Chance – where is he now? A reunion with Chance in New Zealand

WLGA Director David Tyler caught up with Andy Sibley during his visit to New Zealand in April.

In 2017, at LPG Week in Marrakech, Andy had introduced Chance the puppet to the audience with his presentation about changing the safety culture in his company Contact Energy. When David caught up with Andy in Wellington he discovered that Chance is still very much being used to create change in organisations.

When incidents had occurred at Contact Energy ten years ago the investigations and outcomes were always the same; it was put down to just bad luck - and pure chance - that the incidents had occurred.

Now the CEO at Simply Energy, Andy explained to David that eight years ago, whenever incidents and accidents were investigated in Contact Energy, the conclusion was that they were caused by ‘gremlins in the system’, and that it was just bad luck, or down to chance.

Andy approached a marketing agency in Wellington and created the puppet Chance to use as a symbol for the safety investigations. Over the next two years Andy engaged the workforce, of over 300, and changed the safety culture by saying ‘…let’s not leave anything to Chance…’. The puppet broke down the barriers and succeeded in changing the culture not only in Contact Energy but in other companies too.

Chance became an opportunity to change the culture in other organisations too. In all, twenty of the large Chance puppets were made, together with several smaller puppets which were located at high risk areas of the plant as a reminder to be particularly safe. The impact was to significantly reduce the number of incidents that Contact Energy, and other companies, were having.

Today Chance still plays a role in Contact Energy. Andy said ‘… it’s a good way of bringing humour into a subject like safety that can be very dry and difficult…’. There are still lots of stories to tell about him. Andy said ‘…things move on, people move on, but the relevance doesn’t change…it was cutting edge stuff for safety, a good hook to hang it on..’.

The WLGA still uses Chance on the safety alerts that get published periodically by the Core Safety Group.