Real leaders leave a legacy. They capture the hearts and minds of their teams. Their origin story puts the safety and wellbeing 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 again Dr. Lianne Lefsrud. She’s CEO of Insight Risk Systems, also a professor at the University of Alberta. Liane, really happy to have you back with me today.

Yeah, thank you, Eric. It’s always a pleasure. I just love our conversations. Thank you so much.

Excellent! So, let’s go back to a quick review of your journey and your passion for safety because you had quite a background from experiences that shaped your thinking around safety.

Yeah, thanks, Eric. So, my background is very much learning to do by doing and oftentimes learn from mistakes. So, I grew up on a farm, as I told you before, Viking, Alberta, grain and cattle. We had horses. And it was the Wild West, literally and figuratively, you know, shooting guns, pitchforks, riding horses, you know, building tree forts, heavy equipment operating at like 10, you know, all these things in which farm kids are effectively the labor of the farm. So that’s what we were doing. And agriculture, as you know, is one of the most hazardous industries ever, right? So, yeah. So, my father’s super scarred, but many farmers are like missing fingers, you know, have shoulders that don’t work, or sadly have been victims of workplace fatalities. And it’s not uncommon, actually, for, again, you know, children to be run over by tractors or caught in a granary or, you know, any number of horrible things, right? So that was my childhood. I then went into engineering, followed my older brother, and the kinds of jobs that I did in the summertime were again super hands-on. My first one was working for BP Resources as a battery operator.

So, the purpose of that was like not to blow things up, right, in Shawinigan. I worked for PCL blasting rock and building roads in the Northwest Territories. And there we were. Building stuff, blowing stuff up. And as the project engineer on these projects, I wanted to really understand how the equipment worked. So then I would, you know, because you’re out in the middle of nowhere in Northwest Territories, I’d spend time, you know, operating a hoe or a grader, but, you know, just trying to understand, you know, how the machine works and just the level of skill that’s required from a heavy equipment operator, which is pretty extensive. Then I did ice surveys on the Mackenzie River for 8 months, understanding the ice breakup processes because there was an ice road in wintertime and a ferry in summer. And those shoulder seasons was super important to understand the strength of the ice road or, you know, could you put it in or which points you put it in. So that was super interesting, but, you know, -40 in a skidoo with, ice coring in the middle of nowhere. Again, you know, you think, oh my gosh, like, there was two of us, at least we weren’t working alone.

But my goodness, you think of all the things that could go wrong. And then I, after that, I did a master’s, and it was in environmental engineering and sociology, because I was interested in very much in terms of how companies manage risk, specifically around hazardous waste. So, we ended up working with the US Army for a chemical demilitarization facility in Umatilla, Oregon. They had all these chemical munitions left over from the Cold War and they wanted to know how they should destroy them because VX, sarin, and mustard gas, they tend to get corrosive. And they’re worried about auto ignition, which is like really bad. So back to things blowing up again, which was super interesting. But by the end, I realized I didn’t want to work with the US Army. And then I worked for CN Rail for 7 years, trained as a locomotive engineer, cleaning up derailment sites, avalanches, rockfalls, doing a bunch of different things, including working for directly for the Senior Vice President Operations. So, you can understand how a large organization like a railroad, which is effectively a century-old technology, thinks about risk, manages risk, funds risk. Like effectively CN was self-insured and they would, you know, put aside $200 million every year for the inevitable derailments.

And I thought, oh my gosh, wouldn’t it be better to prevent a derailment, right? Rather than just expect them to happen and, you know, pay to clean them up afterwards. And the railroad is very good at, you know, putting down like Thomas the Tank Engine track panels and getting the main track back in operation, like within hours. Like, it’s, it’s a fine-tuned machine. They know how to do— yeah, it’s ridiculous. Like, they just push all the cars aside, rebuild the road, the, the track bed, and then put these panels down. And it would be within hours. And it could be, um, like a multiple— like a full train to run. Unless, of course, it was like something like Lamech Antique, in which case it would be a major, um, a major, uh, catastrophe. But in most cases, they would put the track back so quickly, right? And I thought, oh my gosh, like responsiveness is great, but how about the preventiveness? How about that? So, um, right. Yeah. And when I worked as a regulator, uh, for 5 years after that with APEGA, they regulate engineering and geoscience in Alberta, and, uh, 70,000 engineers and geoscientists and about 5,000-7,000, uh, companies that practice engineering and geoscience.

