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 Brandon Williams, who’s back for a second episode. He’s a former U.S. air Force fighter pilot with over two decades of experience leading teams in complex high-risk environments. He’s now a captain with a major airline and is a safety and human factors expert. Brandon, really happy to have you back with me. Our first episode, I think got a lot of interest, so would love to continue the conversation today.

Awesome. Well, Eric, again, thanks for having me back on the podcast. Like you said a few years ago now, but it was, it was a great talk. I remember we had a lot of good discussion there. And as always, I love talking about, you know, anything safety, human factors related because as I’m sure we’ll get into it and as you know, critically important and high reliability in these churches. But really anything you do; human factors is always at play. And so, for leaders, understanding that is so important. So again, thank you for having me on.

Absolutely. So, so maybe let’s start there. I want to make sure we spend a lot of time today on Debrief Culture. But before, let’s do a bit of a recap in terms of what is human factors. I know we talked about it in our first episode, but let’s start there. 

Yeah. Well, anyone in the safety world, most people probably know about human factors, right? Typically, it’s associated with an engineering concept. You know, the idea of engineering technology for the human to interact with it. So, you know, these laptops were on the chairs we’re sitting in the desk, we’re sitting in the cars we drive, the airplanes I fly, you know, everything had all those pieces of technology, had some human factors designed into it, how the humans going to interact with that. And so, it takes into account all of our human factors and human errors that we’re prone to. You know, for example, from the flying world, you know, a red light goes off or master warning caution. Why is that bright and yellow right in front of my face? Because that’s going to get my attention right away. Right. Same thing in your car. Right. I mean, why don’t we have, you know, the, the, the modern cars now with the sensors on the front and the back, which will alert you to you’re about to hit something, and a lot of them now will even start braking for you if it says you’re going to hit this type thing.

So that’s how far we’ve come in human factors, you know, engineering, design and technology. Well, what I’ve taken from that, you know, a few years ago when I came up with this idea of human factors leadership was, hey, look, we talk about human factors all the time in, you know, how we design things, how we design procedures. But I said we don’t really always consider it. When we think about our teams. Sure. I don’t think. Or how we had signed our teams, or how leaders have to understand human factors of their people. And when we talk safety, obviously that’s a huge idea. I mean, human factors really have become, you know, what aviation safety is all about. You know, understanding that when someone shows up to work, a professional, no one shows up saying, hey, I’m going to make a mistake today. I’m going to make a bad decision that’s going to result in a bad outcome. I mean, nobody shows up. I don’t show up to my job, you know, as a major airline pilot, saying, hey, I’m going to miss a switch or I’m going to do this. No, but it’s because of those human factors, right, that drives us there, that, you know, our limitations as humans.

But hey, that’s okay because that’s what makes us human. At the end of the day, you know, my talks always like to say, you know, raise your hand if you’ve never made a mistake.

And I do the same. One person is their hand once.

There’ll be a few people that don’t. And I like to, and I always like to kind of point say, congratulations, this is amazing. You’ve never made a mistake. That’s phenomenal. But, but it’s so true. But that’s what makes us human. Right? And I think there’s. This is another conversation, but I think, you know, that human factor, I think that’s actually going to become more important in this world we’re in now as AI starts to become way more involved in what we do. That human touch, if you will, I think it’s going to be even more valuable in so many other industries. But that’s another conversation. But the human factors, like you said and like we’re talking about, is really why we as humans make decisions in certain environments. Right. And so, from a safety standpoint, just a pure technical safety standpoint, that’s critical in understanding how we design our procedures, our process, as, you know, our safety gaps, you know, in the system. For example, me as a, again, major airline pilot, I think there are four areas where I check my flap settings required to before we even take off. Why? Because that’s such a critical feature.

And in the, you know, many, many years we’ve had airplanes with flaps, we’ve had pilots take off within proper flap settings, unfortunately, some that have resulted in accidents. And so that’s a critical feature which we have many checks and balances, I call it, in the system that requires us to. To check that in in many different areas. So just an example how you design a process. Right. But as leaders, it’s also critical to understand, you know, these things like fatigue, mental and physical complacency, you know, normalization of deviance, which I know people in safety understand what that is. But, you know, we. This idea that we cut corners a little bit. A little bit. A little bit, A little bit. And then what happens, you know, this cutting the corner becomes the norm, and now there’s a set procedure that’s been knocked out, not because we, you know, we’re not. We want to willfully disregard rules, but because we thought we were doing something good to make something better. But in actuality, we’re deviating from a standard procedure, right. In our brain, it says, hey, I’m doing something more efficient. But the problem is we’re missing gaps or checks and balances supposed to help us, you know, do something.

