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Hi, and welcome to the Safety Guru. Today, I’m very excited to have back with me Dr. David Hoffmann. He’s a Distinguished Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior at UNC Kenan Flagler. He was previously on our show. We had an excellent conversation around psychological distance, brought a lot of conversation. Really key topic. He’s just writing a new article, our new piece of research, “Out of Sight, Out of Mind”. David, welcome to the show. Very excited to have you back.

Thanks, Eric. It’s great to be back, and I’m excited for our conversation today.

Absolutely. So maybe tell me a little bit about the research you did on construal theory and psychological distance. What was some of the motivation behind that research?

Okay, great. We’ll get into the details of the research, I’m sure. But let me tell you just a little bit about where it came because it started actually a number of years ago. As this research process works, sometimes you get an initial idea, and then it just builds over time. The first nugget of this idea was I served on the National Academy of Science Commission that investigated the BP Deepwater Horizon accident. We visited as part of that investigation an onshore monitoring location of one of the major oil companies. Sure. And so that is onshore, sitting in an office in Houston, watching offshore drilling operations several hundred miles away. And I was just struck by the person being that far away from the real-time operations and the equipment and the sound and all of that thing that you’re divorced from in that location. And at the same time, one of our doctoral students was getting into this research on construal level theory and psychological distance, which we can define later. Sure. It was just the marrying of those two things. I started talking with a student about this idea. To further research the idea, we sat down with some folks that worked in an onshore command Center but had all worked offshore.

They had navigated from offshore drilling operations, et cetera, to onshore. We just got about four or five of these folks together, and we just said, you know that transition from Offshore to onshore, how did that affect how you think about your job? Super open-ended question. It was really interesting. They just started talking about, well, you just don’t feel the time pressure or the urgency. You can step back and take a little bit more of a systems view of how things are unfolding. If you see something, you can get up and you can go to the window and get a cup of coffee and you can think about it, versus being onshore where you have the equipment and the sound and this a perceived pressure to make a fast decision. They said, it just really changes your perspective. I asked, well, is it helpful having worked offshore being onshore? They said, oh, yeah, super helpful because you can imagine what it’s like being, what safety people would call the sharp end being on the rig. But then one of their other colleagues said something interesting, and they said, Yeah, but it’s amazing how quickly you go native, and you forget.

I thought that was an interesting observation. We continued to noodle on the idea after that, and we just thought there’s something to this notion of being far removed from the work environment that we think could have some interesting implications for safety. That’s where it started.

Tell me a little bit about the research. We talked about previously with psychological distance. Obviously, this comes up in this research as well as the control theory part. Tell me a little bit about what you uncovered.

Yeah, we were in the midst of this research, I think, last time we talked. I alluded to it, but I didn’t want to get into details because it hadn’t been published yet. We were still in the process of trying to get it through the journal. But okay, so let me step back for a minute and just high-level define this thing called psychological distance or construe-level theory, and hopefully, your listeners have not gone to sleep just hearing those two terms, but I’ll try to keep it high level. So can true-level theory and psychological distance, the same thing. They talk about how we can conceptualize goals and other things at certain levels of abstraction. We could think about things way off in the distance. We typically conceptualize at an abstract level, and we think about the why, why we might want to do something. Then as it gets closer in time, the details become a lot more concrete, and we think about the how. Sure. Let me give you an example. You have this amazing opportunity. Somebody reaches out and says, Eric, we would I love for you to come be a keynote speaker at this conference in Singapore, and it’s going to be all these amazing people.

You’re going to meet all these amazing people, and it’s a year from now. You say, oh, wow, that sounds amazing. I can meet all these amazing people, and I can be this keynote. It makes me feel good to get this keynote opportunity. You commit to it because of the why, because it’s way off in the distance. You’re not really thinking much about the how. Then as you get closer, close, and you think, oh, it’s going to be a 12-hour time inversion. I’m like, Bio-rhymes are going to be totally off, and it’s expensive to get there and then get back. I’ve got these other demands popping up right into this thing. What was I thinking? That’s a little bit of, we can commit to things way off in the distance because we think about the why, we don’t think about the how. As it becomes more concrete, the how becomes a lot more salient. That’s a little bit about how this control level theory works.