And that was interesting, writing practice standards and guidelines, but made me realize that People don’t really read practice standards and guidelines. And regulation is largely an act of faith. Like you say, these are the rules. Presume companies follow them. But for the most part, unless you audit them, you don’t really know. And even if you were to audit, it’s hard to find deficiencies, you know, because companies can really hide things. They can be good at hiding things that they want to. So, after that, I thought, oh my gosh, I really want to understand organizations’ decision-making. How do they see risk? How do they understand it? How do they manage it? So, then I did a PhD in business strategy because it was really, I thought, more of a business strategy discussion. It wasn’t a safety discussion or even a technical problem. It was a management problem. And that’s the framework that I wanted to be able to use to understand this more generally.

And one of the things we’re going to talk about today is risks and systems thinking. But let’s start with what are some of the challenges with how we look at risk today? What’s missing from our current view of risks?

Well, oftentimes, you know, safety— let’s just be more specific about safety. Safety is an effortful non-event. So, it’s difficult to prove that you prevented an accident. It doesn’t happen, okay? So really, what we’re doing is understanding that risk is often thought of as you know, the probability and consequence associated with loss. Okay, so we’re only focusing on the negative side of the equation for the most part, right? So, process safety, loss control, you know, occupational safety. It’s really this idea of loss. So, when we talk about risk management, really the argument is about this avoidance of loss. Okay, so how are we not killing people? How are we not blowing things up? How are we— and then if we do, What’s the cost of the fatality? And, you know, is it the WCB claims rates might go up? You know, you’ve got a— you’re going to have the cost of the life. And there’s oftentimes, there’s the value, the statistical value of a fatal— averted fatality. Like there’s some different ways in which companies or countries will design that. But the biggest missing gap is that besides the avoidance of loss, risk management generates productivity, efficiency, quality, better company image, greater capacity to learn and to innovate.

So rather than focusing exclusively on the negative, we have to really focus on the positives. And the positives are pretty dramatic when it comes to risk management. And you know, there’s so much research that shows this. And I’ve kind of written it up as a one-pager just to kind of describe what those benefits are. But they’re pretty substantial. Like it could be increased market capitalization, increased productivity, you know, as much as 30% increase in productivity, efficiency, learning. You know, people are happier. You’ve got greater retention of employees, lower turnover, greater innovation. So, there’s this, all of these additional benefits that risk management provides. But part of that, what’s really missing is, you know, we’ve talked about it before, Eric, about how safety or risk management folks tend to be kind of siloed off in their own part of the organization rather than being fully integrated into their operations. And so, if there is a loss, they don’t even, they might not even, you know, put the associated like cost the loss properly. They might not know, you know, what was that piece of machinery or how many lost tons were there, was there at the mine or you know, other associated costs.

They might not actually put a number, an appropriate number on loss events, number one. And they certainly don’t price increases in productivity or profitability, right? So, it’s this, because of this disconnect, that’s really, I think, one of the big things that’s missing is we don’t see the upside of risk management. We don’t understand how it creates capacity and resilience in the organization. And in doing so, where safety and risk management folks are ill-equipped to be able to enlist, motivate, and connect to the operations people, to the finance people, to the senior executives to understand it in a holistic manner and the benefits it brings to the organization. So, that’s kind of the number one thing that I think is really messy. Not just downside but upside. We have to really think about upside.