So human factors really go back to, again, Eric, understanding why we as humans make decisions in certain environments, but also as leaders designing our teams and processes to help our people, you know, mitigate those human errors and those human factors. So, we do ultimately drive better performance. Because at the end of the day, you know, better performance, whether its safety is what, you know, no mishaps, you know, no injuries, no damaged equipment, machinery. But also, for any team, performance is critical. Right. So, at the end of the day, it’s all about driving better performance.

And to get to that better performance, one of the pieces you’ve written lots of articles, lots of blogs on, is the debrief concept. That’s really, really key in. In aviation fighter pilots. And I want to get to a debrief culture. But before we go there, maybe if you could share a little bit about what a debrief is.

Right, absolutely. And. And I’m glad you brought that up because you’re right, there’s a few different parts of what I talk about when you talk about this, human factors, leadership. But the debrief, I think is probably, in my opinion, the most powerful piece of this. And it’s kind of what I finish on when I do my keynotes, because it’s a really great idea to finish on. And debrief is all about the debrief. At the end of the day, all it’s, its whole entire purpose is to, like I said earlier, is to drive better performance for the team, period. Dot. I mean, that’s, that’s what it’s all about now, how you get there and what’s involved in that debrief. There is a structure that we have and there’s a way you do that, but at the end of the day, you know, that’s what it’s all about. And so, you know, when we talk about safety, when we talk about, you know, whatever industry you’re in, what are we trying to do? You know, if you’re trying to make better safety metrics, you’re trying to design better, safer processes, you’ve got to find a way that really pulls out those gaps in the system.

Right. You’ve got to find a way that is going to bring this to light.

Sure.

Now, any good safety system, any good reliable safety program has what a very open, you know, reporting system or should some way that, that, you know, your frontline leaders, frontline people can report, hey, here’s an issue I see. Here’s a gap in the system I see. Right. You’ve got to have that. So that’s one piece of it which can be incorporated into debriefs. But the other piece of that is debriefing after tasks, projects, you know, whatever, whatever you’re doing. So immediately after that we can talk about some, some things maybe that didn’t go right or some things that did go right. That’s a key piece of debrief. We debrief after everything, even, especially after things go right, because we discover near misses. We want to get best practices out of that. Right. But the whole point of that debrief is to set an environment where we can get open and honest. That’s the key piece there. Open and honest, a tone of accountability, I call it open and honest inputs from that so that we can ultimately drive better performance, get lessons learned out of that and drive that back. Now, I know a lot of people are saying, well, we do this, we have after actions or we have Debriefs or we, you know, we have, you know, team huddles or we do this after, you know, this or that and that.

And I think it’s great that people are, are leaning towards that way. You know, I see that a lot in healthcare. I work with a lot of hospitals, and I’ll ask them, hey, do you debrief after this? Like, well, you know, after code blues or maybe after major procedure surgery or after this, we’ll talk and I’ll ask them, okay, well, how do you do that? You know, and, and a lot of times, well, we get the team together and I’m like, who runs the debrief? Like, typically it’s the, you know, the attending physician or the surgeon or, you know, you know, whatever, or the lead nurse or, you know, whatever, whoever was in that, that task. And I’m like, okay, would you get honest feedback? You know, does it go well? Typically, you know, whoever’s leading it would just say, hey, here’s what happened, and anybody got anything? And you know, maybe sometimes someone will say something and, okay, great, you know, let’s, let’s go about our day and, you know, maybe they’ll learn something out of that and then we’ll move on. So, which the good. The part of that, I mean, it’s great they do that and there is learning that happens in those.

And that’s important. But I think the key piece and what makes the debrief, the fighter pilot debriefs, which is where I got this idea from, so different than anything else you’ve ever heard that’s similar to this is how you set that tone of accountability. Okay. How you set that tone where we bring down those barriers to communication and everyone, all the way down to the most junior member on that team feels like they can speak up. And it’s this mindset that we’re not trying to. It’s not a. Don’t think of it as an individual evaluation. Right? What I always say, we’re trying to get away from that blame and train feel that we, I think we’ve, we’re so accustomed to, in, in the professional world, to a learning and growing mindset, right? It’s not about evaluation. It’s not about individual performance. This is purely about what happened, why it happened, and how we’re going to make things better for the team next time. Not just our team, but anyone in our organization. Maybe there’s things we need to change. Maybe there’s things we need to take back to leadership, some processes and some learning that’s going to happen out of that.

