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Year in Review: The 2024 Highlights on The Safety Guru with Eric Michrowski

The Safety Guru Holiday Special Episode

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As we wrap up another impactful year, we’re reflecting on an incredible journey filled with powerful insights from global experts, transformative ideas from thought leaders, and voices committed to meaningful change—all dedicated to making a difference. Take a moment to reminisce with your host, Eric Michrowski, as he highlights the podcast’s most inspirational moments and top themes of 2024, celebrating the lessons learned that shaped this podcast season. Here’s to a wonderful time of joy, a year of growth ahead, and making every day safer for everyone!

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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.

Hello, and welcome to the Safety Guru’s year-end special episode. Happy holidays! This season reminds me of the magical moments in life that bring joy and meaning, and I believe every safe day is a priceless gift you bring to your team. Safety is not a priority; it’s a value. Priorities change, but values drive decisions every day.

As we wrap up another impactful year, we’re celebrating the incredible journey we’ve shared, filled with powerful insights from inspiring global experts, transformative stories from thought leaders, and voices on a mission for change. Change, all dedicated to making a difference. We’re generally grateful to have shared it all with you.

To our special guests, we extend our heartfelt appreciation. Your passion, expertise, and dedication to improving safety culture have enriched our show and, most importantly, made a profound impact on our listeners. And, of course, we extend our deepest gratitude to you, our cherished listeners. Your support, engagement, and feedback have been the driving force behind every episode.

Join us as we revisit these magical moments and celebrate unforgettable safety lessons and stories that uplift and empower, reminding us why We Do What We Do.

This year, we’ve been honored to share incredible insights and powerful stories from around the world, focusing on five impactful themes that resonate deeply with our listeners. Each theme offered valuable lessons for your organization.

Our first theme, Elevating Safety Culture and Embracing Continuous Learning, explored the importance of creating safety as a deeply rooted value within organizations. We uncovered how safety culture grows stronger when continuous learning becomes part of the journey.

Dr. Josh Williams kicked off the year with a clear vision for 2024, where he outlined five significant themes to shape the future of safety culture and leadership. His approach provided a big-picture perspective on advancing safety practices across organizations.

We delved into the critical yet often overlooked topic of loan worker safety with Dr. Ryan Olson. Dr. Olson shared invaluable insights from his groundbreaking research on how organizational safety climate and priorities impact the decision-making of loan workers despite their limited interactions with leaders. His strategies offer profound approaches to enhance the safety of those who work independently, ensuring that they benefit from a strong safety culture.

In an enlightening episode with the science behind safe decision-making, we welcomed The Decision Doctor®, Dr. Constance Dierickx, who shared actionable strategies to overcome common biases in decision-making. She highlighted the importance of resisting urgency in critical situations, giving listeners science-back tools to enhance workplace safety.

Marty Ohme, a former US Navy helicopter pilot and current system safety engineer, brought his extensive experience in system safety to life. He delved into system factors, organizational learning, and risk management, sharing best practices from the US Navy and using real-world examples that resonate for any organization focused on mitigating future risks.

We then heard from Dr. Nippin Anand, who raised an important question: are we generally learning from accidents? With deep and impactful research, Dr. Anand shares risks, Risk, and safety through the Lens of Culture and Shared Responsibility. He discussed how meaningful organizational learning can drive real change and highlighted the importance of genuine reflection after accidents.

David East offered value valuable lessons on organizational learning, reminding us that safety is all about learning. He brought his deep expertise in human and organizational performance, discussing critical risk, learning from incidents, and emphasized in the need to address interconnected factors behind them to drive excellence in safety culture.

An engaging episode with Ken Roberts explored frontline engagement in safety. Ken shared strategies for fostering buy-in through trust, team understanding, and a concept he calls Convenience Kills, illustrating how frontline workers can embrace safety by seeing the consequences of their actions. He introduced the idea of a safety commitment agreement, emphasizing its role in helping workers incorporate safety into their daily lives.

Keld Jensen, a renowned negotiation expert, joins us to discuss a crucial yet often overlooked dimension of workplace safety, strategic negotiation, and collaboration. Keld emphasizes how negotiations can turn safety core values into practical outcomes, stressing the importance of shared responsibility, especially with subcontractors. His episode offered a valuable perspective on how strategic collaboration strengthens safety culture, creating an environment where all stakeholders collectively pursue safer practices.

We invited Ann Latham, the Queen of Clarity, to emphasize the importance of clear communication. She introduced her disconnect principle, offering practical advice on aligning safety goals. Her expertise is invaluable in helping leaders build a strong safety culture through clarity and understanding.

In an episode focused on moving beyond human error, Dr. Mark Young shared keen insights into human factors discussing the psychological mechanisms behind mistakes. He highlighted how a learning-oriented culture can significantly reduce errors, providing a solid foundation for any organization aiming to improve safety.

Each episode in this theme offers crucial knowledge and actionable strategies for fostering a culture of safety and continuous learning. If you haven’t had a chance to listen yet, I highly recommend diving into these episodes to enrich your perspective on safety culture.

Next, we deep dive into aviation safety, applying industry-leading safety practices where we take a closer look at one of the highest standards of safety practices and how these principles can elevate safety excellence across all industries.

Norman MacLeod, a seasoned expert in organization of human factors, shared decades of experience and wealth of knowledge, emphasizing how system factors play a crucial role in organizational safety decisions. Drawing on his background in both aviation and healthcare, he brought profound research findings and real-life examples to show how system level thinking can be applied to enhance safety.

In another captivating episode, we spoke with Niall Downey, an airline captain and doctor who bridges the gap between aviation and healthcare safety. Niall illustrates how aviation’s proven principles could effectively reduce human errors in healthcare settings. His discussion on air management and proactive safety measures provided compelling insights that are relevant to any safety-critical industry.

Emma Henderson, an experienced airline captain, joined us to share her perspective on safety from above the wings to ground safety. Drawing on her leadership within the Project Wingman Foundation, she highlighted the importance of peer support, civility, and an organizational culture of learning. Emma’s engaging episode shows how aviation safety elements can inspire other industries to foster safe, supportive environments, prioritizing human factors.

Our third theme, Preventing Injuries and Fatalities: Practical Strategies for a safer workplace, highlighted proactive measures and actionable strategies to prevent incidents before they even occur, approaches that can save lives.

In a lively and insightful conversation with Kelly Lynch Feldkamp, an expert in injury prevention, Kelly passionately advocates for the role of body movement as a key factor in staying safe and reducing soft tissue injuries. She shared the benefits of preventative physical therapy, emphasizing how those proactive approaches elevate safety on and off the job site while enhancing overall personal health.

Next, we tackle the critical topic of fatigue management in high-risk environments with Susan Sawatzky. She guided us through various factors contributing to fatigue and strategies to mitigate its effects. Susan underscored how effective fatigue management can improve safety and productivity, reinforcing safety as a value in industries where every second counts.

Christian Harris shared six critical drivers for preventing slips, trips, and falls, providing organizations with practical tools to reduce accidents and create safer environments through Slipology. He highlighted the importance of engaging the C-suite to drive safety leadership from the top down, fostering a culture of continuous improvement, and linking safety to business success. Christian’s Insights offers actionable steps for those looking to make a lasting, positive impact on workplace safety.

Each episode in this theme provided essential strategies for preventing injuries and fatalities and emphasizing a proactive approach that prioritizes worker safety.

In our fourth theme, Voices for Change: Stories from Motivational Speakers on a Mission, we share powerful stories from inspiring individuals who turn personal experiences into missions for change. Their resilience, passion, and purpose demonstrate the compelling impact that individual dedication can have on safety culture.

We began with Paul Mahoney, who in 2000 suffered a severe workplace injury while working in the UK’s paper industry. This life-altering event set him on a path to help others. Paul’s insights focus on fostering a safety culture by creating a safe environment where employees feel empowered to ask questions and raise concerns. His story is inspiring and practical, offering guidance on making a lasting positive impact on workplace safety.

In honor of Distracted Driving Awareness Month, we featured Karen Torres, who shared her moving story of turning personal strategy into impactful change after losing her father in a distracted driving incident. Karen has since dedicated her life to raising awareness about road safety, especially around work zones. Her advocacy for situational awareness and education serves as a reminder that one moment can change lives. She continues to inspire others to become role models for safer roads through her efforts.

Brandon Schroeder, a motivational safety speaker for over a decade, shared his candid journey on overcoming physical and mental barriers following a serious workplace injury in 2011. Brandon’s message is of resilience, encouraging teams to avoid shortcuts, and working together to prioritize safety in every decision.

Dr. Lana Cormie brought a heartfelt story as she recounted her journey after losing her husband in a 2018 workplace incident. Driven to create an intentional safety culture, Lana emphasizes the importance of continuous training, proactive hazard reporting, and empowering team members to prioritize safety. Her powerful message serves as a call to action to ensure everyone returns home safely each day.

We also explore the incredible journey of Mercedes Ramirez Johnson, a miracle survivor of a 1995 airplane crash that claimed the lives of 160 people, including those of her parents. Mercedes shared the critical safety lessons uncovered after the crash, transforming her tragedy into a mission to prevent future aviation disasters. Her story aims to ensure that no one else endures a similar experience.

Mark Stanway shared his life-altering experience of falling from a 10-metre height and revisited the three critical seconds and five missed opportunities that could have prevented the incident. His story highlights the ripple effect his accident had on his family, especially one of his young daughters, underscoring the personal stakes of workplace safety. Mark introduced practical risk assessment tools for site supervisors, inspiring a renewed commitment to safety and prompting listeners to rethink safety on both personal and professional levels.

Each of these powerful voices reminds us that safety is personal and a commitment to ensuring everyone goes home safely to their loved ones each day.

Finally, with the neuroscience of safety leadership and psychological safety, we explored a science-backed approach to safety leadership rooted in brain-based insights.

Linda Ray, a seasoned expert in applied organizational neuroscience, shared her extensive knowledge of psychological safety. Linda introduced the five social brain needs essential for fostering belonging, connection, and engagement with teams. She provides actionable strategies for leaders to enhance social safety in the workplace, ultimately driving better performance and building a more robust safety culture.

We also featured Dr. Dan Radecki, a leading neuroscience and brain-based leadership expert. Dr. Radecki discusses the distinctions between acute and chronic stress in the workplace, emphasizing the link between psychological and physical safety. His valuable expertise offered effective strategies for building brain resilience, fostering better decision-making, and managing stress in high-risk environments, all contributing to safer, more supportive workplaces.

This theme provided an insightful opportunity to dive into the neuroscience of safety leadership, equipping leaders with science-driven strategies to create environments where team members feel safe, connected, connected, and empowered.

And that’s a wrap for this season of the Safety Guru! As we head into the holiday season, we hope that you carry these lessons with you and feel empowered to share them and make a difference. Thank you for joining us throughout this season. And a special thanks to our incredible guests for sharing their invaluable insights.

Please note that we’ll be taking a break on December 26 to enjoy the holidays, but we’ll be back in January with more exciting content to kick off the new year. Until then, stay safe, keep leading with impact, and here’s to a season of joy, a year of growth, and making every day safer. Thank you so much. Happy holidays!

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.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Eric Michrowski is a globally recognized thought leader and guru in Operations and Safety Culture Transformations. A highly sought-after Executive speaker on the global stage, he has led executive training programs, coached the C-Suite, and connected with thousands of Fortune 500 senior leaders. His approach is anchored in evidence-based research and practical applications in Human Performance, Process Excellence, and Organizational Change. He brings over 25-years hands-on experience in Operations Management, Culture & Business Transformations, and Safety having worked across a broad range of industries.

For more information: https://www.ericmichrowski.com/

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Slipology: Preventing Slips, Trips, and Falls and Connecting Safety to Business Success with Christian Harris

Slipology: Preventing Slips Trips and Falls and Connecting Safety to Business Success

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Join us for an engaging episode with Christian Harris, a leading expert in slip safety, as he shares his transformative journey into Slipology, resulting from a life-changing incident in London in 2012. With a contagious passion for creating safer workplaces, Christian details actionable strategies grounded in a scientific and holistic approach to preventing slips, trips, and falls. Discover the six key drivers for mitigating risks and learn the critical role of connecting with the C-Suite to drive business success and safety excellence. Packed with powerful insights and practical takeaways, this episode is a must-listen for anyone committed to fostering a safer workplace!

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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, welcome to the Safety Guru. Today, I’m very excited to have with me, Christian Harris. He is the founder of Slip Safety Services. He’s the author of Prevent Slip Accidents with Slipology, which we’ll talk about soon, as well as a host on his own podcast, A Safety and Risk Success. Christian, very excited to have you with me. Looking forward to our conversation.

Thanks, Eric, and that’s a great introduction. I couldn’t have written it better myself.

Christian! Maybe let’s get started with how you got into safety because you have a very deep personal connection to safety. Maybe let’s start there.

Yeah, sure. If you cast your mind back to 2012, it was the London Olympics, which was a massive event in my country. I live in London now, and I lived in London then as well. This was a time before marriage and before kids. So, Sunday, May the 13th, 2012, was quite a relaxing day, which Sundays aren’t for me any longer. I’ve got two little ones. But we had a bit of a lie in, went and had a nice breakfast from a café around the corner. Then my wife and I, or she was my girlfriend at the time, decided we’d go to this place called Columbia Road flower market, where we bought some flowers, had some lunch, had a nice stroll along the canal. It was a lovely sunny day, having a great Sunday. Headed back home. We were driving. We parked up our car in a Sainsbury’s, which is like a supermarket chain car park in Islington in North London. Went to go into the store and we had to go out onto the road and walk around the corner to get into the store. And then that’s the last thing that I remember for several hours.

So, what happened was a car had basically sped around the corner and turned onto the road that I was on. I was walking down the pavement or the sidewalk, depending on where you are in the world. This car came around the corner too fast, swerved, lost control, mounted the curb, and ran into me. I don’t remember anything about that. I just have a total blackout. But that’s what happened. Then woke up a few hours later in hospital feeling slightly worse for wear.

I’m sure. In Since then, you’ve done a lot of work, particularly around slips trips and falls. So obviously, a strong connection to safety. It’s an interesting topic in that very few people talk about it, at least in my experience, yet it’s a very common cause of injuries in the workplace. Tell me a little bit about some of the contacts around slip, trips, and falls, and then we get into maybe some strategies or some ideas there.

Yeah, absolutely. That incident obviously gave me a passion for safety. When something like that happens to you, you get very interested in safety very quickly, and you want to help avoid that thing happening to other people. I was a management consultant by training. Once I got this passion for safety, I started analytically looking at the world of safety. What I came across was this category called Slips, Trips, and Falls, which was the biggest cause of accidents, injuries, and insurance James, and it was very flat. Road safety, we’ve done well. It’s been improving. A bit of a flat lining now, but broadly speaking, moving in the right direction. I thought to myself, well, look, if I want to make an impact in this world of safety, why not focus on this area, which is the biggest area, and it’s one that nobody so far seems to have mastered, shall we say? That’s what got me interested in this area. You’re right that one of the biggest challenges is everybody knows about it as a risk, but we don’t speak about it enough. We don’t do enough on it. We have lots of misconceptions and poor thinking around it, and therefore We do a pretty good job.

If we were doing a terrible job, we wouldn’t be seeing 30% of accidents. We’d be seeing 70% of accidents. So, I’m not criticizing people to say we’re doing a bad job. Everyone’s doing something. But the real insight, I suppose, is that the difference in time and effort and cost between doing good and great and the outcomes we can achieve are massively exponential. So, with a small amount more investment, we can achieve exponentially better results.

It doesn’t surprise me because I see so many charts that I’ve mentioned, slip, trips, and falls, but very few action plans around what are we going to do around it. Maybe tell me about some of the strategies that you’ve seen work.

Sure. When I started delving into this subject and decoding it, I basically figured out quickly that there were six key drivers as to why somebody might slip and therefore six key areas to work on. I’m happy to run through those if you like.

I love that. Yes.

