Real leaders leave a legacy. They capture the hearts and minds of their teams. Their origin story puts the safety and well-being of their people first. Great companies ubiquitously have safe, yet productive operations. For those companies, safety is an investment, not a cost for the C-suite. It’s a real topic of daily focus. This is the Safety Guru with your host, Eric Michrowski, a globally recognized ops and safety guru, public speaker, and author. Are you ready to leave a safety legacy? Your legacy success story begins now. 

Hi, and welcome to the Safety Guru today. I’m very excited to have with me, Trish Kerin, who is a self-prescribed safety geek and storyteller. We have some pretty exciting stories to cover today. So, Trish, welcome to the show. Very excited to have you with me. Maybe let’s start with a bit of your journey into safety because you’ve had quite the interesting career in the safety space.

Thanks, Eric, and great to be here on the podcast today. My journey in safety started quite early in my career. I went to college, I studied engineering. I’m a mechanical engineer by qualification, and never really got exposed to safety there at all. It was not covered when I studied engineering very much. Got into the workplace, started my first job. My first job was designing and installing aviation fueling systems at airport, so building underground pipelines to transport jet fuel to the planes. Pretty simple but requires very detailed specifications to get it right. My first process safety incident actually found me standing in a puddle of jet fuel, and the worker beside me completely covered inkjet fuel from head to toe. Oh, wow. This was a massive, I guess, shock to me at the time. And instantly I kicked into, got to solve this problem. Engineers love solving problems. That’s what we do. Got to solve the problem. Got to figure out what to do next. And so rapidly, I got my colleague to a water source so he could strip off his clothing so he didn’t get chemical burns from the fuel but also got to strip it off underwater because jet fuel is flammable and static of taking the clothes off could have ignited it.

I thought through those things. I knew that much to do. Then we went through the process of dealing with the environmental contamination, dealing with the cleanup, stopping the leak, all that stuff. We got through all of that. We progressed as we went through. But for me, that was the first really big wake-up call. Interestingly, as a young engineer, a couple of years out of college, if that, quite gung-ho, I guess, didn’t really have a grasp of the magnitude of the work I was doing. I thought I was competent because I was doing it, not necessarily because I was competent. It led to me missing some weak signals along the way that I should have picked up, and I didn’t. That resulted in the incident occurring. As I said, I was fortunate that my co-worker was unharmed after being covered inkjet fuel. I was the only injury from that day because I then continued to work the scene deal with everything, deal with the cleanup, walk around in my elastic-sided safety boots, and the elastic had got doused inkjet fuel as well. After a few hours, by the time I took my boots off, I had chemical burns, a nice little elastic size, patches down the side of both of them.

I couldn’t wear shoes for about three weeks or so, but that was the magnitude of that incident. It could have been a lot worse. There could have been an ignition, there could have been a fire, there could have been someone who burnt very, very badly in that incident. But we were lucky to have got away with a minor consequence and the environmental impact, really, to deal with there.

No kidding. A lot of the work you do is around the importance of learning. You mentioned the weak signal. Tell me a little bit more about the concept of weak signal. You’ve got a cool analogy, which I’d love to hear you share, and also how it connects to learning.

Yes. So weak signals, you can think of them as these little signs that occur around us every day. And what they are is our brain is picking up on a pattern in the background. So, our brains mostly work in our subconscious state. We notice patterns, but mostly we don’t notice patterns. They just happen all around us. Then sometimes something will happen, and you’ll think, that was strange. That was weird, or I didn’t expect that, or I don’t understand what’s going on right now. They’re the weak signals that are filtering up to the surface because our brain’s saying, no, there’s something not right here, because most of the time, our brain doesn’t even notice these things. I don’t know if you’ve ever had that experience, it’s a sense that you go driving from one destination to another, and it’s a route really, really well, and you get to the destination and you don’t remember the journey. Right.

Or whether you encountered red lights or if anything unusual happened along the Yeah, right.

Yeah, because our brains are just ticking along and everything on that journey was normal. It was nothing unusual. There were no potential weak signals that popped out. But there might have been other journeys where all of a sudden you had a warning light come on in your car, and you don’t know why, or sometimes even your car just sounded different today.

Sure.