But that’s the key, you know, the key difference, I think, in anything else that, you know, you’ve seen when you, when you talk about what happened and why it happened. But it’s. You’ve got to have that, like I said, open, honest tone of accountability type, type environment.

And so how. How do you go about introducing this in your culture? Right, because this is through and through aviation.

Right.

Probably at least Since World War I, from what I’ve, I’ve heard in, in terms of the history, it’s ingrained. But how do you start building that into a culture? You talked about healthcare as an example.

Right, right. And that’s a great question, too, because that’s one of the biggest, you know, questions I get from teams that I work with. And they say, well, you know, this is great, Brandon, but I mean, how do you, how do you get people to be open and honest, you know, talk about their missteps or missteps of their peers or even leaders sometimes in these. And I said, that’s a great, great question. And like you said, your kind of just alluded to one. And actually, just so you know, the fighter pilot debris kind of goes back to the Vietnam era, is where we trace this back to when, when we realized fighter pilots were realizing that, hey, if you make it through 10 missions, these young fighter pilots coming over, they made it through 10 missions, their chance of survival exponentially went up. Why? Because after 10 missions, you. That’s experience you’re gaining, right? And so, they said, how can we accelerate that learning? How could we get every ounce of learning out of combat and training missions? So, we kind of simulate this first 10 missions. And so first it was, hey, we’re going to make our training as realistic as we can, which we learned from that.

And then things like Red Flag out Nilis, that all came about. But the other key piece was the debrief. You know, how do we accelerate learning? And we’re going to debrief; we’re going to reconstruct what happened and we’re going to find the root causes. And that’s why we as fighter pilots hold it so near and dear, because we said the real learning always happens in the debrief. I mean, yes, you got to have experience, but when we learn what happened and why it happened, that happens in the debrief. So that’s the first piece is you’ve got to do it. It’s got to be part of. That’s why I call it a debrief. Culture, it’s got to be part of how you do things. Because as we know as humans, the more we do something, what happens? The better we get at it, the better we. More we get used to it, right? I mean, you know, again, going back to the Air Force as a fighter pilot from day one of pilot training, you know, brand new, never many times, a lot of us, hardly any aviation experience whatsoever. We go out, we fly that first man.

What do we do when we first come back? We debrief. And then from there on out, every single sortie you do as an Air Force pilot, you will debrief. So literally thousands of debriefs I’ve done just as a, you know, fighter pilot in my time. So that’s the first thing, is making it how you do business, right? And it doesn’t even have to be this thing where we go and shut the door and sit down and, you know, talk for an hour or 30 minutes. I do this a lot with. Sometimes I work with sales teams, and I do this all the time. I say, hey, look, you can debrief after a sales call. Just sit down. If you had another team member you and. Or maybe you went and had a sales pitch, sit down, you know, take. Go to a cup of coffee, sit down, 15, 20 minutes, just talk about it. You know, what happened? Why did this happen? What could we do different next time? You know, so it’s. It’s this idea of ingraining it and how you do business, you know, ingraining it in a tool for your. For your teams to use.

So that’s the first thing is making it part of your culture, like you said. And then the second thing, you know, the second major part of this is, is like most things, I mean, shockingly, guess where it starts is, is with leadership, right? With. With team leaders, with organizational leaders. Because you as a leader have to do what. You have to show your own transparency and accountability. And if you are involved in a debrief, you’ve got to be one of the first people to speak up and talk about your missteps and talk about things, you know, you’ve done or you could have done better for the team. You know, the. The Blue Angels debrief that I’ve. I’ve talked about. There’s one. The reason I show. It’s about a minute and a half clip that I show my keynotes a lot of times, and I know I’ve given you access to that, so you can go watch that. But I think the key part of that is before they even start talking about their execution and, you know, watching the tape and trying to. What they could have done better and what they need to improve on.

They go around the room, they call it a safety. And each one of them, each member on that team fesses up to some things they, you know, didn’t do well that day or they could have done better. Like they were off air speed, their power control wasn’t good. They did this, they did all the way up to the team leader. The boss says that, you know, what they could have done better. And what’s the whole purpose of that, Eric, is purely just to bring down those barriers to communication. Right. I mean, we’re talking the Blue Angels, right? So, like, best of the best type A individuals, right, that. That, you know, essentially the best at what they do. And so. But I think it’s so powerful. The one key thing I pass on to my clients and people I work with is, hey, especially leaders, again, going back to this, what you have to have in organization is leaders that are transparent, leaders that hold themselves accountable, and leaders that bring down that, you know, those barriers, communication by, again, things I could have done better for you as a team. And I know you’ve probably been part of teams where you’ve seen this and how powerful that is when you have a leader that can do that.