And I think this is important because we’ve talked about this before. You have a place to have a place at the C-suite, to have a place influencing people in operations. Those are tools that help influence. And I think it’s also difficult to see, at least at the grassroots level, that you can improve quality, productivity, and all those things while improving safety, because we tend to see it as safety has to come first. But if you’re truly able to build in the resilience, build in better work practices, you have less downtime. But you also have more productive people who are engaged, want to come to work because nobody’s engaged if they’re concerned that they could die today. And so, those types of things change the language and also speak the language of business.

Yeah, yeah. And building— so, it’s not safety first, it’s safety always and safety embedded in everything. And our last conversation was, you know, prevention through design, inherently safer design, you know, safe and sustainable design, which is really how do you actually, you know, build safety into the systems to prevent hazards, you know, avoid like the probability, completely eliminate the probability or significantly reduce consequences. And you can do that by designing it into the system, right into the technical system, the tools that we use and how we interact with them. Absolutely.

Great transition into systems thinking. I think that’s an evolution we’re hearing for good reasons a lot more these days, but it’s still easy to say systems thinking. It’s much harder to really try to understand where the risk is introduced, as we were talking about just before this episode, is, is even understanding what the system includes and how things are interrelated that we may not even see. 

Yeah.

Well, you know, and I don’t know how many books I have. You know, when I go to conferences, you know, they’re going to hand me a book on, you know, systems, this, that, and the other thing. They don’t even define system. It makes me crazy because, you know, definition of terms is the first and foremost. So, I want to start with a definition. And it’s a system is an arrangement of parts and elements ‘in an interacting combination organized to achieve one or more stated purposes that together exhibit behavior and meaning that the individual elements do not.’ Okay, so let’s— and that’s important that we define what this is. So, it is— it could be a communication system. So, it’s the phones, the towers, you know, the tech in the phone, the turn-taking in a conversation. That’s part of a communication system, right? So, that would be an example of a socio-technical system. So, it’s the technical systems that are designed, built, and operated by certain technical criteria and governed by policies, rules, processes. And it’s also the people who interact with the technical system, right? So, it’s, you know, we can’t have a conversation if we don’t have turn-taking, right?

That’s how conversations work, right? So, we have to understand not only the technical side of it but the social, right, in terms of how we interact with each other and then interact with the technologies. And when you think about an organizational system, right, there’s different ways we can think about the organization. It’s the worker. And a lot of safety stuff focuses on the worker and, you know, PPE. Are they wearing their glasses? Blah, blah, blah. The worker, you know, pointy end of the stick, all that. And then we think about dyads like maybe the worker and the supervisor. So, you know, the relationship, leadership-member exchange. There’s sort of— there’s organizational theories that help us understand that relationship. And we think about the work group. So, this is the team doing certain things, right, doing certain tasks. And then, we think about not only the worker and the team, but then how are they then in the organization in terms of the tools that they’re given, the tasks that they’re given, right. And hierarchically in the organization. So how does the organization function? And is it the work group is nested in the organizational function, the business unit, the organization?

And then you’ll have, you know, the tool, the task, the project, or the work package, the project, and then kind of the organizational operation. You can think about like the notedness of all of those levels. And we need to be able to understand both the social side of things, the technical side of things, and then the notedness, and then how things can happen at different levels. Because if we focus only on the worker and the PPE, we can’t see how the organizational resourcing, you know, he’s been working, you know, 12-hour shifts, you know, 2 weeks on, 2 weeks off. He’s on Day 13, he’s exhausted. He’s not sleeping, blah blah blah. Like all of these things in terms of how the organization resourcing sets him up for success or for failure. Right? And he’s so tired and he hates his job so much that he’s not coming back. Right? Like the turnover in a lot of companies is fairly high actually. And in some cases, it’s like 70% turnover. Right? And why? It’s because I know, crazy 70% contractors and it’s because they’re not given the equipment that they need. You know, they’re working crazy long hours.

