Ojai, Calif., Technology Firm Wins NASA Contract

Apr. 25–There is nothing particularly striking about the two-story, 20,000-square-foot concrete block office building on Ojai’s Bryant Circle. The 50 or so people inside — many of them statisticians, psychologists, industrial safety and organizational development experts — work for a company with a low public profile.

But in its highly specialized field, Behavioral Science Technology Inc is a powerhouse. Its list of more than 1,600 clients includes AT&T Corp., American Airlines Inc., Intel Corp., Hewlett-Packard, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer Inc., Eastman Kodak Co. and Miller Brewing Co. Combining technology with applied behavioral sciences, BST has made companies safer and better places to work. It also has helped them improve product quality.

The little-known company launched a project in March, however, that is certain to be the most visible, important and closely monitored in its 18-year history. BST was chosen by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to fix the agency’s complacent safety culture — which an investigation board said had as much to do with the last year’s loss of Space Shuttle Columbia and its seven astronauts after a breakaway chunk of foam punched a hole in the orbiter’s left wing. With potential revenues of $10 million, the five-year NASA contract is BST’s biggest undertaking. It also is the most daunting.

“We take this incredibly seriously. I mean, we’re going to have a hand in making sure the next time that space shuttle launches that people won’t die. That’s a big deal,” said C. Patrick Smith, BST’s chief executive officer, who met in Houston recently with NASA’s senior managers.

“It was very moving to watch grown men cry when they talked about the importance of this effort,” Smith said. “Their friends, people they’d known for 10 or 15 years, died, and they feel É that they really should have done something and could have done something. It’s a very emotional and gut-wrenching experience to be part of this.”

Hundreds of industrial-safety consulting firms inquired last year about contracting with NASA, but BST was not one of them. Instead, NASA officials approached the Ojai company after former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill recommended BST to NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe.

O’Neill told his friend O’Keefe that the company had helped aluminum giant Alcoa Corp. achieve significant worker safety improvements over several years while he was the company’s CEO.

Along with about 40 other companies, BST was invited to bid for the job through what’s called a “competitive procurement process.” The company got the contract mostly because of its track record and a database of information from past projects that enables it to compare an organization’s performance with hundreds of others. It’s something BST’s competitors don’t have.

“It’s not so much that we were lucky, although we probably were lucky, but that we really are unique in that safety is the thing we have done the most of for the last 15 years,” said Thomas Krause, BST’s chairman and co-founder. “I don’t think there are many other consulting companies, maybe not any, that could provide that set of tools normed across organizations throughout the country.”

With nearly 20,000 employees and a portfolio of space science’s most sophisticated — and risky — projects, NASA has a strong commitment to safety but has developed a culture over the years that does not fully support it, the accident investigation board concluded. BST officials agree, but they believe they can help the agency implement top-to-bottom change. One of its other clients said he has seen it happen.

“We chose it because of the structured methodology that is lacking in some other safety-improvement programs. BST’s approach is rooted in the scientific method, avoiding at-risk behaviors in favor of robust behaviors that will keep you safe,” said Dennis Ruddy, president and general manager of a joint venture by Bechtel Corp. and McDermott Inc. that runs a 5,000-employee operation for the Department of Energy in Oak Ridge, Tenn., where enriched-uranium components for nuclear weapons are produced. “Taking data, using people on the floor as observers rather than safety or management people, and then analyzing that data and improving the environment is a very meaningful process in any kind of technical work,” he said.

Before he sought BST’s help last summer, Ruddy said there were 3.5 injury accidents annually for every 100 employees at the site. Though BST’s changes won’t be fully implemented for another six months, the facility just completed a 127-day run in which 3.4 million man-hours were worked without one day lost to accidents.

In the mid-1990s when Ruddy was running a City of Industry plastics plant, the company’s standardized-technology method reduced accidents by 50 percent. He got similar results at factories worldwide for Tenneco, an auto parts manufacturer.

“I was dealing with people in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Europe, Australia, South America and North America. The disparate cultures, languages and other kinds of things we were dealing with, this gave us a unifying force in safety with the same methodology going on in each one of our 70 plants worldwide,” Ruddy said. “That was extremely valuable to us. É In about a year, we were able to halve our accident rates.” To assess attitudes at NASA, the company began last month with a 150-question survey online that drew responses from about 9,000 employees, almost half the space agency’s work force.