And then also how extremely demoralizing it is when you. That. That can’t do that or even worse, you know, will kind of point out the errors of their team members, you know, without, you know, talking about their own. Their own missteps. So that. That’s the Q2 key pieces, though, is making it part of your culture, how you do it, you know, so people get used to it. But also having that tone of accountability within your organization, starting at the top.

And it does require very high growth mindset. Right. Because people have to recognize that, yeah, I’ve done this a million times, but I can do this better.

Right.

In aviation, there’s really this mindset of it’s an unforgiving environment. Once I’m up in the air, if something goes wrong, I need to know as much as I can.

Right.

That mindset of growth, and that can always get better isn’t always present in every organization. So how do you overcome that?

Yeah, that growth mindset, I think that goes back to, you know, again, realizing what you do. Right. And. And kind of like you said, you know, we always say, like you said, I love you. You talked about aviation’s unforgiving. You know, it’s the Famous quote is. I’m not even sure who said it, but we talk about all the time is aviation itself is not inherently dangerous, but it’s incredibly unforgiving, you know, incredibly unforgiving. What does that mean? Just like you said, you know, if you ever get into that complacent mindset of, I know it all, I’ve seen it all, you know, aviation has a way of throwing things at you that you never in a million years would have trained for, it would have thought for. I mean, there’s. You go back and look at so many incidents, so many. I don’t know if you remember back in the. Was it late 80s, the Sioux City DC10 with engine failure and how they had to. Or, sorry, the flight controls where it burned through the hydraulics, and they basically controlled the airplane with the power. Now, unfortunately, there was some loss of life, but they saved a lot of people, too.

And there’s so many things that came out of that, you know, crew coordination, how they did that working, you know, just so many things. But the point of that is, like they said when they. When that first happened, and the captain, he’s talking to, you know, back to his operations center, and they’ve got the engineers on the line and like, well, that can’t happen. And he’s like, well, I’m telling you, this is what’s happened. It severed our lines. We have no idea. They’re like, well, that can’t happen. It’s not designed that way. You’re like, well, this happened. So, it just. Aviation has a, you know, an incredibly sick sense of humor, of humbling you. And even the thousands and thousands of hours you have throwing things at you, whether it’s decision making, you know, aircraft issues, you name it, of throwing something at you. So, I think to you. To you. Back to your question is this idea of, you know, always say, you know, the number one enemy of all this stuff of. Of situation awareness, as we call it, of getting better is always complacency. And I think it’s. It’s. It’s a natural human instinct to be complacent.

I mean, that’s where we want to be. We. We. Our human mindset goes back to, you know, comfort, right? Once we get everything solid, we have food, we have water, we have shelter. Okay, now I can relax a little bit, right? It’s what you want to do. So, I think what I always tell people is this constant. I use this term, healthy paranoia sometimes, because it’s this idea that I got, again, I got from aviation, you Know what could go wrong? What have I not thought about? I mean, you’re not always paranoid, but you are in the back of your mind, little mind, that little thing of, what have we not done? What if? What have we not thought about? Hey, if I’m flying along here, if this engine does fail, where’s my closest piece of concrete I’d set this airplane down at, right? And so, I think that’s what it goes back to, is leaders having that heightened sense of situational awareness and also passing on to our people of, hey, what have we not thought about? Are we getting complacent? Because that’s a key part, again, of human factors, is again, we want to be comfortable, we want to be complacent.

Unfortunately, it’s where our mindset goes. But it’s this idea of never falling into that trap of getting completely complacent because as we know, that’s where mistakes are going to happen, right? That’s where this human error is going to seep in. That’s when something’s going to happen. So, I think it’s always going back to understanding. We haven’t. We don’t know everything. We haven’t seen everything. You know, like, just like your example earlier of, hey, I’ve done this thousand times. We’ve never had anything bad happen. Why would it happen now? And that’s when something’s going to happen, which I know you’ve probably seen this your world, but that’s one of the main reasons people would argue against, you know, safety programs. Like, we’ve done this for so long and nothing bad has ever happened. Which, as we know, that’s never a. It only takes one bad incident to, you know, unfortunately hurt someone or, you know, lose money or lose your business. So, I think it’s this idea of combating that complacency and thinking, you know, what have we not thought about and what do we need to learn? Where do we need to grow?