They just don’t feel connected. You know, they for a whole bunch of different reasons, right? So, how the heck as a frontline supervisor is you supposed to motivate and connect to your subcontractors if you have a 70% turnover rate and you’re not even sure what the guy’s name is? It’s impossible. It’s impossible, right? So, you know, if we think about Again, understanding it as a system, the social system, the technical system, and then how they interact in all these different layers, then you can start to understand how in a complex system, you can have dysfunctional interactions between perfectly functional, reliable, and non-failed elements. Okay? So, an example of this is vaccine.

Makes perfect sense.

Yep. Subcontracting, right? So, subcontracting is run by supply chain management. They want the lowest cost. They’re optimizing on cost, right? So, they’re perfectly functional. They’re getting the lowest cost provider, right? And they say, “Oh, we’re pre-qualifying the contractor.” Sure, the company. Sure, you’re pre-qualifying the contractor. However, when they have those heavy equipment operators, those contractor heavy equipment operators come on site, it’s a new guy. Have they checked whether or not Sure, he’s got his certificate. Have they checked to see if he’s actually competent to do the task at hand in the piece of equipment, right? And he’s new. And you know, he’s been put on this piece of equipment because they need, you know, butt in the seat and he may not actually be competent, right? So, here you have frontline supervisor doing his job. Hallelujah! And you got supply chain doing their job. Hallelujah! Lowest cost provider, and then you have this, this dysfunctional interaction between perfectly functional elements, which is the guy who’s supposed to be trained but he’s actually not competent for the task at hand, and the frontline supervisor who’s supervising and doing the best that he can, but then, you know, he presumes that this operator can do the job but he doesn’t have time to actually test the competence because he’s This is one operator of 50 that he’s got under his control and supervision, right?

So that would be an example of, in a complex system, how incidents can result from these dysfunctional interactions between perfectly functional, reliable, and non-failed elements. So that’s, you know, we have to start to think about what that looks like. And it’s, you know, we have to think like from a systems perspective. And, and you need to then connect safety to, to contract and supply chain management to supervisor training, to scheduling, to project management. Like you’ve got to start to connect all these pieces because it’s just not the guy wearing his seatbelt and the heavy equipment, right, or his training certificate. It’s a more complicated dynamic, right, that really leads to these failures, right. And you can’t; by only looking at one element, you can’t see it. You have to look at all these elements together. And if supply chain has been given the edict, find the lowest cost provider, and they do, and they do their job and they do it well without necessarily understanding those downstream impacts, then nothing will change, right? If we don’t understand again how much this can affect profitability and efficiency, if you have that long-term partner, those long-term contractors who have those 20 years’ experience, know the job.

You know, it puts you in a different position entirely, right, than having, you know, the new guy again and again and again, right?

And the challenge is in many organizations; complexity is increasing as technology changes. And you’re layering different, even eras of technology. When you talked about railways, railways were built more than 100 years ago. So, you’re introducing risk that’s compounded time, you’ve got functions that are often disconnected. When you talked about supply chain as an example, sometimes they may not even realize the impact of a decision. I worked with one organization, and supply chain had bought her basically different equipment that required 50 different types of Herdman rescue to bring somebody back. What that brings complexity. If you had an aircraft that had 50 different variations and you expected the pilot to be able to figure out which variation it was today, you would have a lot of incidents. And so, these pieces aren’t necessarily connected to, okay, this is layering into the system that doesn’t actually cause an incident but just adding compounding complexity. Add in legal, that will have different requirements from a legal standpoint that could actually introduce risk on a contractor. Adding HR that may not invest adequately in skills for that supervisor or even, uh, selection criteria around how do they lead. All of these piece’s compound and we don’t even realize that we’re introducing these additional layers of complexity.

No, and introducing the layers of complexity and we don’t understand because, like we talked about previously, risk management safety is siloed over here and we’re not actually putting the pieces together, linking up the data systems or the management systems to understand how a decision in supply chain or in HR will affect safety both positively and negatively. And there are very, very, very few companies that do that, that actually look at those precursory conditions and then understand the impact and quantify the impact. Either understand it or quantify it. Sure.