But at a headline level, what I found is that, and hence the book being called Slipology, it’s about trying to take a more scientific approach. We’re doing a pretty good job doing the basics, shall we say. But how can we go further? Well, we can go further by trying to introduce some more scientific measurement. Therefore, if we can measure those indicators of results, we can look to improve upon them, and therefore we can drive the inputs, and that will help us to get to the outputs. We’ve seen examples of people doing that cross-sectors, where we’ve seen up to an eradication of incidents. I’d never ever promised an eradication, but we normally see at least a halving of incidents and therefore, fewer injuries, fewer claims, much lower costs. It’s all about that scientific approach.

Which makes good sense because, again, the charts I typically see don’t break it down beyond somebody slip, tripped, or fell. You talked about six key drivers. Tell me a little bit about each one because I think that will inform some of the potential interventions.

Sure. It’s an acronym of CHIMES. Otherwise, I talk about tune your chimes to stop slips. C is contamination. If a floor is perfectly clean and perfectly dry, then it’s almost impossible for somebody to slip. What’s clean and what’s dry are open to interpretation a little bit. For example, what did COVID teach us about cleaning? Covid taught us that a surface can look clean but be contaminated. When it comes down to slip resistance, we see lots of floors that look clean, but they’re not very clean. They are contaminated, and therefore the slip resistance is lower than it might otherwise be. That’s one, contamination. H is for heel, so that’s all about footwear. Now, obviously, we can control footwear for members of staff much more readily than for members of the public. But there are situations where organizations will have safety shoes, safety footwear in place, and they perceive them to be slip resistant, but they’re not really slip resistant. Or they might be slip-resistant in their kitchens, but they’re not in other areas. So that would be one thing. Then from the perspective of members of the public, we often rush to blame somebody that slipped by saying, well, did you see what they had on their feet?

The way we should be thinking about this is not blame. It should be, well, what’s reasonable for somebody to be wearing on their feet? If we’re operating a restaurant or a shopping mall or something, then we should expect people to have high heels on, and therefore we should try and mitigate the risk of somebody wearing high heels. Sure.

Makes sense.  

I am individual, so this is the human factors. So, gender and age play a role here. Statistically, if you’re an 80-year-old woman, you are more likely to slip and fall than if you’re a 20-year-old man. You’re also more likely to be hurt more seriously, and therefore that will become a more costly accident. So that’s one part to think about. But the key bit here is all about behavior. So, if we are pushing, pulling, twisting, turning, if we’re carrying, if we’re distracted, if we’re rushing, all these activities will heighten the risk of a slip. Therefore, to what extent can we manage these activities? Again, that’s often easier for members of the staff than members of the public. Of course. M is maintenance, and that splits into three. Change of use. Again, think of COVID. We started walking in areas in buildings that we weren’t walking in before. We started seeing hand sanitizer stations dotted around buildings, and that was introducing risk. Wear and tear are a second thing. If you go to a church, for example, or any old building, you’ll see floors have been down for years. You’ll see wear patterns. That’s going to change the likelihood of slipping.

Then the third area here is cleaning, which is a massive control measure that people can get wrong. When we’re cleaning a floor, we’re typically introducing water or liquid and therefore introducing risk. But also, how well How do we clean a floor can determine the risk. Cleaning, the definition of cleaning is removing a contaminant from a surface. But how often do we see people mopping floors, for example, when they’re not actually removing anything, they’re just spreading stuff around and leaving a Valid point.

Valid point, yes.

Which is going to make the floor more slippery. E is environment. This is obviously the weather, rainfall, condensation, temperature, but it’s also the built environment. So, entrance, matting, steps and stairs, ramps and slopes, lighting, noise levels, all of these things contribute. Then finally, S, the surface, so that’s the floor. Some floors are more slippery than other floors. Some floors can be incredibly slippery, but perfectly suitable depending on where you’re putting them. Other floors can appear to be suitable, but they’re not. When I get invited into an organization and they’re struggling, and I present this CHIMES model to them. They tend to say, firstly, I hadn’t realized there was as much to this as that, and secondly, that they’re only working on maybe one or two of those areas. But when I go in and I meet an organization and they’re doing well, it tends to be the case that they are ticking lots of boxes around all six areas.

Sure. When you talk about footwear, one thing that I learned a little while back is even the standards around what is slip-resistant are not actually measuring the right thing. So essentially, it’s even hard to say which shoe would have or boot would have the better slip resistance. So, tell me a little bit more about how you go about it, because in that case, standard isn’t necessarily getting you the best shoe.

No. I mean, one of the challenges in my area is that there are different standards around the world. So, there are different standards of footwear, different standards of how to measure the slip resistance of a floor, different cleaning standards, etc. It is quite difficult, and it can be quite a minefield. In Europe, we have a European-wide standard. What the HEC, which is the regulator here in the UK have done is they’ve developed their own footwear test, which they would say is much more robust. I tend here in the UK to suggest people to go down that route. Sure. If the regulators developed something impartially, then hopefully it would be pretty good. If we look at floor slip resistance, for example, in Europe, then the prevailing feeling would be that that’s been influenced a bit too much by floor manufacturers, and therefore it’s perhaps a little bit too easy to pass a test than it might be for other types of tests. So, you need to be looking into your local rules, regulations, laws, and standards but also, I guess, having a bit of a beginner’s mind and questioning some of these things a little bit to say, well, is that actually as good as it might seem to be on the face of it?

And so, in your experience, and when you work with an organization to reduce slips, strips, and falls, is it trying to look at each one of these drivers? Are there some that have a bigger impact? Or are you looking more at the data specific to that organization? What have you found to be successful?

Yeah, it’s a Great question. In an ideal world, you would do well in all six areas, and then you’d be having a holistic and robust approach to mitigating the risk. What you do find, though, is in certain circumstances, you can’t control all of them. Let’s think about an Amazon delivery driver, for example, going out and visiting other businesses and other people’s homes and so on and so forth. Lots of those factors aren’t within not only that person’s control, but Amazon’s control problem in this case. If you’ve got some of the six that you can’t control, then I would suggest that you should try and go above and beyond on the ones that you can control. Whereas if you’re operating, let’s say, a manufacturing plant, you can control all six because it’s members of staff only. It’s all within your control. Try and have a consistently high performance across the board. But it is going to be very depending on where you are, what activity you’re undertaking, and that level of control. Yeah.

Because I’ve heard of some examples where, I think it was in the restaurant industry, where one chain focused predominantly on shoes and the quality of the shoes that people are wearing. The other one looked at the surface, the flooring to make sure it was less slips possible. But it strikes me doing a little bit of both would have a bigger impact.

Yeah, absolutely. Better to do both. We always advocate for a holistic approach, and we always Try and get people to figure out how they stand on all six to start with. Then look, we can prioritize based on risk assessment, based on need, based on control. But ideally, you would be trying to do something. In that scenario, you’d absolutely be trying to do something around the flooring, the footwear, and the cleaning of that flooring as a bare minimum. I tend to find that we should start with the floor and how the floor is looked at and maintained as a starting point. Because if you think of it this way, whilst we can all walk on floors that are slippery, so we can all walk on a sheet of ice without slipping, for example, it’s obviously much more difficult to walk on a sheet of ice than on a paving slab. Sure. If we can get the floor right, then we give ourselves half a chance. If we have the floor wrong, then even if we do well in all the other five areas, we’re still going to be struggling to achieve a good outcome. I think focusing on the floor and, of course, the foot, if you can control the foot from a staff perspective, are absolutely the cornerstone approaches of where I recommend people should start.

You talked about the Amazon delivery person, I think a utility worker is people that are constantly outdoors in a different environment, where some of the factors you talked about even just the environment, the weather, aren’t necessarily within their control. What are some of the strategies that work in that context? Because a lot of what I hear is it gets blamed to situational awareness. I did notice there was a dip in the grass or something along those lines. Yeah.

That’s where we must focus more on the individual human behavior and pieces, but also things like the PPE, things like lighting. If you’re a delivery driver or if you’re working on site and it’s in hours of darkness, can we give them some good lighting of some kind, even if it’s a torch or something that they have on their body in some way, shape, form, so they can see a hazard. Awareness is important. You can even go down the route of balance and how to fall, learning from martial arts, how to fall better and protect yourself. There’s lots and lots of things that you can do where you can’t necessarily control all those environmental factors. But again, just go slightly deeper on the things that you can control. In a factory, would I I recommend getting a martial arts instructor in to teach people how to fall? No, I wouldn’t, because I think there, we can mitigate that fall and hopefully prevent that fall. But if people are out and about on mobile on a construction site or railway lines or delivery drivers it might be worth doing that extra effort there because we can’t do other things.

So, we’re still taking a… Overall, we’re putting the same amount of effort in, but we’re just going a little bit deeper in that category.

This episode of the Safety Guru podcast is 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. It’s striking that you can have a significant impact on a category that for most is quite large and hasn’t, as you said, shifted in the last several years.

Yeah, you can. That’s across sectors, across environments, even in places like swimming pools or hotel bathrooms and shower trays and bathtubs, where the floor is constantly… It’s designed to be wet, right? A swimming pool is designed to be wet. A bathtub is designed to be wet. It’s only going to be used when it’s wet. So even there, you can have a big impact. I think the challenges are that… Well, there’s a few, but if you haven’t had the incidents, this is a perennial challenge for safety. If you haven’t had the incidents, then why should I focus on this is always going to be one. And with slips, trips, and falls, although it does constitute the biggest cause by far of accidents, injuries, insurance claims, as I said, they can be thinly spread. If you’re managing 100 sites, you might not have any accidents in 10, 20, 30 of those sites. Does that mean that you shouldn’t be doing stuff there? I would say no, because to what extent is that just good luck. To what extent is it under-reporting? We should still be taking a proactive and a risk-based approach to this and trying to be preventative.

It makes really solid sense. I think this is a good segue as well into another topic that I’m quite passionate about, and I know you are as well, is how do you position safety of the C-suite? In a case like what you just described, if I haven’t seen the incident in this plant, why should I invest in it? Logically, it’s just a probabilities game. It’s going to show up at some point in that other location, unless there is a very different hazard because of the way the floor in that other manufacturing environment is designed. But how do you position safety of the C-suite to drive the right impact?

Yeah, a very big perennial challenge, and one that I believe we in the safety profession should be trying to grapple with more often. In no small part because we’ve got AI and other tech, meaning that, in my opinion, our soft skills and our influencing skills are already more and more important, and are only going to get more and more important. It’s these conversations that I think we need to be having. I think I would make it as simple as possible, and I would start with first principles of what do these people care about. If you’re the CEO or if you’re the CFO or financial director, what is it that you care about? What is it that’s going to make you feel that you’re progressing? What’s going to get you your annual bonus? What’s going to get you publicity? What’s going to get you the outcomes that you want as an individual? If we start by thinking, what’s in it for them? Because everyone in the world, their favorite radio station is What’s in it for me, FM. What’s in it for them? What do they want to achieve? Then how can we enable them to achieve those objectives whilst also at the same time achieving our safety objectives.

To me, the biggest linkage that I’ve found that works well is around performance. So, safety drives high performance. And every CEO, every CFO will say they want safety, and safety is our number one priority, and all these other platitudes. Now, some of them believe it, some of them do walk the walk in that area, but lots of people don’t. But in my experience, high-performing team, they absolutely buy into that. They absolutely want that. They will invest in a high-performing team. So, to me, it’s about linking the inputs of safety into what drives performance because I think it’s much easier to sell performance to that board than it is to sell safety. Does that make sense as an approach?

Yeah, it absolutely does. I think it’s something similar when I think about a nuclear where safety is highly embedded. What I found was quite consistent is the message was that, yes, safety matters, and they were highly invested in it, but they looked at every incident that happened as simple as a slip trip. I dropped an object saying, that’s something where we are not operating at our best. It’s not the highest level of performance. It means there’s a gap in our system. Something could obviously have a much bigger consequence. It becomes really this element of high performance, although they were looking at it more in terms of adherence to rules and standards and those types of pieces, which made sense in the nuclear context. But I think that’s where I’ve seen the most success is connecting it to the C-suite, speaking the language of business as opposed to the language of safety.

Yeah. I also think we’ve got to try and get away from this piece around human error. Nobody sets out to cause an accident, have an accident, hurt themselves or hurt other people. Nobody. If we instead think of it around performance, Let’s say we’re in a sales role. We have some days where we’re really on song and we knock it out of the park, and we do well, and we get lots of meetings or we get lots of sales or whatever. We have other days where we don’t do so well. We have accepted that that thing is going to happen. I believe we shouldn’t be looking at that. We should be managing around and accepting that these peaks and troughs will happen because we’re humans, we’re fallible, we’re never going to be perfect, and therefore we need to be looking more about the engineering control the systems, et cetera, the things that are outside the control of the human. Also shining a light on us and looking in the mirror and saying, well, again, nobody creates policies, procedures, systems, processes, thinking that they’re not great. We all think that we’re doing a good job, but just saying, well, could that be a bit better?

Can we improve on that a little bit more? I think one of the things I did six months ago, I did some polls on LinkedIn in a lot of health and safety groups, and I said, how often, when you start a new health and safety role, do you find things that you can improve upon? Always, often, rarely, never. It was something like 85% said always. So, my question back then was, well, if you can always find things to improve upon from other people, are you always checking yourself to see if there’s things you can improve upon instead of putting that challenge back?

I think that’s a great comment and observation, because at the end of the day, to me, safety is about continuous improvement. There’s really no difference. And even when you’re talking about high performance and Teams is an example, a big part of it is same as continuous improvement, you’re getting this muscle reflex of problem solving. If you’re doing it effectively. In that scenario, there should always be a better way to check the policy. Are you speaking to the frontline team members? Are you getting their input? It can be a very engaging organization as well that you’re building when you’re seeking that input as opposed to pushing rules and standards and expecting a different outcome.

Yeah. No, I fully agree with that. And again, it goes back to those soft skills. It’s the empathy, the active listening. These are the fields that we should be playing on. These are the causes that we should be focusing our time and effort on, trying to improve, to be more effective in our roles, in my opinion.

Absolutely. I think these are great observations, but it’s really… You also brought the linkage back to sales. It is about selling, but selling not just about, here’s a new rule we need to implement, but selling what’s the difference we’re trying to do to the organization How is it going to help?

Yeah, and going back to what’s in it for them. You’re not going to get the shop floor staff, if you’re in an industry where there’s a shop floor staff, to do something if they don’t see the benefit to themselves. Again, I think that’s where high performance can come in. It’s not about keeping you safer because they don’t think something bad is going to happen to them anyway. It’s about actually enabling you to do your job better and be more productive and get a better review and so on and so forth. Really understanding what people are seeking to achieve and being an enabler and not a blocker is one key thing. The other thing I’d really like to draw out is we’ve got to be better at speaking the language of business, which is the language of numbers. We’ve got to figure out how we can put together a return on investment business case, and that is how we can unlock more investment and funding by convincing, influencing, persuading the powers that be that if we spend a dollar on this, we’re going to get $5 or $10 or $20 back. One way or another, that could be by reducing cost of accidents, it could be by reducing insurance premiums, it could be by improving productivity, it could be by reducing staff attrition.  

Because staff are feeling happier, they don’t leave, and therefore you save on training costs and other things. There’s a plethora of ways that our work in safety can help our business. We’re just going to be better at understanding that and then playing that back and selling that to the board.

I think the other element I talk about in this space is ultimately driving a great safety culture is driving a good business culture, good operation culture, and so driving the linkage. But if you go into an organization and you, I want to change the culture to become more efficient, nobody’s going to come on board, nobody’s going to love the idea. But if you’re driving against a goal of safety, people are not going to resist it. But ultimately, a tight operation that’s well run. If you look a lot of the drivers of safety culture, it’s engaged employees that are putting their discretionary effort to drive improvements. All these things drive a better culture, but there’s a rallying cry if you’re trying to drive safety culture. The other one, I would say, is customer service. If you’re in a customer service environment, can also be that rallying cry because nobody’s going to fight. So no, I want a crappy customer yelling at me every day. Those are two good drivers of change.