But these weak signals, by definition, are really, really weak. Back in 2009, Schumacher and they did some work in trying to understand and identify these concepts of weak signals. And you can actually think of them as warning signs. They’re warning signs that all is not going to plan according to your brain. Our brains are just full of all of our lifetime of experience. And so, as we go through our brains, filtering all this information, we then need to decide whether that information is important or not. And how do we do that? How do you decide whether it’s just noise in the background and you can ignore it. That led me to come up with an action plan to try and think through these weak signals when they occur, when you notice it, what it is, and figure out if it’s noise. And that led me to then in a fit of frustration one day as I was talking about why we can’t learn from incidents and why we can’t see the warning signals because they were all there, the typical safety gig. Why can’t we just get this right and all of a sudden, it just dawned on me, and I turned around and said, it’s because it’s a platypus.

And the other person just looked at me and said, what are you talking about now? For those of you that don’t know out there, the platypus is a truly bizarre animal. It only occurs in a few parts in Australia. So, it’s not even across the whole Australian continent. It only actually occurs down Eastern Coast States and Tasmania, the island down the bottom. It’s the only place that platypuses occur in the world at all. But what makes a platypus really special is that it’s almost as if it’s impossible to exist. The platypus should not exist. It is a weird, strange creature that when you see them, you just think, what is that? It has It’s the bill of a duck, but the tail of a beaver. It’s got fur like an otter or a seal. It’s got claws like an otter. It’s a mammal, but it lays eggs. Again, there’s only two of mainstreams of animals in the world that are mammals that lay eggs, and both of them live in Australia only. It’s this really, really strange creature. It’s also a mammal that uses electro perception for its foraging and food, which, again, is quite unusual.

Pretty much any other occurs in bats. The males have a spur on their back legs that can inject a toxin. Now, mammals are not typically toxic either. Every time you look at one of the traits of a Platypus, it just gets weirder and weirder. In fact, I think it was in 2020, in Texas A&M University, they made another discovery about a Platypus, and that is that it actually luminates under ultraviolet light. Really? This creature is really, really weird. It’s almost proof that the impossible is possible because this animal shouldn’t exist. In fact, when the animal was first discovered, A species in the early white fertilization of Australia was discovered, that species was sent back to England, and everybody thought it was a taxidermies joke because it made no sense. This animal’s made up of bits of other animals. It just did. That led me to this idea that if all you saw when you went out to the river was a little bill sticking out from the reeds, you might just assume it’s a duck because you’re expecting to see a duck because ducks are more common.

Sure.

But is it a platypus? Is seeing that bill a weak signal? And if we think that seeing that bill is a weak signal, then we need to figure out whether it’s a duck or a platypus, because ducks can’t hurt you, but platypus can. So, the platypus is the potential incident there, the weak signal that we’re looking for. And so that’s where I came up with this action plan. And the action plan basically uses the letters of the word platypus because I love a great bit of playing around with the English language. So First of all, we’ve got our P, our partial sighting. This is when we see that bill and we’ve got to figure out what’s going on. Then we get to thinking about what we’re actually seeing at the time. We need to start linking pieces of information together, linking the data, where are we? What’s going on? We need to start to assess some of that information and analyze it. So thinking about what time of what’s going on around us geographically, where are we? What activities are going on? And so, to help with that, we start to think about T, the task and timing. 

What task are we doing? What time of the day is it? What time in a cycle of what’s going on is it? Then we move on to yesterday and yonder, so the why. What is, has it happened to you before? Has it happened somewhere else? When we actually work through those first few steps of that platy bit, the P-L-A-T-Y, we then can start to assemble enough information to then make a decision. Is it a duck or is it a platypus? If it’s a duck, walk away. It doesn’t matter. It’s just noise. We don’t have to worry about it. But if it’s a platypus, remember that platypus can hurt you. Then we need to move into our risk management part, which is the PUS of the word platypus. Perceive the scenarios. What could go wrong?

What could go wrong?  

What could go wrong? Understand the controls. What can we do about it? What do we need to do about it? Then lastly, secure the platypus. You need to put the controls in and communicate to other people that you’ve done it. So, securing the platypus is not just about solving the problem. If I solve the problem for me and I don’t tell anybody about it, the next person may encounter the same problem. So, it’s around solving the problem and telling someone about it And so the platypus word, it was just a nice way to remember the steps of… So, we start with basically some data analysis up front, and then we determine whether it’s a duck or a platypus, and we move into the risk management part of it, dealing with that platypus if we do have it. 

Great analogy. And you’ve written a book on this as well.