And I like what you’re saying there because it’s not about you can’t introduce any of the risk. You just have to understand as I introduce this risk, how does it impact other decisions that are made by other groups. And it may be fine because at the end of the day, businesses require risk to make profit. It’s just about how you manage and understand the risks that you’re introducing.

Yeah, absolutely. And do it in an informed manner. And, you know, risks— you know, I deal with high-hazard industries, right? So, everything, everything is inherently risky. Like when you’re dealing with things that could start on fire, blow up, you know, leak, catastrophic failure type, company killer type risks, like, we have to manage them. We have to know what the hazards are. We have to be able to understand those risks. And, and, and there are always trade-offs, of course. Sure. But do we surface those interactions? Do we understand them and then think about the controls and, and what, what are the most effective ways of, of managing those risks, of controlling those risks?

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

So, what are some of the ways that we can use to surface some of those risks but also the connections that exist between them?

Yeah, yeah. So, that’s a great question. Thanks, Eric. So, what we’ve done is, as you mentioned, I got kind of a dual role right now. I’m a professor at the University of Alberta, Risk Innovation Sustainability Chair, and I’ve been doing data analytics in, like I said, I’m kind of the management system perspective, but then I also teach process and risk management, process safety risk management. And then I work with, in my team, you know, we do, you know, data analytics, you know, machine learning, because we want to understand variables and how they’re related. So, what we’ve done is developed a bunch of algorithms to basically say, how do we fuse data from different sources, whether or not it’s incident data, inspection, operational data, maintenance data, HR data, project data, and then analyze the relationships between those? And we have developed a bunch of algorithms that we have patented. And, you know, and it was developed in, like, from working with construction companies, energy mining companies, you know, and even, you know, ag producers like Nutrient, which is interesting because it’s a miner or refiner and a retailer. Sure. One huge enterprise. And then we developed these algorithms and it’s no longer research when companies are like, hey, can you do that for us too?

Hey, can you do this for us too? And so, we were talking to our university, the technology commercialization folks, and we said, well, how do we, how do we commercialize these algorithms? And they said, well, we find that the best folks to commercialize are the inventors themselves. So, we’ll help you start up a company. And we’re like, oh, okay, that sounds kind of interesting. Sure. So, myself, who’s my director of research, we started this company, Insight Risk Systems, with the purposes of developing these algorithms, delivering them as a service and also as a product. So, so how do we, um, and we’re in conversations now with Microsoft partners and such to say, how do we take these algorithms, can we lay it onto like Microsoft Fabric so that it can, it can be— because companies, you know, everyone and their dog has like, you know, 3 dashboards for gosh sakes. Like, it’s no shortage of data in many cases. But how do we actually layer this onto something like Power BI so that companies have this additional functionality to be able to analyze their data, glean those insights, and then again support real-time decision-making about, you know, what are those precursory conditions.

So that’s what we’ve done with Insight Risk Systems. And like I said, we’ve developed these, these bunch of different tools that we use in terms of data cleaning, statistics, you know, pattern recognition, classification systems, you know, machine learning, you know, word analysis, cross-validation, like a bunch of different sort of more machine learning. People use AI and they kind of do jazz hands when they say AI. And when they mean AI, they often mean like generative AI, like large language models, right? So, like ChatGPT or Claude or something. And you know, and I’ve done a bunch of stuff with computer science and psychology folks and a lot of those ChatGPT, it’s, I mean, they’re getting smarter now, but it’s kind of a bag of words. Sort of concept. And what I mean by that is, is all the primary function is, is it looks at the correlation matrix of every word with every word, okay? And if you see a document, it’s what are all the words in the document and how close are they to each other? So, when you do predictive generative AI, all it’s saying is what are the most likely words that would, should, or could come next after this one word, like Lianne Lefsrud is, okay, then they scan the internet and then they find everything related to me.