I like that. That was the great thing about the famous Alcoa case study, wasn’t it? Let’s lead with safety because safety is something that everybody can buy into, and therefore, it is a rallying cause that will get people emotive and typically, to get people to act and change, you need to get them emotive about something. That’s where the… Although I just said we need to be speaking the language of business to get people to change their behaviors, at that grassroots shop floor level, talking about numbers to them is not going to make that difference. In most cases, it needs to be something a bit more emotive. There’s an interesting case study that I could share with you about business outcomes and customer service, which you just mentioned, which I think is relevant. This was in the leisure industry, an operator of swimming pools. They had about 150 sites, and they were getting about 30% of their insurance claims were from slips, and that equated to about one claim per week. We worked with them over about 18 months, and they managed to drive that down to 8% of claims, and it was one per month.

So quite a big, from 50-ish to 10-ish claims. But what was interesting was, going back to that piece around chimes, what they were working on was the floors, their cleaning and keeping the floors as safe as possible for their members who were going in the showers and the pool sides and so on and so forth. Now, what they found was by investing their time and effort in making their floors safer, they were also making them much cleaner. The biggest the source of members leaving gyms is cleanliness. Makes sense. What they found was they had a massive, as well as the savings, the profit they generated from the reduction in risk, they had a massive uplift in net promoter score, member feedback. They saw fewer members leaving, and they saw an increase in their ability to sell memberships as well. They had a massive profit benefit from this focus on safety, and that’s a great example, tying it all together.

I think that’s the point you’re making around talking the language of business, connecting the dots. That’s not where a safety professional normally will spend their time in saying, well, how has the net promoter score change? But there could be some connections if the people you’re injuring or the public in general, a threat to follow. So, love the title of your book, Slipology. So, tell me a little bit more about your book. It’s available on Amazon. It’s on the best seller list. So, tell me a little bit about why somebody should pick up Slipology.

So, the first thing I’d say is one of the big challenges I get is slips, trips, and falls. So that’s simple. And my response to that is, well, I must be the best writer in the world then because I’ve managed to write 50-odd thousand words about something that’s so simple. Basically, it goes through That whole Chimes model in much more detail, there’s a five-step method that you can go through to step by step to reduce your risk. And it starts with better understanding and diagnostic of where you are and goes all the way through to being able to prove in evidence what you’re doing to enable you to show the internal stakeholders, the insurance company, the regulators, and so on and so forth, all of those third parties as well, that you’re doing what you say you’re going to do and that you’re managing those inputs well. There are lots and lots of case studies and examples, both from the perspective of positive things like the one I shared, but also where things have gone wrong. Speaking about some of the serious incidents that I’ve had to investigate, like fatalities and serious head injuries and so on because of slips and learning the lessons from those.

Just trying to make it accessible, but also engaging. We know it’s not the sexiest topic. I’ve tried to inject some personality into it, tried to make it story-driven, insight-led, and make it accessible and engaging, but also enough detail in there that it’s actually useful. We’ve had some good reviews so far. As you say, it got number one safety book on Amazon, number one insurance book on Amazon, from the Kindle Edition, the paperback edition. By the time this podcast goes out, it’s probably out. It wasn’t out straight away because it took a bit of time to get all that sorted, but that will be available around the world as well. If you’re interested in doing more and just, like I said earlier, going from good to great in this area, then I’d encourage you to pick up a copy.

I was watching on your quite active on LinkedIn, you also have some good examples of floors and some of the items you described in terms of what’s clean versus not clean and how you can actually make it much more slip resistant. So, a lot of good illustrations on how you can drive the change.

Exactly. I think bringing it to life is really important. It sounds ironic to say it on a podcast, but a lot of communication is in the visual. So, when you’re talking to somebody, I think it’s like 30% is what they say and 70% is nonverbal communication. And a picture is worth a thousand words. So, the more you can show people rather than telling them, obviously, the more beneficial that is. There are all sorts I put on LinkedIn. I’ve got a very funny video which I share occasionally showing a yellow sign in a supermarket and basically people stumbling over it and knocking it over. Just showing that, these are not all they’re cracked up to be. There are loads of stuff, and just trying to make it engage.

Definitely. Well, thank you so much, Christian, for joining me today, for sharing your insights, both in terms of how to address slips, trips, falls, but also in terms of how you communicate, connect the dots for the C-suite to be able to drive this positive change. So, thank you, Christian.

Thanks, Eric. Enjoyed it.

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.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Christian Harris is a renowned slip safety expert known for his innovative, data-driven approach to reducing slip accidents, injuries, and claims. As the founder of Slip Safety Services, Christian has spent over 12 years helping thousands of clients achieve a 57%+ reduction in slip-related incidents through a practical, end-to-end implementation service of the Slipology principles and CHIMES.

In 2012, Christian was struck by a speeding car while walking on the pavement. The serious injuries he sustained ignited his passion for safety. This life-changing event inspired him to prevent accidents and protect others from similar, avoidable harm.

Christian’s mission is to reduce slip accidents worldwide through Slipology, a scientific method to reduce slip risk. He aims to empower businesses to protect people while enhancing operational efficiency and profits.

Christian envisions a world where businesses prevent slip accidents and profit from safety. Through Slipology, he aims to save over 500,000 accidents annually, proving that safety drives profitability and growth.

For more information: https://slipsafety.co.uk/.

Connect with Christian on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christian-harris-slip-safety/.

Get his book “Prevent Slip Accidents with Slipology”: https://amzn.eu/d/eNmBDTf.

Listen to his Safety And Risk Success podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/safety-and-risk-success/id1521150061.

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Three Seconds and Five Missed Opportunities: The Journey to Safety and Its Ripple Effects with Mark Stanway

Three Seconds and Five Missed Opportunities: The Journey to Safety and Its Ripple Effects with Mark Stanway

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ABOUT THE EPISODE

We are honored to feature a sobering and impactful conversation with Mark Stanway, a seasoned professional in the construction industry, as he recounts the three life-altering seconds in 2015 when he fell from a ten-meter height. Mark reflects on the five missed opportunities that could have prevented his incident and emphasizes the importance of identifying and understanding hazards in work areas and ensuring control measures are in place. He also shares the devastating ripple effects it had on his family. Tune in now as Mark introduces practical risk-assessment tools that empower site supervisors to efficiently evaluate work hazards, promoting safer workplaces. Don’t miss this compelling episode that will leave you rethinking safety on every level.

READ THE EPISODE

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, Mark Stanway. He’s a freelance site manager. He’s also a motivational speaker on safety. He has some very powerful stories and examples to share with us, particularly around risk identification, risk assessments, and job sites. Mark, welcome to the show. I’m very excited to have you with me today.

Hi, nice to meet you, Eric. Nice to be invited on to the show.

Excellent. Maybe let’s start with your accident that happened. If you can reshare the story you shared with me originally, I think it was a very, very powerful story.

I was working off a scaffold fitting to a roof that we were refurbishing on a building in the center of Tot-mouth in a busy shopping area. I’d arrived on site the day before at approximately 8:30, having traveled for roughly three and a half hours. When I arrived on site, I a gang of subcontract roofers who I’d worked with before. They’d arrived on site at the start of the week. We were all subcontracting to the same roofing company. When I arrived on site, there was no site representative or site supervisor for the roofing company on site. There was no site office. There was nowhere to sign in or sign out. There was nowhere for site inductions to take place, nor was I site inducted. There were no RAMs for me to sign up to. There were no welfare facilities. On first inspection of the work area, I could see that the scaffold had been erected too high for me to fit the new Soffit board. I contacted the Contracts Manager for the roofing company. I’d known him for over 30 years. He answered the phone unbeknown to me he was on holiday abroad. I explained to him all the issues I had with fitting the Soffit board, and I said to him, if I removed certain scaffold boards, I would be able to gain access to fit the new Soffit board.

He asked me to proceed. Why is it as tradespeople, instead of refusing to do the work, we try to find ways to get the work done, often compromising our own health and safety, but even worse, compromising the health and safety of others. The access to the scaffold was from a balcony area. This balcony area was used by the public to access some flats and small businesses on this level. The ladders to the scaffold were situated in such a way as to wedge the scaffold gate in a permanently open position. The balcony area that the ladder sat on was covered in tiles. The tiles had a raised disk pattern for extra grip, but this raised disk pattern wasn’t noticeable as the whole area was covered in lichen. Lichen is an organic substance which is incredibly slippery when wet, a fact that I did not know. Had I known that fact, I might have checked that the ladders were secured to the scaffold, but I didn’t. It was part of the site supervisor’s daily pre-start checks to check that the ladders were secured to the scaffold. But that does not excuse operators from checking as well. We all have a duty.

Sure. When I first went up the ladders, for some reason, I looked down and I could see the metal handrail balcony below me. Further below that was a flat roof, and even further below that was a small concrete backyard, which is part of an emergency exit route for the premises below. I thought to myself, that looks a nasty form. But this messed the thought from my head and carried on. A few hours later, the site supervisor for the roofing company arrived on site. I said to him all the issues that I had with fitting the soffit board, but he showed no interest. He was more concerned about trying to source a generator for the hoist for the subcontract roofers. On the day of the accident, the weather was overcast. I contacted the with the project manager first thing in the morning as I needed to remove quite a few scaffold boards from the gable end of the building in order to fit the soffit. The subcontract roofers and the site supervisor for the roofing company were involved in the conversation. I as it would mean restricting access to this area. I was told to proceed.

At around nine o’clock, the weather changed, and it started to slightly rain. The subcontract roofers decided to go for an early breakfast, believing the weather would blow over. Before they went for their early breakfast, they asked me if I could start to fit the fascia board to one elevation so that they could complete their roof edge detail on their return. I stopped what I was doing and started to fit the fascia board. The rain became more persistent, so I decided to do some work at ground floor level. As I went to exit the scaffold, the next thing I remember was my father-in-law, crunching over me, saying, Mark, you can’t go. You’ve got to look after Debbie and the children, Debbie being my wife and my five children, Harriet, Georgina, Harvey, Millie, and Pip. But my father-in-law had died the year before. Perhaps I was about to die. I suddenly became aware of people around me and my clothes being cut off. This was the paramedics attending to me. This would have been approximately an hour after I had fallen. What had happened was, as I went to step onto the ladders, the ladder slipped, causing my body to partially cartwheel.

I fell approximately four and a half meters onto the metal handrail, impacting on the left side of my upper body, just under my arm pit. The impact caused ribs three, two, and three to explode, three and four to explode, fractured my shoulder blade and caused my left lung to start bleeding. As the impact continued, fracturing rib two, causing nerve and soft tissue damage, fracturing my collarbone. My neck then followed the impact, cushioned by my shoulder, followed by my head. My head being sliced open on the side, dislodging crystals in my left ear and causing a possible brain trauma. As the rest of my upper body impacted the handrail, ribs five, six, and seven, impacting at the side and where they joined the spine, my internal organs being squashed, my lung had suffered further damage, damage to my spleen, pushing my stomach up into my chest wall, trauma to my spine, further nerve and soft tissue damage. The rest of my body followed, and the unbalanced weight tried to roll me off the handrail, but the handrail was wet firmly under my left shoulder, and my left shoulder was now started to be torn off. The joint between the collarbone and sternum was starting to be torn apart, and the sternum itself has started to be twisted and distorted within the chest wall.

Somehow my shoulder freed itself, but further trauma was caused to my left arm. I fell just over a meter onto the edge of the flat roof, impacting on the right side of my body, fracturing rib eight on the right side and causing trauma to my large intestine. I then fell a further three and a half meters headfirst onto the concrete ground, impacting the concrete ground headfirst with the right side of my head, causing trauma to the right side of my head, possible brain trauma, dislodging crystals in my right ear, trauma to my neck, trauma to my right-hand. The accident had been witnessed by a dental technician, whose premises was some eight meters away from the scaffolded access point. They’d been alerted to the fall by the noise of the ladder sliding and the impact of my body on the handrail. They quickly told their colleague what had happened and then went to site to tell them. Their colleague, who was first trained, went to attend to me, but there was no direct access. She had to go down to the market square, out of the market square to the high street, down the high street to a cafe, into the cafe, through the cafe into their kitchen, to the kitchen area, through the kitchen area to the emergency exit area, to where I lay on the concrete ground.

The site supervisor for the roofing company, on learning what had happened, went to the balcony area, could see that the ladders had slipped, decided to push the ladders back up and secure them, and put all the scaffold board in that morning. The police had called for detectives to come to the scene as they believed my accident was going to result in a fatality. They called in the balcony area off and they asked who was in charge. The site supervisor for the roofing company said he was. They asked what had happened. He said that I’d fallen off the ladders, but they could see the skid marks on the ground that the ladders had made when they took their bath, asked further questions. The site supervisor eventually admitted what he had done and was subsequently arrested.

Wow. That’s incredible. One that you’re still alive from a fall of that height, but also all the attempt to cover up what had occurred.

It gets worse with the cover up because the company itself then went to the site before the HSE got there, and they started interfering with the scene. They changed the documentation. They removed the site supervisor as the person in charge and tried to shift all the blame to the roofers. There was an awful lot of deceit that went on instead of just honesty, which is terrible, really, because nothing gets learned on the accident. It doesn’t make you feel very good as a person because it makes you feel worthless.

So, your accident, tortuosity events, Tell me a little bit about the journey after because you got to the hospital, the impact from your life standpoint, but also the impact on your family.

I was taken to hospital via a helicopter. I don’t remember much of being in the hospital, as I first arriving in the hospital. So, I was drifting in and out of consciousness. The local place where I lived, I’d gone round to our house to tell my wife in person what had happened, as they believed I was going to be a fatality. Unfortunately, my wife wasn’t at home. She was in Ludlow, which is some 10 miles away from where we lived. The police had to ring my wife up. My wife received the phone call, and they said, hello, this is Lempster police. Your husband has had an accident at work. He’s been airlifted to hospital. We don’t have any further information. My wife started to shake from head to in shock, but I was over 200 miles away, and all she wanted to do was to see me. Stress, the strain, the anxiety my wife was feeling at that particular moment. She was unable to come to me straight away because we had three of our children at different schools within a 10-mile radius. One of our daughters was traveling back from the university at that particular point.

Our eldest daughter lived some four and a half hours away, and both sets of parents lived 60 miles away. She contacted my mother and asked my mother to contact the hospital, and my wife spoke to me later that day. She arrived at the hospital the following day with three of our children. That was Georgina, Millie, and Pip. Pip being our youngest daughter, who was only nine years old at the time of the accident. When Pip saw me in the hospital bed, battered and bruised with a mask on my face, she had a massive panic attack, and her mom had to take her out of the to try to calm her down. The day before, when my wife had told her what had happened, she stopped uncontrollably. She was very, very upset. She eventually managed to get her back into the hospital to see me. I told my wife for the events. Initially, the hospital was going to operate on me and reconstruct my rib cage. Without this operation, I would suffer a lifetime of pain. But after a few days, they decided not to operate and just wanted to send me home. I was on a machine that would self-administer morphine by the push of a button.

They made several attempts to try to take me off this machine, all of which failed. But despite this, they sent me home on the ninth of July, seven days after my accident. They sent me home with insufficient pain medication, no follow-up appointment, a letter to my doctor stating that I had multiple rib fractures and a damaged left lung, and no further medical advice. I’ll always remember the nurse that gave me that letter and the pain medication, the look of concern on her face as though she knew something that I didn’t. Were they sending me home to die? I had more than multiple rib fractures. I had a flail chest, the danger of which is it can compromise your breathing, and you can die. The hospital had failed to recognize other injuries that I sustained. Despite my complaints of pain, they chose not to investigate. On the day of my discharge, the ninth of July, at 12:35, they had a meeting regarding my discharge. My head trauma was brought up in that meeting, and they decided to put my head trauma in my discharge notice and to give me advice that should I suffer headaches, memory loss, or dizziness, to contact the emergency department straight away.