I have, yeah. I called it The Platypus philosophy. So, it’s just a short little book that it takes you through the concept of spotting a weak signal, what to do with it. It also takes you through it in terms of, imagine you are going on vacation, and you want to see your first platypus. So, you go out and you start looking for platypuses. Who do you consult? You consult with the National Park ranger, perhaps, because they’re skilled in finding platypuses. In the workplace, maybe we go and talk to our operators about this because they’re the ones that are skilled in finding stuff because they’re the ones doing it every day. Sure. It uses a little bit of analogy story in it, too. Just a little bit of fun in writing.

This concept of weak signals, and you highlight as well, almost everybody as well that I’ve spoken to who got seriously injured, who’s come on the show. Almost everybody started by saying, I had this feeling, I had this… Something didn’t feel right that day, just before. That’s a fairly common reflection from everybody I’ve talked to. How do you get people to start searching for them? How do we start really recognizing where those signals are? Because you have to take action, which means you need to recognize and see that maybe there’s something that’s not quite right here. 

Yeah. That challenge, as I said, by nature, they’re weak. We call them weak signals for a reason. They can be hard to see. It’s easy to just sometimes miss that signal or just dismiss it. Certainly, one of the things I’ve learned over my career is to really focus on if you get that gut feeling about something, trust your gut. As an engineer, a person of science sitting here saying trust your gut seems a bit weird, but human intuition is, I mean, it is scientific. There is science behind what our brain is doing when we have a gut feeling. Sure. There’s a reason it is trying to protect it. It’s protecting us because our brain is saying in that subconscious way, I’ve seen this pattern before, and last time it didn’t end well for it. It basically got a gut feeling is. It’s telling us And so we need to be willing to embrace those gut feelings, I think a little bit more, which can be a bit out there for people to get that concept. The other thing to think about, though, is one of the challenges we have is we have a whole lot of cognitive biases that go with how we see the world and how we perceive information in the world.

When we look at some of those, there are some that are very much… They inhibit our ability to see weak signals. Things like, we often hear people talk about confirmation bias, where you’re only looking for the information that confirms your already held belief. If the weak signal that you’re seeing doesn’t confirm your belief, you are going to take it out immediately. But there’s a bias that actually can be helpful to us. I think we can train our brains to use that bias a little bit better. That bias is the familiarity illusion, is what that one is called. And the easiest way to think about this is that’s that one that… Think about if you decide you’re going to buy a car and you pick the make and the model, and you might even pick the color, and you have to research the car, Then all of a sudden, you see that car everywhere on the road. It’s everywhere. There’s not more of them. You’re just noticing them. Correct. They were there. But your brain has decided it’s a familiar concept to you, and so it notices it now more. And so, you say, oh, there’s another one, there’s another one, there’s another.

These cars are really popular. I must have made a good choice. Confirmation bias. All these biases do come into what we do. But if we think about that familiarity illusion, how can we use that? How can we train our brains to notice the weak signals? And that’s what I’ve been doing some work around. How can we, particularly in, and I’ve been doing this research in work workplace scenarios. How can we actually look at what’s going on at the time and train our workforce adequately, so their brains look for the weak signals proactively rather than subconsciously? We want to activate that familiarity a little bit. That led me to this idea that if we take our risk assessment processes that we have established, and in particular, and I don’t know how widespread these are necessarily all over the world, but I’m certainly saying a lot more use of bow-tie diagrams to describe risk scenarios for people because it’s visually easy for people to comprehend and see, Okay, so if this happens, and if that happens, that happens, now we’re at this end, we don’t want to be on the right-hand side of the bow tie. If we look at the left-hand side of the bowtie, we focus in on that, and we can see what our controls are, then we can actually do some workshop brainstorming around, well, what would the failure of that control look like? 

What would be the early warning sign as it was starting to degrade? Sure. Take that information. But importantly, the familiarity illusion only works when the outcome is important to you. So, you don’t notice all the cars similar until you want one of those cars. It has to be important to you. So, we need to match up what the failure would look like with what the consequence was. If the consequence is not significant, then why are we wasting our time? We need to be focusing and managing what matters because we can’t do everything. So really home in, okay, what are our consequences that we really need to prevent happening? Match those to the controls and how those controls might fail. And then piecing that together, talking to people and working through in a detailed way what that barrier looks like when it starts to fail and having these interactions with people. Instead of your daily work start meeting or your toolbox talk, we’ve got a few hazards out there today. Be careful of this, be careful of that. Be safe out there. That’s a waste of everybody’s time. But if it’s going to be, okay, we’re having a problem over here at the moment, so we need to go in.