I am what, a professor, a mother, a wife, a dog owner, whatever, right? Like, because it will see, you know, pictures of me with kids and dogs and my husband or whatever, right? Or as a professor. So, but what it does is it scans the internet. And so, what it does is it feeds off of what’s available, right? And you’ve heard about how ChatGPT is bad because it’s ingested all of these books and documents and it’s, you know, all these copyright infringements and things like that. The problem is that when it comes to like something like process safety or occupational risk or these socio-technical systems, two things. One, that knowledge isn’t necessarily available on the internet. It might be available in company’s documents. So, 1 and 2. And then 3, it only can see what’s in the documents, right? So, it’s not really, you know, when we talked last time about prevention through design, inherently safer design, and safe and sustainable design. There’s no one that’s connecting those 3. I connected them, right? But Claude wouldn’t have connected those for me or ChatGPT because they hadn’t been connected before, right? They hadn’t been connected before.

Correct. I connected them now and then maybe Claude will pick that up and then it’ll start connecting it because now it’s got some new data to feed and generate new ideas. So, what we do is in our data analytics, we look at a company’s— we don’t go search the internet the universe for whatever, whatever. We look at company documents. And then, it’s not just looking at the documents and what do they say. But it’s what are they missing. Okay?

And that’s harder to see. Right.

Yes, of course. Right? Of course. So, what do we do then if we can compare and start with the end in mind? Look at an incident, right? We look at the incident and what causes the incident. And then we say, what did they inspect for, you know, in the 1 month or 2 months before? Okay. And then we can use various natural language processing tools to then look at the similarity of what caused the incident versus what were they inspecting for before.

Okay, so interesting.

Yep. The incident was caused by— oh, let’s give an example of machine guarding taken off of rotating equipment. They took the machine guards off. Okay, so caused this incident. And what did they inspect on? They inspected on slips, trips, and falls, like housekeeping stuff, right? So here they were busy looking at— and most inspections focus on housekeeping because it’s easy to see, you know, are the aisles clear?

Easy to spot, correct.

Yeah, easy to spot, correct, right? But, you know, a hose— tripping over a hose isn’t going to kill you, right? The lack of a machine guard will, unless the hose is on like a scaffolding, then, you know, your trip might be fatal. But you know, you should have guardrails and, and, you know, tethers and harnesses and all that other stuff, right?

So, so yeah, I’m cautious now about saying something can’t kill you because I said a wasp sting can’t kill you, and then somebody said, yes, it, it killed one person after 3 EpiPens failed, and, uh, the person passed. And it’s unlikely, but it just— there’s a relatively low probability, correct?

Yeah, relatively low. You know, like, I had a friend who was eating an apple at work and she died. Why? Because she had epilepsy and her epilepsy medicine made it harder for her to swallow, and then the apple got stuck and she was in her office by herself. Very, very rare. Like, like, so those things are like, like ridiculously rare. But what we’re interested in then, if you look at the incident, and because we understand process safety, you know, energy and, and critical controls, we can then say, okay, what should they have been looking for? right? What would be critical controls? What were the precursor conditions and what were the critical controls that should have been in place? Okay. And we’ve done work. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with like bowties, right? So, are you familiar? Yeah. So, for listeners who aren’t, it’s in the center. It looks like a bowtie. At the center of the bowtie is a loss of control or containment associated with a certain energy source. Like keep it in the pipes. That’s what chemical engineers care about. Keep it in the pipes. And then on the front end is a fault tree.

How did it happen? And on the right-hand side, it’s an event tree of what happened, right? So, what were the consequences? And then preventative and mitigative controls on the left and the right-hand side, both before and after the loss of control of containment. So, if we understand the nice thing about a bowtie, you know, back to visualization, is it’s centered on an energy source, on a task. So, it’s the energy source, the task. Then you think about the precursor conditions, the consequences, and then the preventative and mitigative controls. And so, what it is, it’s a system then of seeing the hazard, the task, and the ways in which you can lose control over that hazard during that task. And then, you know, it gets back to we talked about kind of these human and organizational factors. How do they create precursor conditions like your worker is tired, right? So that’s, you know, putting you at risk or cause your critical control, your controls to degrade. So, he was tired and he forgot his safety harness in his truck. So, he decided to go up on the scaffold, you know, quickly because he didn’t have a safety harness and was going to do a quick job.