If you look at my hospital notes, all the time that I’m in there, I’m complaining of headaches. I’ll make it off. Which I’m told to expect headaches for the next 6 to 12 months. As I said, this meeting was at 12:35, but my discharge notice was printed at 12:18, so none of this information was ever entered into my discharge notice. The hospital that I was at was at the forefront of blunt thoracic trauma. That is a blunt impact to your upper those. The danger, which is you can develop pneumonia and die. They had developed a treatment chart based on a score. The score was calculated by the age of the patient, the number of rib fractures they sustained, and pain medication was considered. No matter how you calculated my school, there is no way that I should have just been sent home with no follow-up. Some years later, I would meet one of the consultants that sent me home, probably to die, and he would apologize more than once. The hospital would write a letter to me explaining that my injuries were potentially life-threatening, and for that reason, an operation would have been too intrusive.

Unfortunately, that meant I probably would suffer a lifetime of pain. Wow.

So crazy series of events even into the hospital because it’s already… You had gone through incredible fall. Was it 10 meters total in terms of the scaffolding?

It was approximately 10 meters. It’s the equivalent of falling from the top of the three-store building. That’s crazy. I mean, by right, shouldn’t have survived well.

You talked about when you started out, there were multiple events where somebody could have noticed something. In fact, I think you identified five times an opportunity that was missed that could have stopped the incident. Tell me a little bit about that and how we drive a culture, ultimately, where this doesn’t happen.

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, and enhance supervisory safety capabilities, or introduce unique safety leadership training and talent solutions, Propulo has you covered. Visit us at propulo.com.

That’s right, Eric. If you look, there was five opportunities missed to stop my accident from happening. I should have checked that the ladder was secured to the scaffold, but I either didn’t understand the importance of the ladder has been secured to the scaffold, but I didn’t understand the importance of the ladder’s being secured to the scaffold, or I couldn’t be They were bothered to check. The other cooperatives were using the ladders that day. Should have checked that the ladders were secured to the scaffold, they either didn’t understand the importance of the ladders being secured to the scaffold or they couldn’t be bothered. The site supervisor has a duty to supervise the work area, to review the work area, and identify hazards. Part of his pre-start daily checks were to check that the ladders were secured to the scaffold, which he didn’t do.

The ground was covered in lichen. He should have witnessed, should have observed that and dealt with it straight away. The ladders wedged the scaffold gate in a permanently open position. He should have realized that was wrong and had the ladders repositioned. The scaffolding company erected the scaffold access, not as per TG20, the ladders were wedging the scaffold gate open. They should have been at right angles to the scaffold. They should have also identified the issues with the ground covered in lichen where they were going to put the ladders. And the contract manager Instead of using site-specific ramps, used generic RAMs, failing to realize all the hazards that were around by putting the scaffold access where we did. It also had the scaffold erected without thinking about my task of fitting the new soffit board and compromising my health and safety in trying to fit the soffit board, balancing off scaffold tubes because there was no lift there for me to do it. Also, the issue, should somebody suffer an accident, getting access to them. Five opportunities missed to stop my accident from happening.

How do you make a shift from a cultural standpoint, where you’ve got multiple people that look the other way? How do you instill that impact? Obviously, sharing a story drives an impact. But tell me about a little bit in terms of how you could make a difference in that regard in terms of getting people to, as you said, either didn’t understand or couldn’t be bothered with it. How do you change that so that the right actions happen day in and day out?

Well, based on what happened to me, I developed a free-to-use app, shako.org.uk, which is all about people reviewing their work area. It’s designed for supervisors to review the work area. But the objective is everybody needs to review their work area to identify the hazards and to ensure there are control measures in place. If you have a hazard and you can’t eliminate the hazard, then there’s always the potential that hazard could turn into an accident. You have a control measure in place, but it doesn’t stop the potential of that hazard becoming an accident. And that’s what people need to do is to stop, stand back, look at their work area, identify the hazards, and to understand how the control measures need to be in place to try to stop those hazards occurring. A simple thing, if somebody using their tools and putting their tools down in a walkway, that’s obviously a trip hazard. If they think to themselves, oh, I’m going to create a trip hazard. I need to put a control measure in place, which is I’ll remove the tools from the walkway. You’ve eliminated it. And it’s getting that mentality over.

Because at the end of the day, the person most affected by my accident was my youngest daughter, Pip, who was only nine years old. Now, I’ve gone through a huge amount of trauma. I’ve been suicidal. I’ve gone through all these different events It was my choice to take a risk. But the person most affected by my accident was my youngest daughter, who suffered terribly. When I had my accident, as I said to you, that she started to sob uncontrollably. When she saw me in the hospital, she had a massive panic attack. I was eventually remitted back into hospital when I was discharged. It was on one of the days was her birthday, and she sent me a text saying, All I want for my birthday is for you to come home, Daddy. I have a picture that was taken a month before my accident of me and my daughter. It’s a lovely picture. It shows a bond between us, but it’s a bond I haven’t felt since the accident, nor do I remember before the accident. Imagine how dramatic that is for a nine-year-old girl to feel that her father doesn’t have that connection. But then it gets even worse.

For the first two years after my accident, every time I was in a room with my daughter and she would start to speak, I would just get up and leave the room. She would say to a mom, Doesn’t Daddy love me anymore? The reality was I couldn’t cope with the pitch of her voice. But how can she possibly understand that? And so, she spent over half of her life, nine more years of her life because she’s 18 now, suffering that trauma, trying to deal with the trauma from my accident. And that’s what people have to try to realize, is you may be the injured person. You may be the person that has the accident, but the ripple effect of the trauma of an accident in the workplace is devastating. And that’s why they need to review the work area, identify the hazards, and make sure control measures are in place.

And it sounds so simple, but it’s not the first time I’ve heard multiple layers like this of different people did not identify the hazard, not seeing the hazard. In some cases, you position it very well. It’s I’m either they didn’t see the hazard, or they didn’t recognize the impact, or they couldn’t be bothered. I think at the end of the day, it’s a compounding of all these pieces that leads to terrible events.

You’re quite right. The trouble is most of our health and safety is tick box. You can quite easily bypass it by tick box. I’m a freelance site manager. I give toolbox talks. If I just stop you work and give you a toolbox talk, you’ve got no interest in me. You don’t really want to listen to me. I’ve just stopped you earning your money. I’ve frustrated you, if anything. But if I walk around the site and I see you working in an unsafe manner, and then I stop you and ask why you’re working that way, and then you tell me why, and then I give you a toolbox talk explaining that way, I think that’s a better way of doing it, because then people are going to listen and learn from it. I think we do too much tick boxing, and we just need to get people to understand. The big first thing is to understand the hazards. If you can understand the hazards, you’re halfway there, and then it’s getting them to want to put the control measures in place. You have risk and method statements telling you how to do something, identifying the risks.

Now, who’s to say the person doing that risk and method statement is competent? They’ve come up with how they feel, which is a safe way of doing it. Now, if you’re a tradesman person, you say, well, I’ve always worked this way. I’ve always done things my way. Then that tradesperson needs to engage and say, well, I don’t think your risk and method statement is correct. I think you should do this. And they should have a discussion to make sure the way they’re working is safe. But at the same time as a tradesperson, before he carries out his job, he’ll be thinking, What tools do I need? What materials do I need? He’ll plan all that part. He needs to also start to plan his own health and safety. I think, oh, I need a bit of access. What access can use? I won’t stand on a book on a tin of paint. Actually, I’ll get a proper hopper, or I’ll get a small scaffold. They need to engage, and they need to want to engage. And it’s trying to get people to want to engage. That seems to be the biggest difficulty. And the only way I can really express that is to turn around and say, the ripple effects your accident will have on your family and loved ones, you can destroy their lives.

They can commit suicide from your accidents because of the trauma it’s caused them.

You said something else at the beginning of your story, I think that was quite powerful, is you said in the trades, you solve problems. There’s something around when you saw something that wasn’t right, you’re trying to find a solution to make it work. There’s also that orientation to solve because that’s what you’re doing, is solving problems day in and day out. But I think it was a very powerful statement, really, in terms of There’s a desire to find a solution as opposed to saying, not safe.

The trades people should turn around and say, It’s not safe. They should have the competence to turn around and say, I can’t do this safely. How can I do this safely? And contact somebody and say, I can’t do my job safely. If you did this, I could do it safely, as opposed to having to completely dismantle the scaffold and re-erect the scaffold. When I’m outside as a freelance site manager and I say, I’ll say to people, can you do this task for me? And they’ll say, I’m not comfortable. And I’ll say, why aren’t you comfortable with doing the task? And they’ll say, Therefore, I want a better access. It could be multiple things. And I’ll say, Okay, then. So, I’ll put that in place. Would you feel happy then? But some people will say, I’m just not comfortable doing the task. And I’ll say, That’s perfectly fine. I’ll find somebody else to do it. You must be comfortable doing the task. I appreciate the fact that you’ve turned around to me and said that you’re not comfortable. I wish more people would say that because they should do. If you’re not comfortable, don’t be forced into taking a risk.

Because the reality is my life-changing accident happened in three seconds. My daughter has lived nine years of her life in trauma from my life-changing accident. Three seconds has caused… It probably destroys her life. It’s certainly had a huge impact on her life. It’s had a huge impact on my other four children. It’s had a massive impact on my wife. Three seconds. Three seconds. It’s not worth it.

Three seconds and five opportunities to change the course. Five? Ahead of time. Yeah. I think very, very powerful story, and we’re lucky to still have you with us. Tell me a little bit about… You mentioned a tool that you’ve launched, increased that risk awareness, the risk identification, the risk assessment and job sites. Tell me a little bit more about how you’ve brought that to life.

What I was looking at was how could I possibly try to stop my accident, try to get a supervisor to realize, or for me to realize all the risks that there were, were the way that the ladders were positioned. There was the ground that was slippery, the ladders weren’t secured, the ladders were positioned incorrectly. So, there’s three opportunities there of things that were wrong straight away. I tried to understand that. I noticed if you I look at people that post pictures online of their work progress, and you actually look at the picture and start to look for hazards, all you’re looking is for hazards. There could be a control measure in place. There might not be a control measure in place. And then I started looking at photographs that people were advertising. Look at our business. And they were advertising. It’s nice action shot. It was showing work and progress and everything. But then I thought to myself, well, you’ve got hazards, and you’ve got no control measures in place. You’re saying, look at me, I want to say if we are. And then I looked back when I had my own junior company.

It’s an image I had. It was an image. It was up in Scotland, and it was a big timber frame building, a longnecks roof and everything. And I started to think but look at the hazards I’ve got on there with no control measures in place. So that’s what gave me the idea. So, my idea basically as a site supervisor on a regular basis takes a picture of their work area. It’s got to be their work area. It’s not a picture of the site. It’s not saying, oh, look at this on the side. It’s their work area. They’re trying to teach they’re fellow workers of what’s going on. To take a picture of their work area and identify five hazards. Identify the type of hazard it is. If there’s a control measure in place, they put a green thumbs up. If there’s no control measure in place, they put a red thorn down. And they put a brief description of the control measure. They do this on five occasions. If they find anything with a red thumbs down because there’s no control measure in place, they can take an action and deal with that. But they then see this as the people they are supervising in a form of a test.

It’s not a scored test. And it comes to the people that they’re supervising. They see an image of their work area with five hazards identified. When they select a hazard, it comes up with the option. It shows you the type of hazard it is, just a pictorial method, and with a green thumbs up or red thumbs down choice. And whichever they select, it doesn’t matter if they select with a green thumbs up or a red thumb down, whichever one they select, the picture then zooms in with the correct answer of whether it’s a green thumbs or red thumbs down with a brief description of the control measure. So, it could be there’s a brick in a walk. So, it’s a red thumbs down, brick and a walk, so it’s a trip hazard, remove brick. And simply by doing through pictures, because you remember 80% of what you see, compared to what I think it’s 20% of what you read. Over time, operatives to understand how their actions and inactions can create hazards and the control measures that need to be in place. The site supervisor also must take picture with five hazards in. Now, that sounds simple, but it’s not as simple as it sounds.

If you took a picture, for example, of a scaffold because you’re working off a scaffold, you’ve got a clear walkway because the platform you’re working. So therefore, the trip has it, and it’s a green thumbs up because it’s clear. You’ve got a double handrail, so that’s two falls from heights. So, there’s two more hazards, which is a reduced hazard because you’ve got the two handrails. You’ve got a tow board and a brick guard. There’s two more of materials falling off the scaffold. There are five hazards determined. If every scaffold that you went on during a working day was clear with all those pieces in place, imagine the number of accidents, potential accidents that you would stop. Because during the working day, you’ve got trip hazards all over that scaffold. You’ll have brick guards pulled off. And that’s the point I’m trying to get through is that people think, oh, something’s not right there because they’ve been learned through pictorial images. I need to do that. They feel that something’s wrong and want to adjust it. That was the idea behind it.

Which is huge because if you can get people to just find the hazards and do something about it, that’s a game changer in many cases.

It’s basically health and safety, isn’t it, really? The reality is it’s the hazard that’s causing the potential accident. If you put a control measure in place, you must have reduced the risk of an accident. Correct.

If somebody wants to more about your story or more about your tool, how can they get in touch with you, Mark?

They can contact me direct at [email protected]. But I do have a website that they can view, which is www.shakositemanagementservicesltd.com. On there, it shows all the articles I’m constantly writing on LinkedIn about various issues of health and safety. It shows a bit about my motivational speaking. It also tells me a bit about an accident, tells you about Shako. My wives also involved telling her side of the story because it’s all about a family to try to get that message across of the people who were affected by an accident in the workplace.

Because I think that’s a big part as well of recognizing, like you said, the impact is on yourself, but also on everybody around you in terms of how it impacts them, the ripple effects, so that hopefully somebody makes a safer choice, somebody stops the work, somebody recognizes and controls the hazard in the workplace. That’s correct, Eric.

That’s the main thing. It’s the other people. It’s not the injured person. I always say that I’m the injured person. I’m the person who suffered. I haven’t suffered. My head has probably lost it and I’ve changed. It’s the people around me. They are the ones who suffered. They haven’t had the trauma to the brain. They’re realizing what’s going on. It’s affected their lives.

Right. Mark, thank you so much for sharing your story to shift hearts and minds in industry around both the hazard identification inside, but also in terms of choosing to work safe, to stop something, as opposed to trying to find a patch, a solution to make the problem go away.

Thank you for having me, Eric. I appreciate that. To get my message over, that’s very good of you. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Mark.

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.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Mark Stanway is a seasoned professional in the construction industry, boasting over 45 years of experience as a director of a carpentry and joinery contracting business, builder, and freelance site manager. His extensive background has given him a deep understanding of the industry’s intricacies and challenges.

In 2015, Mark experienced a life-changing accident when he fell from a height of approximately ten meters, which profoundly reshaped his perspective on workplace safety. This incident ignited his passion for health and safety, motivating him to advocate for better practices in the industry.

To further this mission, Mark developed a free-to-use app, shako.org.uk, that enables site supervisors to efficiently review and assess work areas, prompting safer construction environments.

As a keynote speaker, he shares his insights and experiences, educating construction workers on the importance of safety measures and accident prevention. Mark’s dedication to enhancing workplace safety continues to inspire change and foster a culture of vigilance in the construction sector.

For more information: https://www.shakositemanagementservicesltd.com/

Contact Mark Stanway: [email protected]

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Brain-Based Leadership: The Neuroscience of Safety Leadership with Dr. Dan Radecki

Brain-Based Leadership: The Neuroscience of Safety Leadership

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ABOUT THE EPISODE

Join us for a captivating episode with Dr. Dan Radecki, a leading expert in neuroscience and brain-based leadership. In this discussion, Dr. Radecki details the differences between acute and chronic stress in the workplace and highlights the critical link between psychological and physical safety. Discover effective strategies to build brain resilience, foster better decision-making, and manage stress in high-risk roles to create safer environments. Don’t miss this insightful opportunity to dive into the neuroscience of safety leadership!