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It’s interesting you bring up Sioux City, because recently I came across, I was looking at the Japan Airline mass decompression on 747. That happened a couple years before and apparently one of the pilots, I believe they were deadheading on the flight, or they might have been a passenger had been studying. Exactly. And run multiple scenarios on the 747 where they had lost the rotors, go stabilizers and so forth. He right away came to give some advice because he had run 50, 60 simulations of how I would handle the same scenario of mass decompression, loss of hydraulics.

Yeah.

And that plane I think was flying for 32 minutes with very limited control, with no hydraulics.

That’s interesting. Yeah. There was a pilot who came up and helped and assisted with the power. He was like you said, I think he was just as. Or I know he was just a passenger, but yeah, you’re correct. I didn’t know that about that. That’s awesome. Unbelievable. 

But that, that’s, it’s incredible because it shows you’re expecting something to go wrong. Nobody’s expecting that. You have total loss of your hydraulics.

Right, right. And a key part of my, you know, outside of the debrief, but that’s why I incorporate in my planning model kind of that last piece. I always say the what ifs, you know, what are the what ifs? And now you could sit, you know, you could sit here all day and talk about what ifs. Right. I mean, what if, what if zombies come back and you know, But I, I say, you know, just take a few minutes. It’s a way for the team to re cage after you’ve been so involved in this planning process and say, okay, let’s step back, let’s think about what, you know, what have we not thought about? What could be the one thing that throws this, you know, a curveball. One of the most common things is what if our, what if someone on our team puts in their two weeks’ notice tomorrow, you know, or something like that, or what? You know, just things like that that you don’t think about. You’re like, that’s a good idea, let’s talk about that. But that’s my key piece is always, you know, take a minute and just think about, let’s think about some major what ifs here which helps us become.

What helps us become more proactive versus reactive to those changes.

Interesting. One of the things, because some people work alone you talk about is also you can do a self-debrief. Tell me a little bit about what that would look like.

Absolutely. Well, you know, debriefing implies that the team should be involved and a lot of times you do need someone else to, you know, point out some Errors or missteps for the team. But let’s be honest, a lot of times we know, whether we want to admit it or not, we know our own, you know, mistakes we did or maybe a way we could have done something better. I mean, think about it, you know, as humans say, you have a negative interaction with a, with a co-worker or, you know, another person, and later on you’re thinking about that, it may even be that night, and you’re like, you know what? Probably could have handled that a little differently. I probably should have done this and said this, and it probably wouldn’t have blown up. Or I probably should have said it like this. Or maybe they got what they wanted, and you were in a bit of a minor negotiation. You’re like, you know, what if I would have done this, then probably would have ended a little better. So, we all do that right after the fact. Why? Because it’s again, this goes back to human factors.

That survival mechanism in our, in our brain always wants us to win. So, it’s always trying to find ways we could have done something better. And so I turn that into, I say, look, you know, even after, you know, minor interact, things like what I just talked about, interaction with co-workers, a task you’ve done on your own, you know, you can do this with your, you know, things around the house, projects you’ve done and just self-debrief, you know, be honest with yourself, hey, here’s what happened. Here’s you know, why it happened and really dig deep, you know, whether it’s the five whys technique of asking why five times and trying to get to that. We call that really deep level, prop, root cause, causal factor, as I always say, and really find down to that root. So, we can do that and then take that back and say, you know, next time, here’s how I could do that. You know, next time, here’s some things I can take back. And again, this can be done, you know, in your personal life, in your professional life. There are so many different areas. And I do this all the time.

I mean, after a keynote, you know, with it, with a client, I always love to say, if they had any video of it, I always say, can I get a copy of that? And what I do is I sit down, I’ll watch it, kind of go through it one time first just to kind of see big picture. Okay, here’s how it went. And then I’ll go through it and stop and say, okay, take notes. Okay. You know, my hand motion was, was poor. Here I Need to stress this word more. My voice inflection or I was talking too fast at this point or change this to this. This sounds. Probably sounds better. Relook at how you tell this story or just. And every time I do that, I find little bits and pieces on how I can make it better. And so even though if a keynote goes well and the great client loves it, there’s always ways, you know, I can improve and, you know, drive my better performance. And that’s one way I do it. So, I think, you know, debris with a team is always the best or someone else that you can deeper foot.

But I think solve degree boosts are incredibly valuable for people.

And I think really like what you’re talking about. It’s, it’s really about learning not just from failure, but from success to say, how can we get to continuous improvement? I think your tagline is learn, adapt, improve around the debrief checklist.

Totally.

But it’s very much this mindset, we can always get better.