I want you to really focus and see if you see Can you take anything with that particular pump. Do you notice everything around its temperature, its pressure, or what’s going on? Maintenance and reliability engineering teaches us a whole lot of things about how equipment fails. We know the failure mode to these pieces of equipment. We actually just need to raise that into people’s consciousness. When they walk out and they walk past it and they go, No, that’s strange.

Yeah, so I’m looking to spot those things.

Then in Encouraging and rewarding people for bringing it up. It’s not a problem to tell me about it. Thanks for telling me. Now let’s figure out what’s going on, as opposed to, not again. Last time you brought something to me, there was nothing there. Because guess what? Sometimes it might just be noise. But if we don’t encourage people to raise these things, they’re not going to raise them. And if they don’t raise them, we’re only going to see it at the end when we look back from the incident and go, oh, yeah, I had that feeling. I had that feeling and did nothing about it.

This episode of the Safety Guru podcast is brought to you by Propulo Consulting, the leading safety and safety culture advisory firm. Whether you are looking to assess your safety culture, develop strategies to level up your safety performance, introduce human performance capabilities, re-energize your BBS program, enhance supervisory safety capabilities, or introduce unique safety leadership training and talent solutions, Propulo has you covered. Visit us at propulo.com.

Interesting. When you say this, it reminds me of the flight captain that I had on a prior episode, and he talks about pilots in general have a chronic unease. You have this sense that something may go wrong. I We often call it a healthy dose of paranoia, that you’re looking and you’re trying to spot, but you’re aware that things are bound to fail. You bring that as well to consciousness. That chronic unease is that you’re expecting something to be out of the ordinary, so you’re looking for signs that it may be out of the ordinary.

Yeah, absolutely. That’s a key part about it. Pilots constantly train on this. We don’t want a paranoid workforce. 

No, you’ll have a different problem at that point. But a healthy dose is not bad because, like you said, I’m listening for a subtle change in the sound or the pressure. I’m looking for those It’s a precursor.

Absolutely. It takes a level of maturity, and I think perhaps humility to actually sit back and say, I need to listen to what’s going on around me. I need to listen to what my gut’s telling me, and I need be open to these things. Because in a world full of busyness, it can be so easy to just go into autopilot and go, I just need to get the job done and get home. That’s what I’m going for. But sadly, when that happens, people get hurt, badly, or even killed. And so, we need to really encourage that sense of challenge and that sense of curiosity and reward people for being curious. You’re curious about something, you ask questions. That’s a great thing. When someone asked me a question or at a presentation or something, well, thanks for that question. That’s actually a really great question, because what you’ve done is uncover X, Y, Z. The simple act of thanks for that question, is a very subtle thing to encourage people. Now, it needs to be genuine. It can’t be all your thing.

Yeah, of course. Yeah.

But have that willingness to encourage people.

It also feels like an evolution to some of the stop work principles, because you want to stop work when you see something, but it’s also going a little bit deeper, just like you want to recognize a stop work You want people to recognize the precursors and stop potentially even earlier than they normally would.

Yeah, absolutely. Because it is actually stopping way earlier.

Way earlier, yes.

Yeah. The stop work principles were initially around, okay, you see something unsafe, you stop. But what I’m talking about here is even before you get to the unsafe bit, we’re seeing the slow or early degradation of our controls before we’re consciously going, Oh, that’s unsafe. Because once we got to the that’s unsafe bit, we’re past the this doesn’t feel right bit.

Yes. Then that’s the part where you’re bringing it a lot earlier on. You’re getting people to be aware of something far before that point where it is unsafe to do the work.

Yeah, absolutely.

But to that point, that requires maturity, and that stop work is easy to say. It’s different to actually do and see consistently in an organization. This takes it to the next level where you have people with that curiosity.

Yeah. As I said, you need leaders with humility to be able to encourage and accept that they’re going to get pushback on things. Yes. That’s not a bad thing. No.

But it takes a maturity, and it takes a comfort with that. Absolutely. Before we move to my last question, you also have another analogy, just like you have the platypus metaphor, you have another analogy around some of the biases.

Some of the biases are quite interesting. I’ve spent a bit of time delving into, I think there’s 188 recognize cognitive biases. They’re in all sorts of different categories of, I’ve got too much information, or I don’t have enough information. They’re broken down into a whole series of subcategories. Some of them have got some great names. The outrage effect is a great one that you stick your head in the sand. I just don’t want to see it. If I pretend it’s not there, surely it can’t hurt me. When you say that out loud, it just sounds ridiculous. But occasionally, have you ever just gone, oh, no, I didn’t see that, and walk away? Just turning that blind eye to something. That’s an example of the outrage effect. There’s a whole series of other different biases that occur. Another classic one we see is anchoring. Anchoring occurs when we get caught up in the first piece of information we get, and we can’t seem to let go of it. We anchor to that first piece of information, even if subsequent information proves to be better or more informative. Sure. In the workplace, this can actually be a really challenging one as well.