The proprietary questionnaire is designed to identify conditions that indicate whether a company has a strong safety culture, BST co-founder Krause said.

The employees’ answers were used to compare NASA with hundreds of other BST clients. NASA scored in the 75th to 80th percentile in seven of the nine categories, Krause said. But it ranked only in the 50th percentile in a category designed to assess whether workers think NASA cares about them as individuals, and in the 60th percentile in whether they believe their questions and objections to decisions and plans are passed upward through the bureaucracy.

NASA wants to hit the high 90th percentiles in all categories, Krause said, with the two low-score groups getting top priority.

Agency officials believe they need high levels of behavior reliability to manage an incredibly complex technology with inherent high risk.

“They can’t be average,” Krause said. “They have to be very, very high-functioning in order to operate that technology safely.”

BST used the survey scores to assess NASA’s problems and recommend solutions. Over the next few weeks, the company will help the agency’s senior managers establish a set of guiding principles essential to the new culture of NASA. Then, they will determine how to make the principles part of every NASA employee’s daily activities.

The training will include coaching on consistent behavior and attitudes, effective teamwork and peer observation in meetings with workers evaluating one another on critical behaviors, such as whether they encourage minority viewpoints.

The program will be implemented over five months at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and NASA’s Glenn and Stennis research centers.

Employees will be surveyed afterward to determine whether things have improved. If they have, all other NASA workers will be trained, a process expected to take three years.

BST leaders say that, because it produces quantifiable results, their method is superior to what they call the “train-and-hope” approach of their competitors.

“We take the desire to change and the need to change and translate that down on a behavioral level to what the workers, supervisors and leaders need to do differently in order to produce that change,” said BST CEO Smith. “That’s different from the way a lot of companies approach these issues. It’s changing behavior. If you change their thinking, that’s nice, but if you haven’t changed the behavior, you’re not going to solve the problems.”

The NASA project is the most interesting and potentially difficult BST has ever undertaken, Krause said. He views the space agency as a fascinating yet complicated organization because it uses pioneering science to accomplish what he called missions of nobility that capture people’s imaginations.

“Other organizations think they’re unique, but NASA really is unique,” he said. “It has a unique set of influences. There is a strong military influence, a strong scientific-engineering influence, and at the same time, it’s a government bureaucracy. The combination of those three makes for an organization that’s really quite unusual.

“Maybe more importantly, the task that they have, there isn’t anybody else that can do what NASA does.” Under its contract, NASA is authorized to spend up to $10 million for BST’s services, but it may opt out if officials don’t think the program is working. Krause and Smith expect to have 12 people spending varied amounts of time on the project, but BST also has more than 200 other contracts.

The U.S. Marine Corps signed one worth several hundred thousand dollars last week, aimed at improving members’ safety with personal vehicles. For unknown reasons, Marines using their own wheels have a much higher accident rate than those driving the Corps’ equipment.

Privately held BST does not disclose its annual revenues, but Krause said most of its contracts run from $50,000 to $250,000. Besides its 50 Ojai workers, the company has almost that many more stationed around the country and at an office in England.

Krause is a psychologist. He co-founded the company in 1986 with John Hibley, a physician who is still active in the company. The two have worked together since 1979, when they treated back injuries suffered by workers at Vetco Inc. in Ventura, which produced equipment for the offshore oil industry.

They started their business after deciding that injury prevention was more effective than treatment.

A client, Jim Dietz, executive vice president and chief operating officer at Potash Corp., a Canadian fertilizer producer, said businesses use BST because its methods work. The company helped Potash reduce its accident rate from two for every 200,000 hours worked to 0.5. The key, he said, is that BST’s concepts are employee-driven.

“This is all about improving work performance, and it’s been readily accepted by the work force,” Dietz said. “In fact, the acceptance has been overwhelming to us.”

ON THE NET: http://www.bstsolutions.com http://www.nasa.gov

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(c) 2004, Ventura County Star, Calif. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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