Competency Frameworks:

The SnSD Approach: A Five-Step Process Built on What Matters

SnSD’s approach to competency management begins with a fundamental discipline: define before you assess, and scope before you define. Our five-step process is structured to ensure that effort concentrates where it produces real risk reduction.

The process is structured around four critical population groups — each requiring a distinct competency profile, a distinct level of assessment rigour, and a distinct closure approach:

This segmentation prevents the two most common failure modes: the under-scoped framework that misses critical roles entirely, and the over-scoped framework that treats every role as equally critical and collapses under its own weight. By defining boundary conditions clearly before identification begins, SnSD ensures the resulting competency matrix reflects actual risk rather than organisational anxiety.

Shining Stars: Breaking Through the Clay Layer

The single most common point of failure in safety culture transformation is mid-level management — what organisational change practitioners call the ‘clay layer.’ Senior leadership commits. Frontline workers respond. The layer in between absorbs the initiative and prevents it from reaching the people who need to feel it most.

SnSD’s Shining Stars programme is specifically designed to address this. Before engaging frontline supervisors, we invest in making mid-level managers the active carriers of safety culture change — not passive recipients of communications from above.

Shining Stars is built within Kotter’s 8-Step Change Model[1], aligning the development programme to a structured change management architecture. Mid-level leaders become change agents — not just trained individuals, but active champions of the ‘Paper to People’ shift throughout their teams.

Making It Stick: Integration into HR and Governance

Competency programmes that exist outside of organisational systems do not survive leadership changes, restructures or operational pressure. SnSD designs for sustainability from the outset. The Rising Stars and Shining Stars programmes are structured to integrate with existing HR systems across the full talent lifecycle: recruitment screening, onboarding, performance management, career and succession planning, and recognition frameworks.

Gold Rising Stars earn CPD points, level-based certificates, and formal recognition through townhall ceremonies. Their status is recorded in operational systems and linked to career progression decisions. Governance is maintained through an HSE Steering Committee for strategic direction and a Gold Rising Stars Community of Practice for ongoing programme health. Programme assurance is embedded into the HSE audit cycle.

The sustainability design reflects a deliberate philosophy: if the competency programme cannot survive without SnSD’s active involvement, it has not succeeded. The measure of success is a client organisation that owns, runs and continuously improves its own competency system — with Rising Stars and Shining Stars as a self-sustaining internal capability, not an externally dependent programme.

Back to Texas City

The fifteen people who died at Texas City in 2005 were not let down by absent procedures or missing equipment. They were let down by a system that could not verify whether the right people, with the right competencies, were in the right place at the right time. That failure was not visible until it was catastrophic.

A well-designed competency framework makes that failure visible before it becomes a tragedy. It defines who is truly critical, verifies that they are genuinely competent, and builds the coaching culture that sustains that competence under pressure — on a Tuesday morning in a rushed shift handover, when a board operator is late and a supervisor has left early.