As the bickie became gooey in my fingers, I knew the moment was now — time to slam that Tim Tam.
A Tim Tam is an Australian bickie — or cookie, to those of you in the U.S. It was created in 1964 by Arnott’s and is an iconic Aussie treat. It consists of two rectangular bickies with a flavored cream filling that is coated in chocolate. A Tim Tam Slam is a unique way to consume the bickie. The steps are as follows:
- Prepare your hot drink of choice — I prefer black coffee
- Take a small bite of one corner of the Tim Tam
- Next, take a small bite of the diagonal corner
- Lower one bitten corner into the hot drink
- Suck the drink through the diagonal corner – using the Tim Tam like a straw. Do note, it will be challenging to get the flow going at first, so keep trying until the cream has started to melt and you taste the drink. At the appropriate time, slam the bickie into your mouth.
Step five is where the skill is and illustrates a great risk/reward challenge. If you go too soon, the bickie is still hard, and you won’t be able to drink your beverage, leading to disappointment. Go too late, and it will disintegrate as you try to eat it, ending up over your face and hands — hence, the risk. Go at just the right moment, and it will be warm, gooey, chocolaty and very tasty — the reward.
A Risky Slam for a Sweet Reward
Process safety is a constant challenge between risk and reward. The risk is that we have a catastrophic incident that kills multiple people, harms the environment and impacts the facilities. This is an extreme example, but far too many incidents have occurred.
The reward for taking the risk is achieving the lowest cost of production, which includes design, construction, maintenance and operations costs.
Striking a balance between how safe is safe enough and the cost of doing business is a perennial challenge. However, it is one that we must focus on and ensure we are not taking unacceptable risks.
Balancing Safety, Cost and Speed
In project management, this is often described by the challenge of good, fast and cheap. You can have any two of them, such as good and fast, or good and cheap or fast and cheap, but you can never have all three simultaneously. This is because whenever we need to balance something, there is always a trade-off.
When it comes to process safety, good must always be one element of the combination, because this is where risk management is done. If we do fast and cheap, we will inevitably build in latent hazards that will one day appear as an incident. Whether it is selecting a cheaper material rather than the one recommended for that service or reducing inspection frequency on equipment, assuming it will be okay to wait a bit longer, we are challenging the risk/reward dichotomy at our peril. What may seem cheap at the time can be much more expensive when human costs and financial losses are at stake.
As humans, we tend toward optimism bias regarding risk management. We assume it won’t happen to us; we know better, are smarter, or are luckier. Without this bias, games of chance wouldn't exist. We wouldn't risk losing something for the possibility of winning more. Few people win more than they lose, yet they continue to take the risk.
The next time you face a risk/reward question in process safety, consider whether the short-term reward is worth the long-term risk.
The Tim Tam Slam oversimplifies this challenge, but it sums up the concept. You might get the reward, but you could just as easily end up disappointed, or even worse, with a big mess on your hands.