Sure.

It’s very, very well-researched in social psychology. Decades of research on this, and it’s a very powerful effect. What we thought with respect to safety is that moral and ethical values, religious values, typically in the literature, are construed at a pretty abstract level. That I have a certain value or religious commitment that says, I want to treat the others the way I want to be treated, the way I’d like to be treated. That’s an abstract principle. Because it’s an abstract principle, I can apply it in multiple situations. That’s why we abstract that principle so we can apply it consistently across different scenarios and situations. Ethical values and moral morality, moral ethics, typically have been found to be these abstract principles. But we thought that this notion of distance in some situations could actually work the opposite way, in that something far off in the distance might actually create less of an ethical and moral imperative. That was really what we sought out to research in this paper.

Something like safety would fall, likely in this category, where I I don’t want to harm anybody, but in a corporate head office, it’s abstract as a concept. I want to be a good person. I want to make the right decision that doesn’t harm people. I feel bad when somebody gets injured, but it’s pretty abstract if you’re a CFO or CEO or COO. Yeah. 

That’s exactly where we went with the study. Because there is a lot of research that what makes something an ethical or moral imperative is the potential to harm someone else. That when there’s a potential harming of another human, that puts an ethical moral lens on it. What we thought in the research was that, if we go back to that example to make it more concrete, pun intended, to take it out of the abstract conversation, make it more concrete, if we go back to that remote operating person. They’re sitting in front of six or seven computer screens. They’re watching operations that are happening 4,000 or 5,000 miles, or 4,000 or 5,000 miles, if it’s another part of the world. Our thought was that it’s going to be hard for them to conceptualize the harm that can construe, even if they had worked offshore and navigated onshore because of that one colleague that says, Yeah, you get acclimated quickly to this environment. We set out to look at that. I’ll just give you a couple One of the examples. One of the… What I thought was the coolest study we did is that we took offshore drillers, and we showed offshore.

We randomly assigned the offshore drillers into two conditions. In one condition, they saw abstract aerial views of drilling rigs from their company. Then the other half of the participants saw photos of a rig floor, like You’re on the offshore drilling rig. We made sure there were no people in any of the images. We didn’t have people in the close-up images and not people in the distance images. Just images, no people.

Sure.

Then we asked them just, what do you observe? They typed in some things. Then we had 10 safety behaviors, like ensuring people are wearing PPE and other types of just safety behaviors. We said, To what extent safety behaviors ethical or moral obligations? Just on a five point, seven-point scale, it’s not an ethical moral obligation at all, or it’s an ethical moral narrative. Sure. It’s a pretty simple study and what we found is that when the people saw the distant images, so the aerial views of the helicopter view of the drilling rate, they viewed these safety behaviors as less of an ethical moral obligation, in part because of the perception of harm, which we also coded in the study. Interesting. And so, what you saw is that as I get more removed from the work environment, I no longer perceive the harm. I view safety as less of an ethical moral obligation and duty. And then we did a few other studies we can talk about, but that was a what I thought was the coolest study, because I don’t know of a study that had been done. I don’t know of a study just like, hey, let’s show us some photographs.

It’s a different perspective on the work environment and see how it affects their moral and ethical judgments around safety, and we found that a pretty nice effect.

Interesting. I know my aha after last conversation was really a realization that corporate America, any country, corporate Canada, corporate Australia, United Kingdom, is very far removed from the day-to-day operation. Even if you think about Houston or Denver that have a big oil and gas presence, there’s no drilling occurring in that immediate vicinity. Even utilities have a very large service territory. Even manufacturing, they may have started with the corporate office close to the manufacturing plant, but they’re typically quite far away from the day-to-day. In some cases, we’ll probably get to that very soon, companies’ corporate offices move away from it. Boeing was a very key case study where their operations were out in Seattle, and then they moved to Chicago.

