One of the most difficult situations a process safety professional can face is finding a genuine safety concern and realising that the person standing in the way of addressing it is their manager.
The challenge is rarely technical. More often, it is interpersonal. You may be concerned about damaging a working relationship, being labelled difficult, or creating tension within the team. At the same time, process safety professionals have a responsibility to ensure significant hazards are identified, understood, and appropriately managed.
There is no single answer that fits every situation, but there are several approaches that can help. In my experience, the goal should not be to win an argument. The goal should be to help the organisation arrive at the safest and most defensible decision possible.
If you are in this situation, I want to acknowledge that what you are facing is not easy. Start with the shared objective of safe, reliable operation, and do try to believe that the other person actually wants that, deep down, too.
I frame the situation in a gentle questioning way, asking for guidance on how to also reach the outcome that has been reached by others, presenting the 'evidence' that is available to me, and tactfully pointing out why it is affecting me reaching that outcome. The practical move is to stop presenting my answer and start asking the questions that led me to it. Ultimately, I am trying to get that person to come to the same conclusion I already have. People rarely change their conclusions in response to someone else's conclusions, but they will change them in response to their own reasoning. I then need to tactfully offer them a way to course-correct without acknowledging they were wrong. It's almost like a "yes, and" improvisation approach.
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Get the data out. Put the source documents, drawings, calculations, or standards in front of them. Tactfully ask them to talk you through what they show. Resist the urge to interrupt with your interpretation. If the evidence supports your conclusion, a competent person working through it will often reach the same place. If they do not, that is data — either your conclusion is wrong, or there is a piece of context they are weighing that you are not. Try to understand what that context might be. This is where internal process safety procedures or methods can help too, constraining how conclusions are reached. Then, the method, not you, is leading the reasoning. Make the case, leave the evidence, and come back later. It's psychologically safer for them to privately reconsider. When you go back later, offer a face-saving path that lets them adjust without conceding, e.g. "I've been thinking more about what you said, and I want to revisit one piece".
If the other person keeps returning to "we've always done it this way" or "the budget won't allow it," no amount of technical argument will move them, because the technical case is not what they are weighing.
At that point the route is escalation, not persuasion.
I had to do this very early in my career, and I stewed about it before doing it, but ultimately, I was addressing a significant liability for the site PCBU, and they needed to know that they had the liability they were not aware of. But it came at a cost to my direct manager and to me. I had to be comfortable that I was acting ethically and that I had exhausted all other options.
Ultimately, speaking up about process safety concerns is rarely comfortable. However, organisations with strong process safety cultures depend on people being willing to raise concerns, challenge assumptions, and escalate issues when necessary. The difficult conversations are often the ones that matter most.
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Have questions or need guidance? Get in touch with our process safety consultants to discuss your facility risks and training needs.