Way, right? So yeah, because he was tired, he forgot it, right? So, you can see then, and you know, again, back to our data analytics, back to the incident, back to the inspections, like what could we or should we have seen before. And then when we think about this task through a tool like Bowtie, then it allows us to simultaneously see all the scenarios, the precursor conditions, all the possible consequences. And then the controls, right, as a system. And then, using that knowledge, we can then suggest new controls, right? If this, then this. If this, then this. And it really equips us to see what’s missing and then make suggestions on how to better control. And it’s not just the one incident or the near miss. The almost incident. It is everything that looks like that. Okay, everything that looks like that. So, is it all rotating equipment and guards? Is it then, you know, all pinch points, you know, caught between, you know, type incidents that could be associated with something like rotating equipment and caught guard? Right, right. So, then we can start to see the family of incidents, all the scenarios and how they’re related.

And then, then, you know, all these controls and then expand our range of possibles and understanding how to better prevent or mitigate. So, it really allows us to show not only what did happen, but what could have happened, right? And with our data analytics, we also, you know, take bowties and our kind of missing leading indicators. What we’re able to determine. And then we use what’s called Bayesian network analysis. And Bayesian statistics are basically conditional probabilities. So, if this, then this, right? And then you look at the network of, of, of precursory conditions, the causes and the consequences. And then you realize it’s not necessarily like a nested hierarchical, or, you know, everyone talks about the Swiss cheese, which assumes some sort of— or the domino, which assumes a linear causation model. But in this case, our slices of cheese aren’t lined up with holes. There’s— we’ve got like a— it’s a deli case where you’ve got all these different cheeses and they’re interacting with each other, right? And then you can then see, okay, now what’s— how strongly are they related to each other and moving the cheeses around, right? And then. And then you can start to say, okay, now, if, you know, and then conditional probability, you know, if you have, you know, poor competency, then you’ve got a 17% more greater likelihood that you’re going to have this kind of incident, right?

And then you say, and then start to price what might— how much money should I be spending on training then in a relative sense relative to other causes, or machine guarding, or You know, what kind of training? Maybe I need to train my guys on how to, you know, back up trailers because, you know, that’s where all my incidents are is in, you know, retail. It’s backing up trailers, you know, and maybe that’s where I need to spend my money on backing up trailers and forklifts, right? And because that’s the most likely source of incidents, both kind of occupational and process safety incidents. And then because It’s complicated. You’re absolutely right. So, how do we start to disentangle those interactions, understand the relative influence of them, and then prioritize, right? Because you can’t do everything.

Which is key.

Which is key. What do you do? What do you start with? What’s the most important thing to start with? And then start there, right? And because we can do this analysis again and again, you can start there. And then you say, “Oh, okay. This is— we’ve now improved our safety. We’ve reduced our process safety incidents by 70% because of—”, you know, A, B, and C, right? Yep. So, it’s like, okay, this is showing us benefit. And not only that, now we’re, you know, um, because we have reduced downtime, you know, we have better product quality, um, and better efficiency, you know, we have all these other benefits too, right? Sure.

I love this because it’s, it’s getting you to look at things before an incident happens, right, with a broader lens aperture, essentially looking at more, more items. Often what I see with bow ties is they’re done using frontline team members in terms of their input, which is good, but there’s biases that can come into it. And we may be missing some significant components or certain obvious elements like when you talked about somebody who’s tired. Often that comes with significant overtime. If it’s double or triple time, people don’t want to surface that because that’s as well what goes into their pocketbook. And so, it’s really looking at a much broader lens, helping you prioritize where should I start first and capturing a lot of different insights you have across your system. Yeah, absolutely.