READ THE EPISODE

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 Dr. Dan Radecki. He is the co-founder and chief Scientific Officer at the Academy for Brain-based Leadership. He also has a second job as a Vice President and Head of Global Clinical Research at Object Pharma. He’s co-authored a book as well as a regular TEDx keynote So Dan, welcome to the show. Very excited to have you with me. I think we’re going to have a great conversation today. So, tell me a little bit about your background and the two roles that you have.

Thanks, Eric. I’m happy to be here. I’m a neuroscientist by training and have done research in the space in mental health and the neuroscience aspects of all of this, but also found myself working in the corporate world as a leader at biotech and pharma. And so early on, I appreciated this difference between the way that we, as leaders, behave, how we lead our people, and what the neuroscience says about how you should. So that whole dichotomy between what you should be doing and what you are doing. And it always frustrated me, even in the science field, how leadership didn’t adhere to what we know about how the brain works and how we get the best out of our people. So it was really intriguing to me to be able to get into this field of brain-based leadership years ago and to, along with my partner Lee Hall, start this company, Academy of Brain-Based Leadership, about a decade ago now, to really bridge that gap, to teach people about what we know about the brain and how we can build a better competency for leadership. In this case, what we focus on is safety, psychological safety.

Great topic because we know the linkage between psychological safety and physical safety in the workplace. Tell me a little bit about how does the brain operate and how it impacts psychological safety.

Oh, yeah. We can spend weeks on that at a very high level. I think when we talk about this, we get people to understand some very basic concepts, which is your brain is almost always fighting itself for control of your behavior. You’ve got two pieces of the brain that are very distinct. One is the higher brain, and the other is the lower brain. When I teach this to kids, and this holds up, I think, for adults, I use the analogy of Luke Skywalker versus Darth Vader. Luke Skywalker is that higher brain. We have this uniquely human higher brain, and it helps us be moral, think about the future, be empathic towards people, all these things that we think are unique to humans that most animals can’t do. All right. And then on the other hand, we have this lower brain. That’s Darth Vader. And it’s been around a long time. It focuses on threat, on danger. It’s very powerful, very fast. It’s that part of the brain that we share with almost every animal, even birds and lizards. It’s that fight or flight system. And so, your brain is constantly scanning the environment to look for threats.

That’s the way it’s wired. That’s the way all our brains are wired. And so, it’s always focused on that. But what the higher brain does is steps in and allows us to get out of that survival mode and do those, as I mentioned, uniquely human things, collaborate with other people, even though they may be different than us. Or to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, even though they may not share your perspective. Let’s say someone has a different political ideology than you. You know that, but you can still appreciate their friendship, and you can value what they say. That’s not easy to do, and our brain isn’t wired to do that. But as humans, we’ve got higher brain, and it helps step in and keep us away from that animalistic, threat-based brain. And then so everything’s great in our world, right? The problem is when we become stressed, and We really start to have an impact of that higher brain, and then we’re just driven by that lower brain. We’re in threat mode. We’re in that mode that looks around our world for differences and things that could be scary. And that’s where psychological safety comes in.

What we’re finding in the field of neuroscience is that our brain really doesn’t distinguish between physical stressors and psychological stressors. The example I use is if you think about evolution, which is a very large time scale, it’s only been very recently since we as humans have had the creature conference that we do. So, for example, being able to have food available to us at a store where we go and get it or deliver it to us. It wasn’t that long ago, a couple of thousand years ago, where we didn’t have that. You had to go out and forage or hunt, and it was life or death, or you lived at the fear of being attacked by animals at any given moment. So, we don’t have that. Our society is different, but the wiring of our brain hasn’t evolved to the point our society has. So, we’re still stuck with this brain that when we encounter a stressor, it doesn’t distinguish whether that stressor is internal or external. So, if I’m worried about the stock market or how many meetings I have this week at work, that’s stress. It’s the same response to your brain and body as those thousands of years ago when we were worried about being chased by a saber to tiger or something like that.

So, the fact that I think there’s a lot of appreciation now between the fact that there’s a big overlap in our brain in terms of this idea of physical safety and psychological safety. And We’re starting to get on that page, at least in the organizations that I work with, to have that appreciation and understanding of what psychological safety is and how important it is.

Tell me a little bit about how stress in the workplace will impact our brain and the quality of our decision-making.

Yeah, there’s a ton of research on that. The fact that we all have stress means that for the body and brain, it must be somewhat beneficial to us. There must serve a purpose, and it does. A little bit of stress allows us to be alert, aroused to a point where our brain is firing on all cylinders. Some people call it flow state, but everything in moderation. So too much of that, we call it you stress, good stress, too much of that. And then you start to dive over a cliff into distress, bad stress. And what we find happens when we encounter too much stress, and particularly stress that you feel you don’t have control of. We call it learned helplessness. But you feel like you don’t have control of your stress or what’s going on in your world. That’s when we start to see problems. What we start to see is that higher brain, that higher brain that allows us to do these uniquely human things, be creative. Actually, the things we get paid to do at work, it starts to suffer. It physically slowly slows down. We actually can see this on imaging. It slows down, it shrinks over time, and it’s less powerful to be able to counter that lower brain.

Okay, so whereas, let’s say on a daily basis, your to be able to use that higher brain for most of your activities at work, to collaborate with others, even though they may be different from you, to be able to manage conflict, to be creative. But now you have stress, and what we see stress does is it dampens that higher brain ability to do this. And now that lower brain, and this is where I use that analogy starts to take over. So now you’re constantly concerned about safety and threat. And whereas you might not have seen this person down the hall as a threat, now they are, because that lower brain is taking over and it’s very cautious in determining danger. What we see in the workplace then, when people are chronically stressed, and the research is showing us this very clearly, is that you start to have people become disengaged. You don’t have that higher brain online, so they lose productivity. In fact, if you look at some of the data from the recent massive Gallup survey that came out from 2023, this is really bored out.

In fact, I think the latest was they did a poll with over 122,000 employees in 160 countries. So very big sample size. And they reported that 44% of the employees’ question reported a lot of stress in their workplace in the past day. So, we’re really at a point now where it’s starting to be a crisis. I think people are paying attention to, wow, there’s a lot of stress in our workplace environment. What’s it doing to me?

Right. You talked about chronic stress being present. Is there a difference between chronic stress and acute stress? Because I’m thinking about some environments where even an airline pilot, as an example, may have acute stress when something goes wrong, versus what you’re also describing, which is this chronic state of stress, potentially around psychological safety in the workplace.

Yeah. I think it is a good point to make because the acute stressors, to some extent, can actually be beneficial for us because they allowed us to build, we call, build something called resilience. Sure. It’s almost like the philosophy behind taking a vaccine. Why do we take vaccines? Because what you’re doing is you’re inoculating yourself against a potential threat, a virus, let’s say. Sure. So, when people took the COVID vaccine, they took it in a small dose because the theory is that the body would build up immunity to the actual COVID virus and then become not so affected when they encountered it. That’s what we’re finding that acute stress can do. And there’s actually a whole field of research talking about stress inoculation, exposing yourself to increase and gradually more levels of acute stress, like you say. And that allows your brain, which is very adaptable, to acclimate to it so that in the future, when you do encounter stress, it’s not so detrimental, that higher brain doesn’t totally shut down. So in many instances, that acute stress can be beneficial. I think the thing we’re finding is that perception of that stress, when you see it as something that can build resilience or that it’s finite, your brain can adapt.

The problem is when people see it as a doom and gloom, I have no control over this. It’s something that’s not going to go away. That’s when you start to see the big issues. And so when chronic stress happens, that’s where a lot of people’s minds go to that helplessness piece of it, and that it’s never going to end. And that’s where they get into problems.

Very interesting. This element of the chronic stress that you’re talking about, that doesn’t build resilience unlike the acute stress, unfortunately.

No. What we’re finding is… And that’s what we’re finding. That’s usually how we define it, because the chronic stress is stress that’s occurring over a long period of time that’s unmanageable. So, yeah, a lot of times when I do talks and we talk about the impact of stress on the brain, you’ll invariably have someone say, well, look, I I’ve got a lot of stress. I’ve got kids. I have a full-time job. But those are the things, and this is why we talk about how to manage these stressors. Because, again, in the acute setting, these can be beneficial for us, and they can help build the resilience of our brain. It is something that people tend to fixate a lot. I’ve had situations where I talk about this impact of stress on the brain, and people say, oh, my gosh, I have stress, and now you’re telling me that it’s bad for my brain. Now I have more stress, and now it’s worse for me. It’s a downward spiral.

This shrinking of the high-odor brain that you’re talking about, is it temporary or is it as far as long as the chronic stress is there or is it something that becomes permanent in terms of the shift? Do we know?

Yeah, and that’s another thing to highlight. When I do these talks for people, I get to the light at the end of the tunnel, which is our brain is very malleable. We call it plastic. It can adapt. It’s amazing how much it can adapt and rewire itself. It can. This atrophy that occurs in certain areas of the brain and change in neural networks, it can reverse itself. It can heal itself. It’s very good at that. It’s not all doom and gloom. If you can get to a point where you’re either managing the amount of stress you have or reframing the stress so it’s not so impactful to you personally, then the brain can adapt and say, okay, I feel fine. This stress isn’t so traumatic to my survival. I’m going to go back to normal.

That’s what we see. Fascinating. I’d love to double click a little bit more in terms of the connection between psychological safety we just touched on the impact of stress in the workplace, and ultimately, physical safety, because we’re making decisions that can put us in harm’s way.

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.

I think I think it may be interesting to look at it both from an acute standpoint, acute stress, and as well as a chronic piece, because certain high-risk functions, I’m thinking, firefighters, I’m thinking pilots, will have acute stress and will have to deal with safety decision making at that point. I think it may be a little bit different versus the one when they’re operating under a more chronic state of stress. Is that fair?

Oh, that definitely is. As a matter of fact, I don’t think it’s coincidental that our organization has been contacted a lot by first responder groups for just this purpose. Actually, the United States Marines in basic training have implemented. I have a colleague who’s worked on this, who have implemented stress inoculation training.

Interesting.

In the basic training curriculum to be able to get to a point where when they’re on the battlefield and it’s life and death, and it truly is profound stress, they still have their faculties above it. They can still say, even though I know it’s life and death, I can call on that higher brain to be able to guide me and make the right decision and the right choices. So, it is something that is very relevant, and I think these organizations are seeing that. But in terms of, so I think you’re really trying to get to the question around the link of psychological safety to physical safety? Yeah. So, what we found is that, and again, working with organizations, particularly in the oil mining industry, is that a lot of the… If we go to, say, some of the work sectors that have to do with manufacturing, let’s say, or something where you’re doing the same repetitive tasks over and over. There’s an element of concentration to have physical safety. I think of some of the assembly line workers that we had engaged recently with workshops on this topic who are constantly in the grind every day, having 40-ton sheet metal presses punched out by this massive machinery that you have to at least stay aware that you don’t have your fingers caught in them.

Sure. And they have consistently had accidents because people’s… That higher brain gets turned off. When we have repetitive tasks, it becomes a habit, and that’s the lower brain. And so, we talk about the importance of psychological safety. And in another realm, particularly feeling that in the environment you’re in, you don’t have a lot of conflict that’s unmanageable. You’re not being treated unfairly. You do have a voice, because when people don’t feel psychologically safe in that realm, that lower brain takes over and that sense of focus and concentration really suffers. Sure. And that can lead to a lot of accidents. And in fact, that’s what a lot of the organizations that we engage, we hear that story time and time again.

Which is a common piece. Often, it’s referred to as complacency or it’s referred to as job normalization of some sort, where we’re starting to reduce the visibility of the hazards in front of us.

Yes. The funny thing is our brain is very good at that because when we’re exposed to something regularly and we realize that maybe we’re very proficient at doing that task, even though it’s dangerous, our brain relegates that to the lower brain and say, That’s a habit. I’ll give you an example. I’m sure everyone can relate to the fact of you’ve driven to work on the same road for a decade, right? Yeah. And I know I’ve done this. And then you find yourself one day, getting in the car, and then the next thing you know, you’re at work. You couldn’t even remember a single thing you saw or encountered on the way to work. That’s because our brain, at the very core of it, it’s simple physics. It wants the path of least resistance. So, if I’ve done this 30 times, it’s going to ingrain it and become a habit, and I don’t have to think about it. Well, the problem comes in in some of these organizations, some of these, particularly in the manufacturing sector. People get to that point. Well, they’ve been doing the same thing for years. They don’t see, like you say, they don’t see the task in front of them or the potential dangers until it’s too late because it’s been ingrained to a habit, and you don’t react to differences that may have happened.

You just don’t even recognize it.  

What are some of the ways that organizations can respond to that to reduce the risk that we turn a job into a habit and then start missing the hazards in the workplace right in front of us?

One of the ways we do this is in terms of getting people to be… We create self-awareness a little bit about how the brain functions, but importantly, about what their individual brain needs to feel psychologically safe. We have a whole model around, based on the neuroscience research, about what some of these variables are that everyone’s brain, it’s almost universal, everyone’s brain needs to feel psychologically safe, to be able to be present. I like to use the phrase present in the moment because that is when we talk about safety, this idea of being present. But the other piece of this is with this model, I could describe it a little bit. It’s basically looking at five of the low hanging fruit needs that our brains all have to feel psychologically safe. And they have to do with dealing with our social environment. So, we have an acronym called SAFE. And that stands for Security, Autonomy, Fairness, Esteem, and trust. You can think of them as things that everyone’s brain needs. Everyone’s brain needs a sense of fairness in the world, a sense of trust or security to feel psychologically safe. If you don’t have it, it can then cause psychological stress and a lack of psychological safety for you.

What we typically do is we run people through quantifying exactly which one of these is most important to them, generating some self-awareness around that. Then what we find is once they have that self-awareness, it helps them understand. If I’m in an environment, let’s say, security is the highest need for me, and so I need to know the details, and I need to know that everything’s consistent. If that’s the case, if that’s my highest brain need, then I can ensure that if I’m in an environment where things are rapidly changing, I know that that’s a threat to my brain. I know that’s going to make me feel psychologically unsafe, and that can cause issues for me. So, I have to be aware of that when I’m in that environment, take a step back. And we use this mantra, it’s not me, it’s my brain, which allows us then to be able to work on that and then work through some of the techniques we have to be able to manage that.

Interesting. Then we touched on the other one where you talked about brain inoculation when it comes to, I think that was the term you used, in terms of the acute stress and how do we help people make better decisions in those instances. Tell me a little bit more about How do you do it? Because in high-risk functions, you talked about the Marines, incredibly important to make the best possible decisions under fire.

Yeah. There’s a whole program with stress inoculation, and it basically relies on the fact that the brain can adapt to virtually anything you expose it to if it’s done. It’s like an analogy of lifting weights to build muscle strength. You gradually do it over time, the muscles acclimate, they become stronger. So, the next time they encounter a resistance, it’s easier for them. It’s the same situation with the stress inoculation. So typically, what’s done is what we do is actually something a little bit more indirect, and that is teaching people techniques to build up their brain resilience so that you have that stress inoculation. So, we do a lot of work around, first and foremost, that self-awareness. Okay, what is driving my psychological safety? What are those variables? Is it security, autonomy, fairness? And then we talk about some of the ways to really, I use the phrase, bulletproof your brain so that you’re not so susceptible to stress. So, we talk about the and it’s all scientifically driven. What are the benefits that we know behind nutrition, fasting, that could confer this resistance to the effect of stress? And then we talk about the neuroscience behind that.

We talk about the impact of physical exercise and what that does for the brain to be able to keep you resistant to stress. We talk about, I think probably the one with the most research is mindfulness training. Whether it be whatever form of mindfulness training you use, and this is actually used by a lot of first responders now, to be able to build those neural networks that can counter stress when we come up against it. Then the impact of sleep and what restful sleep can do, again, to be able to build up a stress inoculation system. Importantly, I think the last aspect we about, which a lot of people don’t understand, is a feeling of social connectedness. I think in our day and age, we dismiss that, but we’re showing hard neuroscience research around the benefit of feeling not just that you have a close social circle that you can rely on because our brains are very social, but to have a sense of purpose, a wider purpose in your life, how important that is to counter the effect of stress. All these things, I know, to a lot of people, sound very Squishy, very New Age.

