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

Hi, and welcome to the Safety Guru. Today, I’m very excited to have with me Dr. Jared Dempsey. He’s an industrial You’re a psychologist. Worked in the behavior space for the last 30-some-old years. So, Jared, welcome to the show. Very excited to have you with me.

Good to be here. Thank you very much.

Why don’t you get us started with a little bit about how you got your passion for safety?

Well, my passion for safety probably came about in quite an inadvertent way. I never saw myself as wanting to work in safety. It’s where I’ve landed. I think that’s quite common for a lot of safety professionals. I’m not even sure I would call myself a safety professional, though. I’m an industrial psychologist who happens to work in safety, but it’s something I have a passion for. What happened was I had done my undergraduate degree in psychology. I then moved on to do an occupational psychology degree, and towards the end, I was looking for a topic for a thesis, for my master’s thesis. And I was looking at all the usual suspects, culture, leadership, teamwork. And we know that those impacts safely quite significantly, but I wasn’t looking at them in the self-safety realm. I was married to the same person I’ve been married to for the last 30 years. My wife was working as a nurse at the time, as a registered nurse, and she suggested that I looked at a journal that she’d brought home, especially because she thought I would find it interesting she’d brought home from work. I thought, Well, that’s nursing. I don’t see why nursing would attract or fascinate me at all.

If I wanted to look at nursing, I would have been a nurse. I ignored that request. I ignored it once, and then the following week, I ignored it again. Then the third, we got to about the third week, and I thought, Right, I just need to have a look at this, get the monkey off my back, so to speak. Just have a look to really terrible looking back, just pacify the person that I decided to spend my whole entire life with. Well, more for me because the journal article actually changed the course of my life and it really changed the way that I looked at things. To cut long story short, there was a story in the journal, and it was about a surgeon who was cutting into somebody’s brain to remove a tumor. They cut it into the cranium, and then they couldn’t see what they were looking for. They cut over a bit more and a bit more and a bit more. Then eventually, they realized that they were operating on the wrong hemisphere, the wrong side of the head. The reason for that is the X-ray or a scan, whatever visual that they had pinned up was put the wrong way around.

That is bizarre enough because in my mind at that time, medical error really wasn’t something that was widely spoken about. For me, I thought, A, just how could that happen? But B, the most dramatic thing, if you like, is that there was a nurse in the room who suspected that was the case, that the scan, the image was the wrong way around but didn’t feel comfortable enough to speak up. Maybe through youth and naivety, I just really couldn’t understand why if you saw a risk like that, why you wouldn’t actually raise your hand and say, hold on, this doesn’t look right. That set me off on a bit of a career looking, initially, we call it psychological safety now. We refer it to as speaking up. It wasn’t at the time necessarily even occupational safety. It was more patient safety. But then some years later, it was this… I managed to really get into occupational safety, and it was looking at the same type of things as, why don’t people speak? Why don’t they take action? What’s the psychology behind people actually doing what you would, in a perfect world, you would expect them to do?

That was one of the key experiences that took me into safety and really spurred me on and developed my passion is really just trying to understand what is and what should never be.

That’s a good segue into How is it that things go wrong? What are some of the error-producing conditions that cause things to go wrong?

Well, I think that if we look at how things go wrong, then we might be talking more about cognition. But if we’re talking about why things go wrong, then what we understand now, when we start looking at human performance, is that people get things wrong a lot of the time, quite simply because of the situations in which they find themselves. If we’re talking about conditions, is it light? Is it dark? Is there a glare? Do they feel under pressure? Is the quality of the work they need to do? Is it high? Are they under time pressures? Do they need to get something done in a relatively short amount of time? Are the instructions, the written instructions that they have, are fit for purpose? Is the verbal communication during a task? They talk about the dirty dozen. I would say it’s probably about depending on how you slice it and dice it, there’s probably around 10 core factors that when we look back at incidents, we find them time and time again. Obviously, what you want to do is you want to be thinking about these environmental precursors, precursors to incidents before you actually do a job, and you want to be talking about them.