And where do we start first? And then, like back to senior leaders, they love that. Like, tell me the 3 things that I should do and how much money is this costing me. Hence, how much should I, could I invest, right? Like, what does that look like? Right? And when you understand those connections, the relative influence then— and we’d also like to say, oh, safety. You know, it’s a moral imperative of safety. Sure. Yes, absolutely. Right? And you know, with everyone, like life is sacred. Absolutely. But in many cases, that isn’t enough of an argument. You also need to make the business case, right?

To say— And this helps you identify that in terms of the probability of the event occurring or certain elements compounding each other to cause an incident.

Yeah, absolutely. And then also, in causing an incident, it’s not like just occupational health and safety. It’s also process safety. So, you know, it’s— yeah. So then, they’re related. It’s not just the human stuff. Like that’s not the worst consequence. A death is not the worst consequence, right? You can have, you know, multiple deaths. Facility blows up, stuff on site. Like it’s, you know, heaven forbid. But if you understand like all the consequences associated with certain loss of control or containment scenarios, then you can understand that it’s not just about that, like the occupational health and safety person, the safety guy.

It’s broader operational implications. Absolutely. So, if somebody wants to get in touch with you to understand more in terms of how Insight Risk Systems can help surface some of those risks that exist, help prioritize, understand essentially different elements from the system through this analysis, what’s the best way to do that?

They can— I can give you my contact information. They can phone me because people do call me if it’s urgent or text me, 780-951-3455. You can email me at the university, [email protected] or [email protected]. So, either of those. And I do get phone calls from defense lawyers, say. So, it does happen. And you know, the nice thing with this is, and companies are like, ‘Oh, we’ve got, you know, all of our data is paper based,’ or it’s Dirty data. I’m not sure how good it is. You probably need tens of thousands or millions of data points. And I’m not sure where to start. And basically, what I say is companies have more data than they think and they need less data than they expect. Sure. Okay, like we can work with paper based. You’ve got 50 of something or 100 of something., right? And we have the capability to do OCR text recognition and data analytics on that. So, it’s like, do you understand your hazards? What are your critical controls? Like, what’s the stuff that’s going to kill you? And then, let’s start with the data analysis so that you can set your baseline, capture attention, measure improvements, and then sustain attention, right?

Like, safety isn’t a one and done. It’s not a project. It’s a process. It’s an ongoing commitment to operational excellence. And you have to understand that this is continual. You know, it’s like a diet. Like, I’m going to lose 10 pounds for my wedding. But then, you know, if you want to be healthy for life, then you have to be thinking about vegetables every meal, right? Not just the month prior, right? So, this is something that becomes embedded in an organization’s system, how they manage. And what a management system is not just these components and how they interact. It’s the plan, the do, the check, and the act. So, you plan the work, you do the work, you check it to make sure it’s working, and then you refine it continually. And that’s what we do. And we have to continue to learn, continue to improve. And this is how we do it. And companies are different levels of maturity, different stages in their journey. And, you know, whether or not you’re just figuring out what your hazards are, or you’re just adopting a new paper-based field-level risk assessment, or you’re a multi-business unit multinational corporation, very sophisticated, oftentimes, you know, they’ll be— the problem is not having enough data.

The problem is too much data and it’s siloed. Sure, we can work with those companies too in terms of, yeah, you know, finding those linkages. So yeah, that’s how they get a hold of me. We work with pretty much everyone, and together we make the world a better, safer place. So, doing good work with good people, Eric, that’s what it’s all about, right? Excellent.

But thank you so much for sharing that, Leanne. I really appreciate you talking about broader view of risk, how you identify, looking at a broader perspective from a system standpoint and trying to be more proactive in terms of understanding the risk so that you can build in and prioritize what are the right actions from a leadership team to, to take forward. Great. Thank you. Excellent. Thank you so much.

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.