But what we do is bring the neuroscience data into it. And a lot of it is stuff you would say, well, people have known that for many. There are cultures that have practiced mindfulness training for thousands of years. But now we’re showing up why it works and where the benefits lie. It’s pretty amazing.

Last topic I want to touch on is when we originally had a conversation, talked about neurodiversity and some of the things that people need. Tell me a little bit more about what we need and what our brains need.

Yeah. So, the neurodiversity part is interesting. It’s a buzz phrase now, right? I mean, being in the field of neuroscience, even the past five years ago, I don’t think people would have really understood what neurodiversity is. And when we talk about it more and more, it really is… And working with the model we do, it’s very easy to understand with this safety model. If my brain has a real strong need for trust. That means that I need to be able to work within my own social circles, people that are familiar to me. I really value loyalty. And let’s say I have someone who doesn’t have that high need for trust. Let’s say they just love to float around, and they love all the differences. That’s diversity. The fact that my brain needs a lot of trust to be able to perform optimally, and yours doesn’t, that’s truly neurodiversity. Neurodiversity. And so, when we talk about neurodiversity, it really is under the auspice of what does your brain need to feel psychologically safe? It’s different between individuals. So that’s one piece of it. Okay, so we’ve got differences of what our brain needs to feel psychologically safe.

And then once you have that understanding of what you need, the key here is to be able to step out of your own brain and put yourself into someone else’s. So, if I do have a high need for trust in my world, I understand that, but you don’t. That’s fine, because your low need for trust may confer a benefit to my team for all of us. What we do know is that diversity, there’s a lot of research around the fact that a diverse team performs better. Sure. And there’s a lot of questions as to why. We think one of the reasons is because this neurodiversity, if you embrace it, you really have different angles to tackle a problem from different perspectives. And so, I think that’s one of the reasons why this whole neurodiversity stream of work has become really popular these days, because we’re realizing we’re becoming more open about mental health and eliminating the stigma behind it. And understanding that, I like to say no one’s normal. There is no normal. It really is about what your brain needs in the moment. So, it’s something we deal with in our organization all the time.

And I think once people truly understand it, there’s a big sigh of relief because they don’t have that stigma attached to it anymore.

Interesting. Dan, fascinating topics. Great connection in terms of how we improve effectiveness on our teams, but also how do we improve physical safety in a workplace because it impacts ultimately decision-making capabilities. If somebody wants to get in touch with you, learn more about what you do, but also in terms of maybe some of the training programs that you offer, tell me a little bit more in terms of how they can go about doing that.

Yeah, the best way to do it is just going to our website, brainleadership.com. We really focus on building that knowledge, that self-awareness about what drives your psychological safety. We have many offerings for the individual, for coaches, for organizations. It really is about helping people understand this really complex machinery inside of our head, and I think the benefit that I’ve seen for people doing this, and we’ve been doing this for many years now, is that, yes, it helps you in this situation understand and feeling more psychologically safe and maybe having a safer workplace. But since you take your brain everywhere you go with you, once you’re in your personal life, now you have a better understanding of maybe why you have conflict with your spouse or with your children. It really does help you feel more psychologically safe in those environments, too. You get many benefits from one work stream of understanding your psychological safety. It really permeates your life.

Interesting. You get a user’s guide to that brain that you’re stuck with, whether you like it or not.

It’s much more effective to work with your brain than against it.

I would imagine. Excellent. Well, thank you so much, Dan, for joining our show. I really appreciate your thoughts and insights on the topic.

Okay, sure. Great. Thanks for having me, Eric. I appreciate it.

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.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Dr. Dan Radecki is Co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer at The Academy of Brain-Based Leadership (ABL). He also serves as Vice President and Head of Global Clinical Research at Object Pharma and holds a Bachelor’s in Psychology, a Master’s in Biopsychology, and a PhD in Neuroscience.

Working as a leader in the corporate world allows Dan the unique perspective on how our knowledge of brain functioning can aid leaders in maximizing their results as well as the results of their teams. With this unique perspective from roles in both the leadership and neuroscientific world, in 2009, Dan created the content for the educational arm of the NeuroLeadership Institute and served as the lead professor and advisor for the Master of Science program in the Neuroscience of Leadership. This was the first university-accredited program ever developed to incorporate cutting-edge neuroscience research into an optimal model of leadership. In the following 7 years, Dan taught over 1000 leaders in 40 countries the neuroscientific underpinnings of effective leadership.

Dan co-authored the book “Psychological Safety: The key to happy, high-performing people and teams.” He has been guest editor on a special issue for the Journal of Consulting Psychology, written numerous peer-reviewed scientific articles, and been published in the Harvard Business Review.

Dan delivered a TEDx keynote and is an internationally sought-after keynote and deliverer on topics such as psychological safety, the neuroscience of diversity & inclusion, the nonconscious drivers of behavior and bias, the neuroscience of managing stress and building resilience, the neuroscience of behavior change and habit building, creativity, leadership wisdom, the aging brain and the biology of collaboration.

Dan is ABL’s most senior facilitator and is responsible for delivering to the C-Suite and leadership teams with ABL’s corporate clients. He has delivered Psychological Safety Executive Charter Workshops and Leading to Safety workshops with Google, Googl-X, Stanford Business School, Volvo Cars, GE Power, Farfetch, Life360, CHOC Children’s, Rehrig, GE Healthcare, NSW Parliament (Australia), to name a few.

For more information: https://brainleadership.com/

E: [email protected]

P: +1 415 935 4027

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The Neuroscience of Psychological Safety with Linda Ray

The Neuroscience of Psychological Safety with Linda Ray

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ABOUT THE EPISODE

Don’t miss our latest episode of The Safety Guru! Join us as Linda Ray, a seasoned expert in applied organizational neuroscience, shares her insights on the neuroscience of psychological safety. Linda delves into the 5 Social Brain Needs that are crucial for fostering a sense of belonging, connection, and engagement within teams. She provides actionable strategies for leaders to enhance psychosocial safety in the workplace, leading to improved performance and building a stronger safety culture. Tune in to gain valuable insights that can make a powerful impact on your organization!

READ THE EPISODE

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 Linda Ray. She’s founder and executive director of NeuroCapability, and she’s on a mission to change the world one brain at a time. Linda, let’s start with that. Tell me a little bit about how you got into this space and this mission of yours.

Thanks so much, Eric. I guess I was like a lot of people. I know when I speak at conferences, one of the questions I ask people is, how long have you carried your brain around without paying any attention to it? And I carried my brain around in my head for the best part of 40 years and really didn’t understand how it operated.

And most, I think, do that way, right?

Yeah, because my first career was in social work, and I was still trying to change the world as a social worker. So, I was really looking at social justice and try to make change to systems. And that was a great career. And that led on to executive coaching and leadership development, training. And I was really attracted to things like strength-based approaches and positive psychology. A fellow that I was coaching in the Navy, he said to me, have you looked at this neuroscience stuff? And I looked at him and I said, no. And he said, I think you should. And I went, oh, really? And he said, So, he said, hey, go and have a little bit of a look at it. And next time we meet, I want to see what you think. And so, to humor him, I did that. I went and started looking at some neuroscience so I could go back and say, Look, I’ve done what you asked. And the lights went on for me. I just went, oh, my gosh, this is the missing piece of the puzzle, because here is some really strong evidence. And I was a humanities girl.

I did chemistry and biology. I never wanted to see that again. When I finished high school. But for me, I couldn’t read enough. I just kept making connections between how people behave and the brain. And I think that’s one of my superpowers. I’m good at translating complex concepts into something that people can understand. And so, I did some postgraduate studies. I went to a ton of conferences. I read and read, and I decided, okay, I’m going to introduce this into some of my leadership development training and coaching. And what was so exciting is that people were as excited about it as I was. And I And I thought, okay, this is the thing for me. I want to look at how I can change the world one brain at a time by helping people to understand how the brain drives behavior, both in the workplace and outside of the workplace. I developed an accredited program, a diploma of Neurosciences of Leadership, which is a very… In Australia, it’s a very complex system to get curriculum accredited. And so, it was very It was very difficult, but I managed to do that and started to deliver that program.

And when it came time for reaccreditation, we upgraded that to an advanced diploma, and we deliver that to students all around the globe. And I guess one of the things they say is its life changing. And I didn’t ever set out to develop a program that would be beneficial, not just to your leadership and how you lead others, but also to how you lead yourself and understand yourself. So that’s delivered now online all around the world. And it’s exciting to see how people are taking the information and taking it back into their workplaces to improve psychological safety in the workplace, which is lovely.

I think this is the main topic we want to discuss today, is really this topic of psychological safety, which is now common. Most people start talking about it. But you have some very interesting perspectives around it. Maybe let’s start with your view around what is psychological safety. It’s a precursor to culture, to innovation. Tell me a little bit about that perspective and a little about why it’s so critical in business.

I guess one of the things that I found extremely frustrating in looking at how organizations are trying to improve what they do is this focus on lag indicators. So, we’re looking at well-being, we’re looking at engagement, we’re looking at ultimately culture and business results.

Sure.

But what struck me is that we’re not looking at the actual What is the lead indicator? What is the lead indicator that will help us understand engagement more and innovation, all those sorts of things? So really, it all starts with what I would refer to as social safety. In Australia, there’s a big focus on psychosocial safety. And really, at its simplest, social safety, basically what our brain is doing moment by moment, even right now, is taking in about 11 million bits of information through our senses and trying to determine whether there’s something that might harm us or help us. And so, our brain assesses not just our physical safety moment by moment, but our social safety. And that social safety is, do I feel safe to take an interpersonal risk here with another person?

Sure.

And because the key role of your brain is to keep you alive and safe. So, I think what people don’t understand is that any social situation, whether it’s with one person, whether it’s you walking into a store as a customer, we’re going, is it safe here? And if it’s not, then that starts to activate what I call the snap reflex, which is that part of light and flee response. And it’s only after… And that happens pretty much outside of our conscious awareness. That’s your brain just doing its stuff to keep you safe without even really realizing it. And I can walk into an organization and tell quickly whether they have high levels of psychosocial safety just by how I’m greeted, how people are interacting. So, it’s obvious to me. I guess I have a Quite a good radar for that, if you like. And then psychological safety is when we can then express it. So, at that intrapersonal level, I can say I feel safe or not safe because they were rude to me when I walked into that store, or I walked into a meeting, and everyone had their arms crossed and they were looking really terrified.

So that’s really that idea that I feel safe to speak up and speak out, that I feel able to even disagree with people in a respectful way, that it’s okay to make mistakes. So, it’s really that feeling of belonging, connection, and feeling like you can trust the people that you’re engaging with.

That has significant impacts on physical safety because as you describe it this way, the first piece is, is somebody going to stop work if they see something that’s not, right? Are they going to escalate an issue if they see something that’s not, right? Can they speak up if they see something? But I’m even thinking about the dynamics on a team where you’ve got perhaps… Pilots are a good for an example of this, you’ll have a very senior captain in command, and then you’ve got a more junior first officer. There’s often a big difference, not always, a bit of substantial difference in hours of experience. You want that first officer to say something. If they see something that doesn’t feel right, or something could be wrong. How do you create the dynamic? But any crew, electrical crews, construction crews, the dynamic is not there. There’s always going to be some form of a seniority, some degree of experience. Am I comfortable saying something if it doesn’t feel right?

That’s right. I think for people familiar with Amy Edmondson’s work, her initial research was looking at medication error reporting in hospitals. Her initial hypothesis was that there would be low medication error reporting in teams with high psychological safety. To her astonishment, it was the opposite. But that makes sense because you would feel safer to challenge and to speak up when you notice that there’s a potential error with medication. Those teams that didn’t feel safe, they weren’t reporting that stuff. And that can lead to pretty drastic consequences, patient deaths.

Absolutely.

And you’re right, in construction, in mining, if people feel safe to say, hey, I’m not sure that that’s the best way to to do this. But if on the other hand, they feel like they’re going to be humiliated or belittled, they’re not going to speak up. So yes, there’s a very strong connection between safety and psychosocial safety, physical safety and psychosocial safety.

The norms that Cruise create, but I think this is also the complexity is you could have a culture that’s trying to be safe, but on a smaller crew, you’ve got dynamics that are present as well that could also skew it in a different way.

That’s correct. I think that that’s when we look at how we measure psychological safety, you’re really looking at team psychological safety because you can have 20 teams in an organization, and you’ve got some great leaders. We know leaders influence the social safety by as much as 75%, so you can have vast differences in teams within the same organization.

Right. So, you touched on measuring it. I think that’s an important way. Tell me a little bit about how you measure the psychological safety on the team.

When I first started looking at this, I was looking at engagement surveys, as I mentioned before, and was really frustrated with how they weren’t measuring the right thing. I did a lot of looking at the neuroscience literature, and there are basically five domains that we can experience threat or reward Certainties, the brain is a prediction organ, so we like to know, have clear expectations around our role and be able to predict the future. And your brain is always trying to predict the future. Autonomy, we want to feel like We can choose the way in which we do our work and that we’re not being micromanaged. Relatedness. We want to feel like we belong, and that people care about us in our team. Equity. We want to feel like we’re being treated and fairly by other people. So, my leader is holding everyone to account in the same way and not playing favorites. And the last one is significance. We want to feel like we matter, and we’re appreciated. And so, I looked at those domains, and that’s common in the which you’ll see that those are agreed upon drivers of behavior in the workplace and outside the workplace.

And so, I looked at developing five questions that would measure the degree to which people felt certain about stuff, felt like they had autonomy, relatedness, equity, and significance. And it’s important when we’re thinking about how we measure it, that we’re looking at the frequency with which that happens. I feel my leader holds people accountable in my team from never to always, or I feel I understand what is expected of me in my role. So, it’s very much rather than that strongly agree to strongly disagree, it’s looking at the frequency within which something occurs. And then that gives us good data when we start looking at, well, what are the areas that this leader can improve on to lift the needle on psychological safety in their team? And It’s interesting because I can look at a team result and tell you straight away by looking at it, is this a leader issue or is it a team dynamic issue or is it a bit of both? So, we know that sometimes there can be personalities within a team that can mean that other people don’t feel safe because of their behavior. So, it’s not just a leader.

And in a lot of the training that I’ve done over the years, it’s around everyone needs to play a part in influencing psychosocial safety, not just leaders, it’s every person. And how do you support people to act in ways that is how you want to be treated in the workplace with respect and dignity and all those things.

Right.

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.

I love your scale around never to always because the frequency, I think, also will activate our response. If it’s happening all the time, then I may me feel safer. You also mentioned that when you walk into an environment, you can see right away. Obviously, this is what you do. Your radar is looking and sensing for these signs. Are there signs that leaders should be looking for to get a bit of a sense? When we’re talking about dynamics on a team, as an example, where things are okay or less That’s okay.

One of the great acronyms that was shared with me by one of our students of the advanced diploma was, he said, we need to activate weight, so W-A-I-T, and that stands for why am I talking? I think one of the leaders… I love it. I just think it’s beautiful. One of the things that leaders need to be able to do is to listen to them. And I guess when I look at some of the key behaviors that we want to see leaders demonstrating, it’s listening, its empathy, it’s adjusting your style to meet the person that you’re working with. And so, I guess for leaders, if they are noticing that everyone’s always agreeing with them, then I think there’s a problem. And we’ve seen that in some of the stories of CEO saying, I want you to disagree with me. So really, you want to see that people will have constructive conflict, constructive dialog, where they may not always agree. If leaders are doing all of the talking, then people will feel influenced by that. So, a lot of people will say, hey, I want to share an idea with you. Wouldn’t it be nice if they could say, hey, we’ve got this challenge.