Absolutely. And I think that’s. That goes back to everything. Right. You know, I mean, I always say in my thousands and thousands and thousands of flying, I would have never had the perfect flight. So, I don’t think I probably ever will. But we, we strive to get there. Right. It’s like the Vince Lombardi quote I love kind of defines us. It’s like perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection, we can catch excellence. Right. So, you’re always trying to, to, you know, find that perfect flight. Always trying. You probably won’t get there, but in that pursuit, we’re making ourselves better. And that goes in any industry. Anything you do, I think is 100% right. That mindset of growth and performance improvement and as safety professionals especially, why I love working with these teams is because, I mean, let’s face it, in safety, you’re always trying to improve, right? We’re always trying to drive better. You know whether it’s metrics you’re concerned with or you’re just trying to find, you know, drive better safety outcomes, better ways to do things, better processes that incorporate safety, but without, you know, harming the business and things like that.

So, I think that’s, you know, just as that inherently that’s what you’re always doing in that role.

So, one of the quotes you, you talk about in your speeches on debrief is this concept of artificial harmony versus respectful truth. Tell me a little bit about the difference between both.

Well, yeah, so I talked earlier about that, that tone of accountability as I called it. So, remember, you know, where do we, as humans typically live? We want to avoid conflict for the most part, right? And so where are we typically at in that artificial harmony? You know, think about it. You know, when you, you know, I just talked about this with my, my kids the other day. We were talking about different cultures, and I’m like, you know how we say, hey, how are you doing? You pass someone on the street or, hey, how’s it going? I’m like, do you really honestly care, like, if you don’t know, especially, like, now? Sometimes we do. Maybe you call a family member or friend and they’ve been sick, hey, how you doing? Like, and you can tell with the body language and voice, but when we say, hey, how you doing? I’m like, I talk to my kids. I’m like, do you really honestly think we care, like, how they’re doing? I mean, it’s reading almost like it’s like saying, hi, we’re being nice and respectful and kind, but it’s a greeting. I said, you know, in other cultures, I was saying for a journey, for example, I said, when someone asks you how you’re doing, they’re honestly wanting to know, like, how are you doing?

Like, as other cultures, they really, they don’t just use it as a, as a, you know, as a greeting. So, so going back to that, that’s kind of that, you know, artificial harmony, right? Think about a cocktail party, you know, where you ask people and I talk, I tell my kid, you know, how to win friends and influence people, right? Type thing of. What do you always do? Ask. You ask them how they’re doing; you ask people about them. You know, you’re trying to build that rapport, right? So, it’s, where do we try to be? We try to avoid that conflict. So that’s that respectful or sorry, that’s that artificial harmony. Some or manufactured harmony we try to make a lot of times, right, just getting along, just trying to avoid conflict, you know, nothing critical here. Let’s just move on. Well, in a debrief, that’s not a great idea. And why? Because then you’re not going to get what I call the truth data out, right? Because if someone thinks that they saw an error or misstep, they don’t want to speak up because they don’t want to. I don’t want to accuse you of anything.

I don’t want to look like that. Especially a new person in an organization, right? What do they do? They just keep that in and say, well, it’s not Going to be a big deal. I’m just not going to say that, well, we’re never going to improve that way.

Correct.

We’re never going to get better. Right. If this stuff is not put out there. And so, you have to have what I call that respectful truth, which is that tone of accountability, which again, it’s not, it’s not investigation. We’re not trying to assign blame again, we’re getting away from the blame and train right, to learn and grow. But it’s about how we could have done better as a team. And so how do you establish that respectful truth? That’s why the first step in my model, I say set the environment and keep. Part of that is setting the tone. And it’s your job as the team leader of that debrief to set that tone. And just like the Blue Angels video I talked about, the first thing you have to do as the team leader is said, hey, here’s some things I could have done better today for the team. And you’ve got to do that part because if you don’t, everyone else is going to, you know, just keep all this stuff inside. Because after you do that, then you go around there and say, what, Eric? What. What could you. What do you have for me?

What could I have done better? And you try to give them to give you some, some inputs and feedback. Now what has that done that’s take down some of that barrier. Right now, people say, okay, we’re in a, you know, open, honest environment here. The team leader can speak up. Then I can definitely speak up and talk about my own shortcomings or maybe some things we saw that the team did other way, good way to do that is as you’re talking about your missteps, not saying, hey, Eric, you didn’t do this, versus saying, hey, we as a team, we missed this. And I think Eric would have done this if we would have done this for him or we would have provided this for him. So, you know, it also goes back to how you, you angle things with that respectful truth. But that’s the key part of that, is that artificial harmony is great, like I said, for cocktail parties, for happy hour, for, you know, just hanging out and small talk. But not great for debriefs, not great when we’re trying to improve. Right? Because that’s where you, that’s the whole purpose of improving, is finding where we had some shortcomings and where we can do better.

