Associate for The Keil Centre – Australian Team

Ronny is a registered psychologist and a founder of The Keil Centre Ltd. He is currently based in Perth, Western Australia (Whadjuk Nyoongar Country). He has over thirty years’ experience as a human and organisational factors specialist in hazardous industries; mainly in the oil,  gas and chemical process sectors worldwide.

Ronny specialises in the human and organisational factors which influence safety and reliability in hazardous industries. This includes safety culture & leadership development, preventing and reducing errors & violations, and incident investigation. He is an Associate Fellow of the Institution of Chemical Engineers and has twice been awarded Practitioner of the Year status by the British Psychological Society for applying psychology to improve safety.

Selected relevant experience

• Founder and former director / owner of The Keil Centre Ltd.
• In 2011 was granted a Distinguished Talent Visa by the Australian Government on the basis of international reputation as an applied psychologist specialising in health and safety, and the potential benefit to the Australian business community gained by living and working in Australia.
• Associate Fellow of the Institution of Chemical Engineers, awarded for twenty years collaboration to improve safety in the oil and gas and chemical process industries.
• Won British Psychological Society’s Division of Occupational Psychology 2008 Practitioner of the Year Health and Wellbeing Award, for developing and implementing the “Our Safety Culture” approach in 3 multinational companies, including Woodside Australia.
• Design and delivery of 2-year professional development programme in human factors in health and safety for the process industries, in collaboration with IChemE, and supported by the UK Health and Safety Executive.
• Selected by Western Australia’s mining regulator DMIRS to define and implement a strategy to incorporate human and organisational factors into their inspection and investigative processes.
• Designed and implemented a novel safety culture framework focused on Control of Work for BHP’s West Australia oil and gas business. This project won the APPEA 2019 Safety Excellence Award.
• Co-author and developer of the “Safety Culture Maturity®” Model, a simple method to involve employees at all levels in assessing and improving safety culture, since used in multiple industries, countries and languages. The ten SCM® elements include Visible Management Commitment, Safety Communication and Learning from Incidents.
• Design and delivery of 4-year programme of safety culture and safety leadership development for a major pharmaceutical company following a serious process safety incident. Implemented with internal company personnel, across 80 sites worldwide.
• During a 3-year project with a major oil and gas company and the UK Health and Safety Executive, developed stress risk assessment methods and management standards for key work-related stressors found in the UK oil and gas sector.
• Ronny Lardner and his colleague Richard Scaife were joint recipients of the British Psychological Society’s Division of Occupational Psychology 2006 Practitioner of the Year Award, for an innovative method of investigating the human factors (errors and violations) which influence accidents at work – HFAT®.
• Ronny was co-author and human factors advisor to UK oil and gas industry’s Step-Change in Safety’s “Changing Minds” safety culture improvement guidance.
• Lead safety culture contractor on 3-year European Union-funded PRISM project, on improving human factors in process industries – case studies of DuPont in Spain, and Unilever in Netherlands.
• Four major published research projects for UK Health and Safety Executive on behavioural aspects of health and safety & safety culture – included several case studies of best practice conducted with industrial partners.
• Multi-national comparison of safety culture across several oil and gas businesses, in Vietnam, UK and Belgium.
• Multi-national comparison of safety culture in a food manufacturing company, including best and worst performing sites, across five European countries.
• Multi-site comparisons of safety culture in major UK construction company.

The Keil Centre acknowledges the traditional custodians of the land on which Ronny lives and works, the Whadjuk Nyoongar people. We pay our respects to their Elders, past, present and emerging.