Yeah, in the flying blind, that’s one of the levers that the author talks about as a reduction of the safety culture is that it was really a double removal or a double distance because one, they moved corporate headquarters from Seattle to Chicago. And then also the senior leaders, they started putting in place senior leaders that didn’t have an engineering aviation background. And so now there’s professional distances as well, which is professional training to really understand that. Related to what you just mentioned, the Houston and Seattle, and Chicago, we actually did two studies, but one of them with nurses, which we took a sample of nurses, and we actually manipulated this distance of the work environment in two ways. So, one way, we repeated the photographs. So, we showed them an outdoor picture of a hospital from outside the hospital. And then we showed them a picture of a hospital floor, nursing station, and hospital rooms and whatever. No people in either photo. So, we tried to eliminate that compound. But then we also said, we asked the nurses what the closest major city is to where they work. And so, you can imagine a nurse says, the major city that I work close to is your hometown, Toronto.

And so, the nurse types in Toronto, and then we randomly assign people. And so, what we did is we said, the people who saw the outside view of the hospital, and they’re working in Toronto, we actually say, imagine that This is a hospital in Miami, Florida. And then the other nurse, say two nurses do our study from Toronto. The other nurse says that they work in Toronto, and they see the inside view of the hospital. And we say, imagine that hospital is in Toronto. So, we gave outside views in a city far, far away. It was Miami for everybody because Miami is pretty far away from most everywhere. And then we did control, actually. If we had somebody from Fort Lauderdale in a sample, we controlled for that. We had outside view of the hospital, Miami, inside view of the hospital, in your hometown. Then we repeated, to what extent is there likely to be a nurse harmed or a patient harmed in this environment in the next 30 days? And then to what extent is safety an ethical moral obligation? And then we also had them look at safety behaviors. And then in one of the studies, we actually had them invest money into productivity or safety.

And again, we repeated the finding in the sense that people who were viewing a work environment that was way off in the distance via photos, a faraway city, they perceived less harm was going to happen, perceived safety is less of an ethical moral obligation. Then when they were given the opportunity to spend $10,000 on increasing productivity or ensuring safety, those folks were more likely to put the money towards productivity if you perceived less harm and you were far away. We went all the way through a behavioral investment decision, at least in one of the studies. This notion of it can be perceived distance, just the photos. It can be physical distance, the cities. They found levels of the hierarchy in an organization. The higher you are up in an organization, the more abstractly you can strew the goals and objectives of the organization. We went through. That notion of city differences, we investigated in a couple of the studies.

Phenomenal research. Scary in some ways in terms of implications. Let’s get into some of the implications.

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I know one of the things that comes to mind when you bring this up is often when I speak to executives, they say, I have a 34,000-foot view or 38,000-foot view of the operation, which is very I could, based on what you’re sharing.

Yeah, that’s the good news and the bad news. Right. I mean, they need that 38,000-foot view of the organization to think about long-term strategy, to think about industry dynamics, industry changes, how to stay in front of those industry changes from an innovation standpoint, from a product standpoint, from a profitability standpoint. But simultaneously, the opposite side of that same coin, is that they do have a 38,000-foot view. They lose sight of some of the harm that can accrue in some of the perhaps financial decisions, investment decisions that they’re making, investments in safety research, or if we go back to the California wildfires, tree trimming budget. Can we just cut that 10% a little bit and then get a little bit more money for innovation for these changes that are happening in the industry. And so, they just cut that budget 10 %, nothing happens. And they’re like, okay, I guess we didn’t need to spend that much money on that. And they just keep going. And so, yeah, you need those executives to have that 38,000-foot view for a lot of different reasons. But the flip side of that is that they lose the 10-foot view, which is some of the harm that can accrue to some of the downstream implications of some of the decisions that they’re making.

Those really are key implications. Tell me about some of the ways an executive can fix that, or a senior leader in an organization How can you fix this distance?