I’m really hearing about this is a consistent thing. We’re doing it Good or bad. We’re constantly trying to hold ourselves accountable. Not each other like you talked about blaming each other but holding each other accountable to the best level, understand system dimensions. What are the things that are occurring that maybe we aren’t aware having as a leader, the humility to. Humility, vulnerability to explore that I’m not perfect so that you have that respectful truth occurring across the board. But it’s really about embedding deep learning day in and day out from good and from bad.

Absolutely. Yeah, it is, it’s, it’s, that’s why I call it a debrief culture, right? Is because it’s this cycle of constant improvement. You know, no matter what, you know, process improvement model you adhere to, or people look at, almost all of them have some sort of at the end of it, you know, how do we improve, how do we improve? How do we go back and make this better? And that’s where the debrief serves to do that. And like I said, it really is a debrief culture and I call it a culture because of all things you just said. It takes leaders at the top that, that are vulnerable, takes leaders that are transparent that hold themselves accountable. You know, one of the things I talk about in my talks, this idea of mutual support, which is another key layer of this debrief culture and a building block of it. And mutual support is really deep level peer accountability, right? I mean it’s the kind of accountability that, that peers, we hold ourselves accountable and not of this, you know, this accountability thing. When I hear it, I always think of, I think we may have talked, talked about this on our first podcast, but you know, when I hear accountability, it’s always a negative connotation.

Like I always think of my, my, my assistant vice principal when I, in elementary school, you know, like the enforcer of the, when you got in trouble, you know, who you were going to go see. And so, but accountability I think gets that conn a lot of times, like it’s a bad word, like do this or else or you’re going to get fired or job action or whatever. And, and, and when I talk about it, I say I, I call it mutual support because that’s really what it is, right? Is, is peer level accountability is mutual support. And it’s not that I’m backing you up, Eric, because if I don’t, you know, something bad’s going to happen to me or job action, but it’s because I want you to look good when you’re leading a project. I want you to look good. I want the team to look good. You know why? Because I know you, I know you got a family, or I know what’s going on with you. And its that human connection going back to human factors again, right? And so that’s another thing you have to have with an organization I think to be a high performing team and ultimately to set up this debrief culture is that mutual support, you know, deep level camaraderie within a team with an organization making everybody human. 

And in this idea that we’re there to drive the team better. And that goes back to how leaders lead their teams, how they incentivize their teams, all kind of things, things again. But that’s a key part of that is that mutual support mindset. And like you said, I mean at the end of the day it’s how you do business, right? It’s leaders admitting their own shortcomings and showing where they could have done better. So then that, that filters down kind of, kind of through the teams and just on that, you know, I, because I hear this a lot of times like well Brandon, you know, I work in a team organization where not a lot of, you know, no name, no rank culture within my team or my leader really doesn’t. He’s not going to adhere to this. He’s not a, you know, big accountability person. So, what do I do? And I said Well influence where you can, right? I mean, because everyone is a leader in some sense. Everyone. And so, influence where, whether it’s just self-debriefs, whether it’s you and, and two or three other co-workers you can debrief on a project you’re doing, I mean influence where you can, right? 

And then that will slowly build hopefully from out to other people like that. And if there’s leaders you have that just aren’t going to embrace it, I mean there’s nothing you can do about that. But if you show, if you can do it within your own world, in your own little bubble, then you will see improvement.

And so last quick closing thought you talked about the debrief. There’s some organizations talk about after action reviews from the US Army. You also talk about the SEAL framework. Are there really differences between the different pieces? Are there things that we need to get that we can approach different ways or is really something unique about the debrief checklist?

Yeah, like you said, the deeper checklist, the model I came up with, I used a SEAL acronym, scald and that, that is a, that is a tick of the hat to I’ve worked with some other special operators before, so Navy SEALs and they use very similar type culture of what they do. High performing military teams, obviously, same reason, firepower, right? Because literally it can mean loss of life. They don’t improve in those type of environment. So, I do, I did come up with that acronym to kind of help. The S is for set the environment. Right. Just really quick, which is what we’ve talked about, you know, setting that tone of accountability. Why is that? First, because if you don’t do that, then you can forget about, you know, getting the rest of the brief working. The truth data, all the things we’ve talked about. Next is execution. So, what are you really looking at there? What was your objective? Right? Was it a clearly defined objective, first, and how did we do to measure up to that? You know, what were our results? And then from that, what is going to be what I call our debrief focus points.