I’d love to hear your ideas about it before they input their ideas. So, I love that. Why am I talking? Is it useful here or not useful?

I’m thinking because of the link to safety as well. My assumption is, as a leader, I should be scanning as well where my team are, and I should be noticing some signs of, okay, in this area, some of maybe the more junior team members are not speaking up as regularly, or as you mentioned, maybe somebody is talking too much. But there should be some signs that you should be able to notice when you’re going from group to group in terms of how team members are showing up, just like you’re able to see as you walk in to see the differences. Because if it’s a strong link to physical safety, then I’d want to make sure that we change up the team. In aviation, there’s a lot that goes into how to create the team dynamics. So even if I don’t know you and this is our first time flying together, we have codes of communication so that you know how to communicate I know how to listen, ultimately through a lot of the crew resource management, so you avoid those critical failures. As a leader, my assumption is I should be able to search out the pockets, the areas where I need to be more targeted to understand some of the differences in terms of leadership that may be present on my teams.

How might I be able to see the differences in terms of how leaders are showing up, but also how the team or crew dynamics might be coming through?

When I said before, I can feel it when I walk into a room, it’s really noticing how your people interacting. Are they staying quiet? Are they offering up suggestions and ideas? Are they looking down, even looking down and not engaging and being hunched up a bit? There are all those nonverbal views as well as what people are saying or not saying that can help you to determine, are people feeling safe here? And I think leaders that do this so naturally really show some great traits like humility and curiosity. Are you noticing that leaders are asking people curious questions, really trying to tap into their own expertise to look at solving a problem or a challenge? So, I think it’s really when you look at a team, also look at how is the air space being shared? Is it just two people speaking in a team? They’re dominating the conversation. Or are we seeing turn-taking? Because when we see and turn taking has been some really fascinating research around how the brains, when there is more equal to turn taking in conversations, start to sink. And insights become much easier to be generated in that situation when we’re taking turns in that airspace.  

I think a lot of leaders also don’t understand the difference between introverts and extroverts. I think one of the things that we do, not intentionally, but I’m an extrovert. I love thinking out loud. That’s how I think. That’s not how introverts think. So, one of the things is also to notice our leaders using different styles of communication to support those people. And are they leaning with the brain and mind in terms of giving that certainty, autonomy related as equity and significance? So, we would see a culture where people are laughing and having a good time. Really great example. My daughter is also in her early career of social work. She had two job interviews last week, and both great jobs. And in fact, one of them is in a much better location. But guess which job she’s going to take? The one in the poorer location because she said, Mom, the vibe. It was just so lovely, and they were joking and having, and it looked like fun. So really, you can feel that warmth and you can feel that. I guess a lot of people ask me this question. I don’t know whether this is something you We’ve also heard, but isn’t psychological safety just about being warm and fuzzy and holding hands?

I have heard that, but it’s not that.

No, it’s not that. Because I guess when you have psychological safety, you also feel okay about holding people to account and holding people mutually to account. So that happens within the team. We would see people holding each other to account as well as leaders holding people to account.

And I think it Next to what you were talking about in terms of equity, if I feel I’m being treated equitably, then we’re comfortable with the accountability piece. If it’s random and you don’t like me, so therefore I’m always getting the sharp edge, then that would not be a safe environment.

That’s right. Absolutely.

I do love that in your surveys, one of the pieces is on top of what we’re talking about, which is scanning, is that you’re also able to start targeting your approach because you may see some pockets, like you said, in some cases it may be leader-led, in other cases it may be the team dynamics. How might an organization start taking a more targeted approach to psychological safety or social safety, essentially?

I think the key is measuring it. I’ll give you an example. We worked with a retail chain in Australia, 70 stores. Great case example because they all have the same product, the same training. We measured psychological safety in those 70 stores, and it ranged from high, great levels of psychological safety to really It was darn awful. Really? And we also in the survey tool that we’ve used, have a question 26, which is around anything else that you want to say. And the low psych safety stores had bullying and sexual harassment happening. So, it was a very unsafe environment. I guess what that allowed that organization to do is to then go, okay, we’ve got these green stores. They’re doing pretty good, these orange stores and these red ones. And they could target their intervention so they could use their HR team to go in and do a little bit more investigation. What was interesting in that scenario as well is the business owners, it was a privately owned company were very focused on the ultimate lag indicator, really, which is profit. And so, they wanted this business to be profitable. And so, we looked at and they were trying to set We had very new targets, but we thought, well, that makes no sense to people on the shop floor.

So, let’s look at the best leading indicator in retail, which is sales conversion rates. Sure. And so, we measured sales conversion rates together with and we were able to see that stores that had high levels of site safety often had high levels of sales conversion rates. And what we did was we worked with this organization to lift sales conversion rates by 5 %. And so, we just did some targeted training, some interventions, did some work with the executive team. And in 91 days, we’re able to lift their sales conversion rates by 14.8 eight %, which was about a $22 million improvement in revenue. And just starting small. And so, the key goal in that was how do they greet customers that came and come into the store? And interestingly, their focus was on loss prevention. So, you walked into their stores, and you saw the back of the staff member as I was checking everyone’s bags coming out. And I said to them, what would it be like to walk around and actually welcome people into the store?

You’re being treated like a criminal as opposed to welcomed.

Being welcomed and what can I help you with? So, I think there’s very strong links between psychosocial safety and KPIs. And yet we still see, I think there’s been some awful examples of how to actually crush psychological safety. We saw when Elon Musk took over Twitter, look what happened there. People were waiting to get an email to see if they still had a job. How do you think their psychosocial safety was while they were waiting?

It was very high.

Yeah. Really, it should be an indicator that a CEO is measured on for their performance bonuses. We haven’t seen that happen yet, but I think ultimately it will. It’s being legislated in many countries around the world, this duty of care for psychosocial safety. We’ve seen physical safety has come leaps and bounds. But I think you can get physical safety to a certain point, but without psychological safety, then you don’t get it to the point that people talk about zero tolerance to safety incidents. But if you don’t have those two things working together, good systems and process around physical safety, but also people feeling confident and brave enough and okay to say this is not okay and this is a personal safety risk.

I think managing a team by team creates a dynamic where… Because in safety, we talk about brothers or sisters keeper. How do we look out for one another? But that requires a certain degree of psychological safety and care for each other. I need to notice and then do something when I see something that’s maybe off. That’s, I think, where the psychological safety really comes in because you can’t get to that view, that perspective where peers are helping each other, giving each other feedback, unless you’ve got psychological safety on the team.  

Yeah, absolutely. You can have all the policies and processes around physical safety. It’s not going to make it different. Yeah.

In the same as in aviation, there was a huge focus around crew resource management to just get the dynamics between the captain and the first officer, where there’s already a pecking order that’s, by definition, being put in because somebody still needs to be in command. But how do I make sure that I have the right level of communications that we’re looking at for one another and ultimately for the safety of the flight and the mission, ultimately? Linda, if somebody wants to get in touch with you to hear more about some of your work, is maybe interested in some of the surveys you mentioned, what’s the best way for somebody to get in touch with you?

Hop on our website, narrowcapability.com.au, and you can send an email to [email protected]. We’d love to have a chat with people if they’re interested.

Excellent. Well, thank you so much for joining me, Linda, on such an important topic of just really, how do I increase psychological safety on my team, in my organization. And ultimately, the link as a leading indicator is huge for physical safety. But as you mentioned, even from a business performance standpoint.

Thank you. It’s lovely to have the opportunity to be on your show. Thank you.

Excellent. 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. 

ABOUT THE GUEST

Linda Ray is the founder and Executive Director of NeuroCapability. Her mission is to change the world one brain at a time. With a career spanning over 25 years in applied organizational neuroscience, leadership development, and executive and team coaching, Linda is widely recognized for her pivotal contributions to the advancement of knowledge in cultivating high-performing teams across the globe, including in Australia, Asia, the United Kingdom, Greece, Dubai, and New Zealand.

Since 2006, Linda’s insatiable curiosity about the intricate interplay between our brains and behavior has been the driving force behind her journey. This relentless pursuit led her to craft the groundbreaking Advanced Diploma of Neuroscience of Leadership, the first and only accredited program of its kind worldwide. Through this program, Linda has extended her transformative insights to students around the world, sparking a revolution in understanding how the brain drives behavior both inside and outside of the workplace.

A true trailblazer, Linda stands at the forefront of leveraging neuroscientific principles to elevate both individual and organizational performance. Her profound grasp of brain functionality has ignited her passion for empowering individuals, teams, and organizations to unleash their untapped potential, attain peak productivity, ignite creativity, and nurture a flourishing corporate culture.

For the latest on Linda’s insights and to connect with her directly, follow Linda on LinkedIn or visit the NeuroCapability website for more information on her work.

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Looking Beyond Human Error to Improve Safety with Dr. Mark Young

Looking Beyond Human Error to Improve Safety

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We all make errors all the time. Join us for a fascinating conversation on looking beyond human error to improve safety, featuring special guest Dr. Mark Young. With profound insights into human factors and backed by solid research, Dr. Young shares the psychological mechanisms behind errors and emphasizes the importance of fostering a learning culture to enhance safety. The conversation also covers the impact of vehicle automation on safety and the critical role of fatigue risk management in safety-critical industries. Don’t miss this engaging episode!

READ THE EPISODE

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 Professor Mark Young. He’s a human factor professional and a professor in transportation, University of South London, does a lot of work and research in this space. I’m very excited to have you with me, Mark. Tell me a little bit about your background and how you got started in this space.

Hi, Eric, and thanks so much for me on. It’s great to be here. Thank you for the introduction. I actually started out in psychology. My first degree was in a psychology department. As part of that, I started learning about cognitive psychology and how humans think and make decisions and perform and took a course in human factors during that time, which got me really interested in mixing my two interests of how people think and behave with technology stuff in the real world and how that applies to making the world better in terms of systems, interfaces, design of equipment, etc. I went on and did a PhD in that topic in the University of Southampton, using the driving simulator, looking at the impact of automation on driver mental workload and ultimately performance. The stuff that’s around now quite commonly in our car, so adaptive cruise controls, automatic steering, that thing. What that did in terms our attentional capacity, what that did in terms of mental overload. A lot of people have been concerned for a long time with things like overload, if you got too much to do and how that affects your performance, but there was less interest in the underload side of that equation, which can be just as bad for performance as overload.

That’s what I got interested in looking at using the simulator, looking at the effects of automation on drivers. I carried on in academia for some time, working at a partner in Southampton and then on to at Brunel University. Again, doing work in driver behavior, looking at things like eco-driving, looking at things like driver distractions from advertising, from meeting and drinking, that thing. And the more I got interested in I’ve got a performance in particularly safety critical systems, and I got interested in accidents, an accident investigation. Then an opportunity came up to work with the UK’s rail accident investigation branch. This is a bit like the NTSB in the States. They do independent investigations of accidents to improve safety. I’d like a job there and I was very fortunate to get it. I worked there for 11 years, which flew by. A very satisfactory time I had there working on a number of investigations across different areas of the railway, learned an awful lot about railway operations and applied my human factors experience to understanding what’s gone wrong in these accidents and how we can make recommendations to improve safety in the future. Although it sounds on the face of it a bit of a grim job, and it certainly had its moments, it was incredibly satisfying and was a great place to work.

But then about a year and a half ago, the opportunity came up to return to academia. In fact, to my original university back at Southampton with this role as professor of Human Factors in Transport within the Transportation Research Group. It was too good an opportunity to pass up, really. I went for that and again, was very fortunate to get it and have been back here now for about a year teaching and researching within… I’m actually in a School of Engineering, Department of Civil Engineering, even though I’m not an engineer. As I said, my original background was in psychology. But because human factors really breach all those disciplines. It’s a very interdisciplinary topic across engineering, design, psychology, behavior, all those things. It’s a very applicable place to be, and we’ve got great facilities here. Again, a much-upgraded simulator compared to the one I was using 25 years ago from PhD and interested in the vehicle and bicycle and that stuff. So great opportunities to carry on doing research in that area.  

We’ll talk shortly on the impact of automated transport on safety. But maybe First, let’s start on the human error side because we start most investigations looking at a degree of human error. Tell me a little bit about some of those elements and some of the work you did on the transport side.

Yeah, absolutely. It’s long been a bit of a bug bearer of mine, actually, that when you quite often see in popular media and reports when an accident happens, that so-called human error was to blame. Every time I see that, and it happens quite a lot, it always gets up my back a little bit, partly because obviously, looking at this area, you know quite a lot about it. But the reason being that, well, there’s a couple of things associated with that, really. You quite often see statistics that anything up to 80 or 90% of accidents are due to this notional human error. I take issue with that, partly because from my point of view, well, okay, you’re talking about the last person who touched it when you talk about those statistics, you’re talking about the driver, the signaler, the pilot, whoever that might be. That’s who people are typically referring to when they talk about this 80, 90% figure. From my point of view, I think about human factors from a socio-technical systems perspective. It’s not frontline performance. Yes, that’s an important part of it, and we absolutely do look at that. But in the accident investigations and with this socio-technical systems perspective, we dig beneath that.

We have to understand what led that person to make those decisions and actions at that point in time in that place. And there’s a whole bunch of stuff that can lead up to that from their training, from the systems they’re using, the equipment, the interfaces they’re faced with, the processes and procedures, right the way up to the culture of the organization, the regulatory framework. You can even take it up to government and national levels if you wanted to. So, there’s a whole bunch of other stuff that goes behind that so-called human error figure. Actually, when you think about it from that point of view, there are humans involved at every single step of this chain. Even what might be a technical failure, a wheel bearing that’s failed and caused a derailment or something like that, well, ultimately, why has that failed? Is it a design issue? Was there something wrong with something missed in maintenance, something like that? There are actually humans involved every step in this process. So, from that point of view, you could argue human error is a factor in 100% of accidents. So that’s one reason I have issue with that.

Fair? Yes. The other reason is this whole thing that as we’ve just discussed, it really is just the starting point. It puts the blame on the frontline operator. And like I was just saying, there’s so much more stuff behind that. So yes, if you go and investigate an accident, your starting point is what happened on the front line. How did we get to this point in time? And you will interview those people involved. You will try to understand what they were doing at that time. But then you dig so much further, you dig much more beneath that. That human error is just the starting point, and we dig beneath that. When we’re making recommendations, which is the end product of an investigation, we want to make stuff better. We want to improve safety in the future, make recommendations to plug those gaps that may have emerged in that system and stop this thing happening in the future. We make those recommendations so much further upstream. There’s no point making a recommendation saying, retrain this person or do something about what they were doing on that. Because all that’s doing is putting a sticking plaster on it.

All that’s doing is saying, we have fixed that one person’s activities at that specific location at that specific time. Sure. Another person could step into those shoes and do exactly the same thing on another day slightly different circumstances. If we go much further up the stream into the socio-technical system and make recommendations at a much higher level, we can stem that tide. If you think about it like the source of a river and loads of tributaries or something like that. If we stem the source, we can affect so much more, we can have much bigger impact to all those other people that might step into those shoes on that front line.

I think this is key because it’s one of the areas where transportation, I think, has gone much further, is in most other industries, it’s blamed the employee. It’s focused on the error, the person that made the mistake, as opposed to acknowledging that as humans, we all make mistakes, and none of us have not made a mistake in the last, probably hour or short period of time. We’re not fixing things. That’s, I think, the area where in aviation, but in transportation in general, there’s been the biggest shift is really understanding, recognizing that there’s a lot more to the chain, that if we want to fix it, if we want to prevent In an incident, we need to go much deeper.

100 %. And what you’ve just described there is exactly what I teach my students. We all make errors all the time. It’s all about the context in which these errors occur. So everyday errors and the psychological mechanisms behind our everyday errors are exactly the same, whether we are at home doing something quite inconsequential or on the flight deck of a of a major eyeliner. There’s a really good example, and it’s a fundamental error type that we all make, and it’s a mode error. And a really simple example of this is using a digital alarm clock and you’re trying to set the alarm, but it’s actually in time mode and you’re resetting the time on it instead. So, it’s an action that might be appropriate in one mode and you are unknowingly in a different mode and that becomes, by definition, an error. Sure. There have been examples of major airline disasters where these basic mode errors, like setting a particular altitude mode, descent mode, which the same numbers on the flight deck can relate to flight path angle or rate of descent. And one, if you put the same numbers in, it can be a much steeper descent in one mode than another. 

