all of us, over the three months we were there. It took a stamina and resilience that I, as chief representative of our company and head facilitator on site, was responsible for managing. Rotation of teams of actors and pairings of facilitators was essential to avoid potential burn-out but, even so, there were moments when those limits could get dangerously close.
To escape the rigours of this demanding programme, I would take myself off on my one day free, through the golf course onto the nearby cliffs and find myself in paradise.
“Walk to Forvie from the Udny Arms,” reads my diary entry for 3 June 2001. “Violets and larks, windy sun, Potentilla – small yellow Rockrose, Speedwell, misty sea beyond grassy dunes, Cottongrass, springy heather, Vetch and Pea, Cuckoo pint – and the cuckoo! Perfect cushion of Viola hirsuta, mass of last year’s Marsh orchid seed heads, new leaves showing well, no spike yet. Fabulous lark – close and low. Marsh marigold through Horsetail. Row of rusty anchors dug in like plough shares. Early Marsh orchid! No spots on fat, swaggy leaves, deep purple, faint scent? Other scents of honey, beeswax – candlewax – good! Yarrow, clumps of Cowslips. Marmalade! Thought of Mum. Heading back now, view – sweep – sea – Aberdeen. 3 buzzards suddenly. Larksong on pigeon grey sky. Spots of rain falling on a sea of yellow gorse, Coleridge’s “never-bloomless furze”. Macaroons!”
Up here, now, on a helicopter, 12 years on, heading to where a young man died, I hold the image of the row of rusty anchors dug in like plough shares somewhere in my head.
What could go wrong? What’s the worst that could happen? How much worse could it get? I had asked those questions, had my anchors, rusty or otherwise, to keep me grounded, focused, alert, prepared, even up here in this flimsy thing. And I didn’t lack for that most primitive source of protection, adrenaline, in this unique situation I found myself in – a situation in which so many things could go wrong.
But what had young Aseem got, as we called him in our play to come, other than the optimism, the belief in the immortality of youth? He’d had his training, been told not to be afraid to question, challenge even, if there was something he was concerned about. Out there, though, in the real, harsh environment of a platform, perched like a pin-prick in the wide, wild ocean, how easy would it be to question anything when told to “Just do it!” by some grizzled supervisor or just assured that everything would be fine. Don’t worry your young head about it, they’d say. It’ll all be fine.