Because, you know, when you look at a result, you could probably look at several things you want to talk about, but in the interest of time, you want to kind of narrow that down to maybe the two or three top areas we want to focus on. This is for major big projects, right, that you want to look at. And why don’t we have that, that even that step of execution? Because just like in the, if you watch the Blue Angels video, they’ll go through and watch the tape and just like I told you earlier in my keynote, I’ll go through and watch the tape. That’s the actual truth data, right? And that’s important because we all want to be on the same page of what actually happened before we start analyzing. Because I’m sure we’ve been in, you know, similar meetings where we’re talking about what happened and there’s a lot of assumptions and people are like, that’s not really what happened. So, we all got to be on the same page first before we start analyzing. Then we go into the analysis, which is the, the meat of that debrief, which is the a, which is really looking at, hey, what happened?

You know, what were some contributing human factors. Contributing factors, I call it, you know, whether it’s, you know, task saturation, overload, fatigue, lack of communication, we look at all those things. But what we’re really trying to get down to is that root cause or what I call that probable cause or that causal factor, sorry, which is say you, you know, something happened, and you really dig down. Yeah, but why did that happen? Why did that happen? So, you know, I use Example, the special, you know, special challenger, right? And so, I’ll ask people, why did that accident happen? They’re like, well, the O rings, you know, okay, that’s the active thing that you’re right. But let’s go back to why. And you keep asking why. I keep. And what it comes down to, you know, and this is what the investigation found too, is NASA didn’t have a solid go, no go process. I mean, at the end of the day, that was a root cause, plenty other contributing factors, right? And we talk about, you know, how they made those decisions, the influences they had, money, shuttle program. But the end of the day, they didn’t have a solid go, no go process that they used.

So, you want to dig down, like I said earlier, the five why is a great technique, but you’re just trying to get to that deep level why things happen finally. L is the lessons learned, which is after we know those root causes now, what are we going to change? You know, what are we going to get better? What are we going to implement within the organization processes, behaviors, patterns, you know, things we need to take back to leadership potentially? What are things we’re going to, we’re going to change, basically. And if you note in that checklist, one key piece I have there is you’ve got to assign, again, accountability to who’s going to oversee that change, right? And that’s a key piece of that. So, I gave you that overview. But to your question, yeah, I always tell people this all the time, look, you don’t have to take everything back, you know that I, that I tell you that I use and redo everything, but if you can just pull a few things out of here, if they can just pull out that, setting that tone of accountability piece out, you know, how you do that, I mean, that’s, that’s critical.

Or just how you analyze mishaps and really getting down to that deep level root cause or analyzing projects or tasks, I mean, if they can just take a few parts of it, that, that’s what I always say. That’s the key part of this. But having an understanding that at the backdrop of this is again going back to human factors, right, that go into that debrief, knowing that, hey, look, we know none of us made these mistakes or errors on purpose. None of us showed up here saying we’re going to do this, so let’s really get down to the deep level root cause. You know, what were the human factors at play? Maybe we didn’t have great communication. You know, like I said earlier, maybe we were mentally and physically fatigued. Maybe we’re running that revving the engine too high here. You know, there’s things that are going to come out of that that you’re going to, you’re going to really need to take step back and think about. So, I think that’s that all those pieces combined, it’s a great framework. But if you can just take a few pieces out of that, I think you’ll definitely see improvement both in how you run debriefs and then how you run your organization as well.

So, Brendan, thank you very much for coming back on the show. You’re a very engaging speaker. You talked last time about some of the elements of human factors. This time you went deeper on the debrief culture. I think it’s a hugely important piece. You also do keynotes, you do workshops. Somebody’s interested in, in tapping into some of your thinking around human factors, continuous learning debriefs. How can they get in touch with you?

Absolutely. Thanks for bringing that up, Eric. And again, thank you for having me on the show. It’s just a great time. I love talking this stuff, as you can tell, hopefully. But yeah, brandonwilliamsspeaker.com is my website. Go in there and you can reach out to me through there and find all kind of information as well. LinkedIn Brandon Williams, Speaker Just search that up and you should be able to find me. I’m also on Instagram, Facebook, leadership speaker pilot on those, if you search those and then [email protected] is my, is my email as well. So, feel free to reach out. And like I said, I love to give people, you know, the guides, free stuff all the time, things like that, because I think they’ll see how credibly valuable, useful it is when they do get it. So, thank you for bringing that up though.

Perfect.

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.