Yeah, that’s a $64 million dollar question, right? So, we don’t have a lot of data on this, but we have other people’s research and our own thoughts on what are the implications for this and how do you fix it? And I think one of the things that you have… So, part of it is the harm is they no longer perceive the harm. Okay, so that’s one problem to solve, is that we have to make sure that they continue to have some accurate perception of the harm. Fairly frequent visits to the job site to really understanding the work that’s being done, what you’re asking there of people. This whole notion of what undercover boss, I think is actually… It’s a little bit predictable. Yes. Just as the show, they always meet an amazing person and a not amazing person and so on. But that notion of the CEO showing up to do the work when they don’t know it’s the CEO. It’s so powerful for that person to realize like, oh, wow, this is hard work. The fact that in some of those shows, it’s like, Yeah, we don’t have fall protection, and so we’re all taking risk.

They’re like, so you’re just climbing up there without fall protection. It’s like, Yeah, the company won’t invest in it. The CEO What do you mean? Oftentimes, the CEO is like, how come I didn’t know about this? There’s a filtering mechanism. But I think there’s… So, one solution is you have to make sure that people, in an ongoing way, have real exposure to keeping that perception of harm as salient as you can. That might monthly or quarterly visits from a senior executive to a job site. But I think it can’t be what we would call a performative visit, which is you show up and you take the tour and nobody’s really working, or people are working at half speed and you’re chatting with somebody and cracking a joke and moving on. But when do you really see the operations? That’s why I like the undercover boss is because Nobody’s performative. It’s like, this is the real work because we don’t know who this person is. I think that notion of we have to somehow keep the perception of harm salient. That could be visits. I think when you’re looking at onshore operations, often those communications are via chat.

That further, that coarseness of that communication channel further removes people. We We’ve thought of, would it be helpful for the onshore command center to have photos of the people on the rig, perhaps photos of the people on the rig with their family? I interact with Eric, who’s on the offshore rig, but all of a sudden, Eric is… Here’s Eric with his wife and two kids in my queue. I need to make sure like, oh, that’s who I’m interacting with. That’s who this decision is going to affect. Somehow bringing the work environment closer in so that perception of harm remains real or as real as it can be one big implication. I think it’s also a lot for senior leaders, too. But I think those middle managers often get pretty removed. I think it’s important for them to… Because they’re the ones making a lot of the day-to-day trade-off decisions across competing priorities. Absolutely. To have those middle managers really attuned to that perception of harm as well. There’s an interesting study that we signed in the paper from, I think it’s a radiologist. Radiologist reading scan. It’s just a scan. Is it really a person after I’ve seen 5,000 in a day?

But they ran an experiment where they put a picture of the patient along with the radiology scan. What they found is that if the picture of the patient was connected to the radiology, the X-ray or the scan, they improved the reading of the scan and the accuracy because the patient’s photo. That notion of bringing the work environment closer into those people that are far away, I think, is one big implication. How do we exactly I think there’s all kinds of different ways you could do that. You could visit them, you could use photos, you could have all kinds of things. But I think the problem we’re trying to solve is for it not to be just an abstract thing 400 miles in the ocean somewhere, where I forget about the people, and the people aren’t real. They’re just part of a system that’s working. Just thinking about, as a senior executive, how do we make sure that those onshore command centers, those middle managers that haven’t worked at a production facility or offshore, wherever, in six or seven or eight years, how do we just make sure those people are staying connected to for harm?

Sure. I think there’s There are all kinds of different ways you can do it, but I think that’s ultimately the goal is to make sure that harm remains salient.

I think one of the pieces that struck me from our last conversation, but I think it’s coming even more front of mind with our conversation today, is it’s not just the CEO, COO. You’ve got to do it across because you talked about middle management. It’s not just in operations. It’s the finance folks that are making decisions. When you talked about the 10% budget, they’re making abstract decisions based on a balance sheet or a spreadsheet. That is, you can’t get more removed from the day-to-day than a spreadsheet, not understanding how it translates. If I cut training as an example, the implication could be down the road skills training for a frontline team member, somebody’s not as well equipped than is in harm’s way. But that risk could be 10 years down the road, especially when you’re thinking that most of these crafts are learned through an apprenticeship type of environment.