Particularly, I don’t know if you’ve ever sat in one of those meetings where we’ve gone, okay, we need to make a decision, everybody’s thoughts, and then we’ll go around the room and ask everybody’s opinion as we go around the room. Have you ever noticed that after about the second or third person, no one adds anything new? Nobody adds is anything new, because by that stage, everybody’s anchored to the first couple of things. And so, we’re left with whoever speaks first basically has the loudest voice, even if they’re not correct. And so, one of the ways that I try and encourage people to overcome anchoring, because it’s a really common bias that we see, is, okay, we need everybody’s opinion on the table here. Everybody takes out a pen and piece of paper, write it down.

Or write it down a post it notes and then I can start putting in the post it notes and finding common ground, but I’ve not anchored at this point.

Exactly. Or even just, okay, write it down. Now everybody has to read out what they wrote. So even once you get to your turn, if you’re already mentally anchored somewhere else, you still have to read out what your first thought was. And we might get a better outcome if we have all of those different voices on the table so that we can understand all the different perspectives to make a better decision. There are a number of different ways that we can try and counteract some of these biases. The fact is the biases exist, and we’re not going to ever get rid of that. This is how our brains work; is our brains are these enormous computers that are basically churning through huge amounts of data every moment of every day. So, there’s certain ways in which they work. We can’t change that, but we can try and direct it to different ways and input strategies that will help us get better outcomes. So, in my book, The Platypus philosophy, I go through several different biases and talk about how they would present and how you can try and counteract some of them so that we can hopefully get better decisions and hopefully get a little bit better at spotting those weak signals and then doing something about them.

I love it. The name of the book, I’m assuming it’s released, Platypus Velocity.

Yes, it is, the Platypus Velocity. It’s available on Amazon, on whichever Amazon marketplace you on.

Excellent. Tell me a little bit about Lead Like Karen and some of the work that you do with organizations.

My main focus area is working within that process safety or that catastrophic or material risk management environment space, and working with companies and their people, whether it’s sometimes frontline, but mainly more leadership, executive leadership and boards, to help them understand and manage and lead better to get better process safety outcomes. So how can we practice better leadership so that we get the right safety outcomes within our organizations? And so, I do that through a number of different coaching activities. I have a range of different training courses and workshops that I do. So, things like focusing leaders in on culture, leadership, accountability and governance, and how that delivers There’s a safety outcome. Got a workshop on that. Another workshop, a very practical couple of hours on some practical tools that you can do as a leader. So that one’s focused, it’s called due diligence. It’s focused on what do you need to do to ensure your business is running well. And I love storytelling. And if we don’t get better as leaders at communicating, we are not going to get the outcomes. And so, I also have a storytelling workshop, a half day workshop and an all-day masterclass on, let’s learn how to communicate better.

Let’s learn how to tell stories, how to engage our audience and get the message across and get a solid call to action at the end of every story. Because we need to get better at storytelling, and there’s a lot of different ways to do it. Obviously, I have my style, I have mapped out my style, I know what it is, and I can train people in the mechanics of that style that they can then They got their own style for that. There’s some of the sorts of activities, as well as some process safety, high-level auditing type activities as well. I’m not the person you come to for a risk assessment. I don’t do those anymore. I’ll look at your governance structures, I’ll look at your leadership, those sorts of activities. I work all over the world in doing that. I’ve got a few different overseas engagements coming up in the next couple of months as well. So, reach out, leadlikekaren.com, if there’s anything I can help you with.

I really love this concept of weak signals and the platypus metaphor and getting people to search for them to be looking out for those potential week signals so that we intervene much earlier in the process. Thank you so much for joining me today, Trish. Really appreciate it.  

Thanks, Eric. Stay safe. Thank you.

Thank you for listening to The Safety Guru on C-suite Radio. Leave a legacy. Distinguish yourself from the past. Grow your success. Capture the hearts and minds of your teams. Elevate your safety. Like every successful athlete, top leaders continuously invest in their safety leadership with an expert coach to boost safety performance. Begin your journey at execsafetycoach.com. Come back in two weeks for the next episode with your host, Eric Michrowski. This podcast is powered by Propulo Consulting.