And that has, in the past, led to a major disaster. So, it’s exactly the same error type, but in the context of a safety critical system, it can lead to much greater consequences. So, you’re absolutely right. We shouldn’t just be thinking about the last person who touched it. And a lot of that, I got to be honest, is, and I’m not going to go into specific details, but some of that does come down to even geographical different cultures. You see certain cultures that are very, very quick and ready to pin blame, and even legally, even be charging people involved on the front line before any proper investigation has taken place.

That also limits our ability to learn because now it’s immediately going to default, and people are going to start hiding some of the key facts.

100% indeed, yeah. These safety investigations are all about safety learning. The organization I used to work for and the NTSB and other similar organizations around the world, they’re all about safety learning. They It’s not going to go out for blame or liability or prosecution or anything like that. It’s got to be about safety learning. You’re absolutely right. If people believe that they are personally going to be at risk, they’re not going to share all of the facts. A really big part of that safety investigation is ensuring you get that trust in these people and ensure that you are getting all of the facts and on all of the learning so you can make those appropriate recommendations.

One topic we were also discussing initially is around fatigue and how fatigue plays out in often is a precursor of error, as we all, when we’re fatigued, are bound to make mistakes. Tell me a little bit more about fatigue and how different industries look at it.

Yeah, it’s a really good example of what we might call a performance-shaping factor. So, something that can affect us all, and as you just rightly said, affects our performance to a greater or lesser degree, depending on how fatigued we are. And the nature of transportation systems today, whether that be rail, aviation, whatever, 24/7 industries, they’re all going to be subject to fatigue to a certain extent because we are animals, we are human beings, we are animals, and we are circadian animals. We are designed to be up in a day and a sleep at night. If we mess with that in any way, trying to get people to work at night and sleep in the day, there’s always going to be an element of fatigue risk. You can never completely eliminate fatigue with a shiftwork-type industry, but you can do stuff to manage the risk of that fatigue, then translating into performance difficulties. Because if we’re fatigued, it can affect our reaction times, it can affect our decision making, it can affect our mood, and it can even have long term effects on our health, gut problems, heart problems, that thing, if we have chronic fatigue over a length of time.

It’s really important that we do manage this risk. And an aviation rail over the years have made great strides in trying to not just understand the causes and consequences of fatigue but put in place what they call fatigue risk management systems to try and mitigate the risks of that. And that’s not just about managing the hours of work. Yes, absolutely. Managing the shifts is a big part of managing fatigue, so not working too long, making sure people have got sufficient rest in between shifts. But it’s also got a qualitative angle. It includes things like fatigue reporting. Just as we were just talking about in terms of gaining trust from people in an investigation to report what’s happened so we can get the safety learning, it’s the same thing with fatigue. If people are tired for whatever reason, employers, managers would need to know about that. We don’t really want people in the cab of a train or the flight deck of an aircraft doing their job if they are fatigued. It’s really important to understand that and understand where that fatigue has come from so that we can then do something about it, because a lot of it is just about sleep and sleep opportunities.

The reason we talk a lot about managing work hours is because that’s the bit that organizations have control over. But really what they’re doing with that is providing people the opportunity for rest. It’s about making sure people have got adequate opportunity for sleep when they can regenerate and restore their abilities to come back fit for work the next day. The fit for work thing is, by the way, not just fit for work at the start of their shift, but all the way through to the end of it as well. Some of the accidents I was involved with in my previous post, we’ve seen accidents happen towards the end of a long night shift. People might have been turning up for work, fit for work. They do a fit for work check when they book on, and they might be fine then. But what are they going to be like 10, 11, 12 hours later? And that’s when you see these incidents tend to occur. So, it’s by no means solved. There’s a long way to go, and it’s the thing, as I say, you’re We’re going to completely eliminate fatigue in a shift work industry, but we can do a lot to manage and mitigate the risks associated with 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.

Are there some learnings from what’s being done in the transportation space that could be carried into other industries around the fatigue management side of the equation? Because obviously, shift work is a key component, and how you manage the shift and the hours of rust and so forth, but other things that could be brought forward to other industries.

Definitely. As I say, aviation, rail have gone great strides over the years to advance their fatigues management systems. Marine, to some extent, I guess, because of the nature of marine work, maybe hasn’t quite come as far as the other transportation modes, but they are starting to work on that. But one area where it’s really important, and this is an area that I’m getting into myself at the university, is healthcare. So, fatigue management in healthcare hasn’t really, certainly, I’m speaking for the UK now, hasn’t really gotten hold of this issue at all. I I wear another hat with my professional institute, the Chartered Institute of Ergonomics and Human Factors. I’m current President of the institute, and we published a white paper just a few months ago, actually, part of a… I don’t take full credit. It was part of a group effort but the white paper was on fatigue risk management in health care. Taking these lessons from other industries, primarily transport, and trying to apply those in the health care context. Because as you can imagine, some of these long and complex surgeries can go on for hours and hours and hours. There’s been, historically, this culture of powering through consultants and surgeons not feeling that they are susceptible to these issues.

But we’re all human at the end of the day. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a pilot, a driver, a train driver, or a surgeon. We all are subject to the whims of this circadian rhythm, this daily diurnal rhythm that we’re all susceptible to. It’s really important that we try and manage that and bring those lessons across. I’ve actually got a PhD student starting next month, actually, doing a project on this very topic, trying to understand fatigue in health care and how we can manage that.

It’s also an industry that has shifts that go through the night, particularly on the nursing, but the doctors, maybe not operations through the night, although there could be in emergencies, but high impacts.

Yeah, and look, that’s right. But the thing is, there are errors in health care, and there are consequences from that, but they are not on an individual level. They’re not on the same scale as a major airline disaster. But it’s a bit like road accidents, really. So, accidents tend to happen frequently, but a few people will be injured or killed on each individual occasion. So, they don’t tend to gain the public attention or hit the news in the same way as an airline going down with a couple of hundred people on it. So that would be very newsworthy. But actually, when you look at the data, that thing is happening regularly on the roads and in healthcare, just in ones or twos. It’s really important that we do get hold of these issues.

The last piece I really want to touch on is your work and your research around automated transport because there’s more and more instances of this automated transport, different vehicles. You talked about the cruise control and the adaptive cruise control. But we’re moving more and more towards vehicles that have high levels of automation, which for the most part should improve safety, but also introduces a lot of new risks. Tell me a little bit about the work you’ve done in this space.

Yeah, that’s right. It’s really interesting because as I mentioned at the top, this stuff I was doing 20, 25 years ago is almost more relevant now than ever. So, these systems are now live. They’re in our cars where many of us have probably experienced them and are using them. And the point we’re at now in terms of technology progression and legislative progression, too, and certainly I know a few states in the US, and we’re going to be doing that in the UK quite soon, is moving forward to this what they call Level 3 automation. I won’t go into detail about the different levels, but up till now, we’ve had bits of the driving task automated for us. You can automate speed with cruise control and adaptive cruise control. You can have some steering automation with lane keeping support and that thing. But we’re getting to a point now where we can automate an entire part of the driving task, but only in certain circumstances. So, you can actually technologically and legally take your attention away from the road, but only in a given context. So that might be on a highway under certain traffic conditions, that thing.

And you need to be ready to step in when the system needs you to. So, part of this whole thing will be the system monitoring the driver as well, understanding from things like eye movements and other behaviors, whether or not it thinks that you’re attentive and what they call fullback ready. You need to be ready to step in as a fallback user if the automation suddenly goes out of its design scope or some other technical issue. For me, from a human factor’s perspective, this is the really tricky phase. This is the troublesome adolescence, if you like, of automation going forward, because what we’re saying to people, drivers, not drivers, but the people behind the wheel, is that, yes, you We switch off now, but we need you to be able to step in. There’s a whole bunch of questions that are still… There’s still research going on in terms of how quickly people can step in. What warnings do they need? How do we ensure they maintain their attention that they are ready to step in? Because you can’t just say to people, Okay, you can sit there and watch a movie or do your emails or whatever, but as soon as I ring this bell, you need to be back in and driving.

People don’t work like that. We need to regain our situation awareness. We need to think, Okay, what’s going on? What are you telling me? What is the automation doing? What’s going on all around me now? How am I supposed to get back into the loop on this thing? What you said about the automation introducing all sorts of new problems, that’s absolutely true. We’ve seen that in aviation, too. We learned a lot of lessons from automation and aviation in terms of translating that across to automotive. Because yes, okay, fundamentally, there probably will be fewer accidents on the main with automation than with human drivers. I think the jury is still out on that to some extent. But I think it’s probably fair to say that that will be true. But what we will get is a whole bunch of new categories of incidents and accidents, because what that involves now is not just being aware of the driving task and what’s around you, but also managing this relationship with the system. You’ve got another layer, if you like, of a driving task there. What’s this system doing? How do I know what it’s coping with? What do I need to do?

It becomes an issue of communication. It’s almost like driving with a co- driver, a human co- driver, and that analogy has been drawn. This system now is becoming part of a team. Human automation teaming is a real big area of research at the moment. How do we actually work together? How do we communicate and coordinate our actions for the ultimate good of the system performance. We want to be able to get from A to B safely and as efficiently as we possibly can, and we need to work together to do that. We can learn lessons from human teamwork. How would I work with another human co- driver? We’d be talking to each other all the time. We’d be saying, Okay, there’s something weird going on here. I need your help here to cope with this. The thing is with automated systems, they tend not to communicate like that, and we need to get better at that. We need to be able to design these systems to work better with their human counterparts. And that’s a two-way thing. We need to work so that the humans can talk to the automation and the automation can talk to the humans.

Otherwise, I think we will see a whole bunch of new problems going forward. And that causes all sorts of sticky legislative and ethical and moral issues because, okay, society, I’m not saying this is right, but society might well accept people crashing or having incidents on their own back. But now what’s happening is, well, who’s now responsible? This system has maybe caused this accident. So, who’s responsible for that? Is it the driver for not paying attention? Is it the manufacturer of the vehicle or the provider of the automated system? Where does that responsibility now lie? And these are all questions that are still open for debate.

And we’ve certainly seen, you brought up aviation. We’ve certainly seen in aviation, a lot of incidents where the autopilot kicks off and there’s a warning that comes in. The amount of time for the pilots who are highly trained to really recognize what’s happened, in some cases, like the 737 max, where systems kicked in automatically because they interpreted data in a way that they shouldn’t have. The pilots weren’t even able to overcome and take over control of the flight.

That’s right, because they weren’t aware of what was going on with the system. There’s a whole bunch of stuff behind that. 737 is one of these incidents that really illustrates this system’s view, because there were all sorts of even organizational stuff going on there about not providing the flight crew with appropriate training and understanding of what that system should be doing. But, yeah, fundamentally, it came down to communication. The system actually informing the flight crew about what’s going on, what they need them to do, and that communication breakdown. It’s the same thing with the Air France 447 accident. Same thing happened there. Workload comes into play again with that one. It’s in the cruise phase of flight over the Atlantic, very low workload phase. Then the system started getting screwy readings from the Pepto tube for the airspeed. Then it’s I’ll cut long story short and oversimplifying, it got to a point where it basically said, I can’t cope with this anymore. I need you to take over, and gave this back to the flight crew, at which point the flight crew go, Wait, what’s going on here? Because they’d never seen that situation before.

They’re highly trained. Nothing wrong with their training or what they did. It has been said in research that these kinds of situations, again, coming back to that point about human error, you could very easily say, well, it was the pilot’s fault because they should have taken over flying. But no, there’s an alternative perspective on this where actually the pilots just weren’t able to save the situation. It wasn’t the pilots that caused it, they just weren’t able to save it because actually what happened was, they were faced with a situation that was a surprise to them, a fundamental surprise. I’m not just talking like a birthday surprise. This was something that they were completely unprepared for and not expecting in the slightest and were unable to cope in that particular situation, unable to diagnose and resolve the situation in the limited time they had available to them. You can’t really put that on the flight crew. It is a socio-technical systems issue.

You’re also dealing with an industry where the level of training is significantly higher than the typical driver.

Wow, yeah, seriously.

Then the driver does doesn’t have the simulations, all the various training components that happen every year, and suddenly they have to deal with the technology in front of them.

That is so true. Some people say, well, aviation must be more complicated because you’re moving in three dimensions and all of that. But no, there’s a prevailing perspective that no, driving is way more complicated because it’s so much more random. You’ve got all sorts of stuff that could… Okay, it’s only in two dimensions, but you get all sorts of stuff that could happen. These rogue other road users, you don’t know what other drivers are going to be doing. What’s that pedestrian going to do? Is that cyclist going to ride out in front of me? And again, another point about this intermediary space until we get to full automation at some point in the future, probably decades away, to be fair. But it’s not just about this intermediate automation inside one vehicle. We’re going to have a mixed fleet on the road. We’re going to have some cars that are human-driven, some cars that are partially automated. How are they all going to interact with each other? How are they going to interact with other road users, pedestrian cyclists, vulnerable road users? And that thing? Actually, I wrote a book and a paper on this myself last year with a slightly contentious perspective on it, but deliberately provocative, suggesting that You know what?

We should just wait. We should just wait until we are ready to fully automate and then jump off that cliff and just say, Right, okay, we’ll hold back, let people drive their cars up. Yes, we can use the technology to help them. Yes, we can provide safety systems, the stuff that we’ve already got, like antelope, braking systems, traction control roll systems, collision, the stuff that’s like a safety net for drivers. For sure, use those systems to help people do what they normally do. But until we can fully and completely automate the entire task, and I can just get in my car on the driveway here and it can take me to my office or wherever I need to go without any intervention from me, then maybe we need to think again about that relationship with the automation.

Yeah, I think provocative Statement, but I think there’s a lot of merit in it in that if you look at aviation, there’s so much more training, so much more guardrails around dealing with the automation. And yes, we talked about the Air France, and the Boeing 737 max, both illustrations were technology and humans were trying to figure out how to interact with each other.

Yeah, that’s right, indeed. And as you rightly point out, drivers on the road get barely any training in comparison. And That’s another question. Will we need to train people to use the automation? Again, using the UK as an example, we have a different level of driving license for using automatic transmission, automatic Gearbox in our cars. If you train and pass a test on an automatic transmission, you can’t use a manual or stick shift until you’ve taken another test. Will we need to think about that for more levels of automation in our vehicles? Is that something that we need to be able to manage the system as well as driving the car? But yeah, I’ve always said that driver training really just tells you how to operate the car. It doesn’t really tell you how to drive properly. It’s a lot more stuff going on there. As you say, in comparison to what flight crew gets, it’s a world apart. Yeah.

Mark, thank you very much for joining me today. A fascinating topic. I think the main takeaway for industries in general is really to think about how I can bring some of these topics from the transportation space. We talked about fatigue, but also, we talked on just the element that humans are going to make mistakes. We are bound to make errors. How do we create a system that reduces the consequences as opposed to blaming the individual at the end? Thank you so much for joining me today.

Thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure.

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.  

ABOUT THE GUEST

Professor Mark Young is a professor of human factors in transport within the Transportation Research Group at the University of Southampton and is currently the president of the Chartered Institute of Ergonomics and Human Factors (CIEHF). Mark has nearly 30 years’ experience working in human factors across transport modes in both academia and industry. Before joining the University of Southampton in June 2023, Mark spent 11 years working as an Inspector at the Rail Accident Investigation Branch, applying his human factors expertise to the investigation of railway incidents and accidents. Mark has written over 70 peer-reviewed journal papers and five books, he is a Chartered Ergonomist and a Fellow of the CIEHF.

For more information: https://www.southampton.ac.uk/people/62gmgv/professor-mark-young

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