Yeah, that’s the rub, right? I interviewed the head of cyber security and international company. Sure. I said, okay, so how do you get capital investment for essentially a cost, right? Preventing cyber security is… I mean, maybe there’s a way that generates revenue, but I mean, if you’re not a cyber security company.

It generates a lot of revenue if you’re that.

But I was like, It’s a cost. So how do you not get it slowly eaten away over time with just tweaks to the budget. The person said an interesting thing. He said, well, you only want to build the wall one brick higher than the enemy is willing to climb. My first My first take was that I wrote down that quote really quickly because I was like, oh, I’m going to use this down the road. But it actually made me quite nervous if I was a senior executive in that company, because there’s a lot of assumptions behind that, which is- No kidding. You know who the enemy is. You know that they’re climbing as opposed to digging a tunnel, and you have some perception of how high they’re willing to climb. His point was that you don’t want to gold plate everything, because you can absolutely gold plate every single system in your company, but then you’re just not competitive, and you’ll be out of business because your cost structure gets too high. Sure. There’s this tension point between you want to invest in safety training and tree trimming and those sorts of things. But at the same time, you don’t want to spend $200 million when actually $175 million is sufficient to prevent harm.

But it’s really hard to figure out where that line should be drawn. Correct. Exactly because of your point, because the feedback cycle is really, really, really long. You cut the budget and nothing happens, but nothing really is going to materialize from that in terms of a learning standpoint. Point for maybe five, six, seven, eight, nine years. Then when it does materialize, nobody tracks it back to, oh, well, it was often paid to cut the training budgets nine years ago. That’s been a major contributor to this accident. There’s just no connection back to those types of decisions. There is this tension point between you want to keep the harm salient, you want to invest. You need to make sure you’re predicting harm. But at the same time, you’re running a business, and you have to compete in the marketplace from a price and cost schedule. There is this tension point, I think, for middle managers of navigating that allocation of scarce resources across competing goals. I think the tendency is, I think what we show is that when that perception of harm goes down, it just becomes a little bit too easy to cut some of these budgets without really thinking too hard about the long-term consequences of that.

I think that’s how this operational drift and risk starts to accumulate over time.

Yeah, and you’re introducing risk across the system. Like you said, it’s not one decision that causes a fatality or a serious event. It’s accumulation of these events that are introducing risk.

And many of those decisions are not made in proximity to the event. They’re made months, weeks, or years ahead upstream from that event. It’s an ongoing challenge to how do you keep harm really salient? How do you make sure you’re not making decisions that are increasing risk and harm? But at the same time, how do you be responsible to shareholders and other investors and compete in the marketplace in terms of price and cost and schedule and everything else. It’s a complicated set of decisions that have to be made. I think our research just provides one lens into that to say, hey, there’s a tendency when you get into middle senior managers and you’re not on the sharp end anymore, there’s a psychological natural tendency to no longer perceive the harm. That has implications. We need to just remind people that there’s harm, real harm could happen, get them exposed to that in a fairly frequent, not the harm, but where harm can happen in a fairly frequent way. That just becomes a criterion or a lens through which they start to see these decisions that they’re making every day.

There’s a cost to that, but it’s also a huge investment to spend that time. But I’ve seen the rewards on a regular basis. It’s an easy fix. What you’re describing is putting pictures, getting people to go out on a regular basis. Very achievable.

Yeah, I think so. I agree.

Thank you again for joining me. Great research, great insights. What I love is how easy it is for an executive to say; I can make a difference in this area. It reminds me of the concept of Gemba Walks that comes out very much on lean manufacturing side of the equation in safety. People talk about listening tours, but it’s really saying, how do I get this across the organization as a repetitive pattern to really understand what goes on, including in the remote parts of my service territory or my business.

Yeah, 100% agree.

Thank you so much for joining me. Again, a pleasure to have you on the show.

It’s great to be back on the show, Eric, and great to see you again.

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.