But what we’ve done for a long time is we’ve focused on traditional hazards. You think about things like gravity, chemical, electrical, radiation. We prime people to think in those areas, and then we actually don’t get them to think the human factors and the conditions that actually compromise a cognitive function, which is a fancy way of saying the way that our brain is thinking at a particular time, how we process an information. So, error-producing conditions, they’ve been around for a while. In the UK, we call them performance influencing factors. Basically, they might go by error traps. But we I still find there’s a lot of work to be done bridging that gap of actually get people to understand them, use them, and actually talk about them prior to starting work.

Is it mostly about the knowledge and how you look at… You recognize the conditions that may be impacting you? You talked about production pressure as an example, and you create awareness of it and talk about it to then think about how I mitigate, or is there more that can be done on that front?

It really depends. If it’s a bit like a work instruction or procedure, written instructions, then that can be flagged by a work team, or it should be caught ahead of time. There’s that type of things that structurally you can take care of. But there are other things that actually they’re pretty dynamic, and you really only going to pick them up as part of your dynamic risk assessment. So, we talk about worker readiness. Are you Are you stressed? Are you fatigued? You’re not going to necessarily know that with your team until the actual day of doing a task. But I think you’re absolutely right there. It is about being empowered to identify the less-than-ideal conditions. Because one of the struggles that we have with human factors is human factors in human error. Are almost treated interchangeably synonymously because they’re so closely related. But I can always guarantee if I go on to the BBC news and I see, if there’s been a massive mistake that’s basically a major harm to plant or somebody’s been hurt, as such it has become newsworthy, then you’ll see the words human error. The way that those words human error are left is somebody did something wrong.

Actually, you might reasonably expect that person to have got it right, and it becomes a blame exercise, and organizations are very good at that. It’s all fine and well saying we’ve got these error-producing conditions. But if the organization doesn’t actually take ownership and really encourage for people to say, Hey, we’re fatigued because we did a double shift earlier on the week, or whatever it is, unless they feel empowered and safe to actually point them out, then it’s not really going to make any difference, and they’re not going to point them out. I guess it’s like most things. When we talk about behaviors and safety, you can have programs and you can have things written down, but ultimately, everybody needs to buy in and you’re going organization from the top down to make sure that, yeah, A, you identified, and B, we’re going to support you and do something about that. We’re going to get those conditions changed.

I think the other part, I’d say, is sometimes the organization causes these factors. The shift schedule, as an example, is something the organization typically either accepts or creates that could induce the fatigue, or if there’s a quick turnaround, these are things that the organization can also That same as production pressure on every construction site. There tends to be a countdown clock that tells you how many days until this goes live and you need to finish. That creates pressure, but some of it could also be internalized.

Yeah, I mean, I would suggest that 98% of the system factors and organizational factors, even when it comes down to things like the socio-technical, but the social side of things and whether you’ve got a good culture. Again, that’s down to the organization. If there isn’t a good culture, if people don’t have psychological safety, then the company or the organization itself is errant, and it really isn’t doing all that it should and it needs to do. Sure. You might have people who for their own reason, are negligent, careless. But on the whole, my belief is, and I think if you work in this space and if you are a safety coach or a consultant, then you really should have the belief that most people are good people trying to do a good job.

Nobody chooses to get injured in the morning, goes to work thinking, I’m going to get injured. Unless you’re atrocious at hiring, you should not have a lot of bad actors in your organization either.

Well, that’s it. Sometimes we’ve got a people problem. Yeah, you’ve got a people hiring problem, perhaps. Even we’ve got a leadership problem. But again, the thing about trying to understand human factors is just trying to take it back. I’m saying human factors isn’t about your mess-ups, it’s about what messes you up. Again, let’s go back and let’s look at the conditions. There’s someone, a professor here in Aberdeen called Rhona Flynn, and I don’t want to misquote her. However, I think what Rhona had said was human factors It’s simply defined as what gets in the way of you doing a good job. When we think of it like that, we could demystify it, take away a lot of the mystery, because I can always guarantee You get into a room of people and you say, okay, someone give me a definition of human factors. A lot of times people look at you blank because it’s so amorphous, it’s so big, it’s everything they think in human nature and in the world, when in but really, it’s those things that time and time again catches out and make the job difficult to do.

You talked about human factors. I’d like to touch a little bit on human performance and matching people where they are. I’d love to get a bit of you on that.

Yeah, I think we have to change our expectations that our expectations need to meet people where they are as opposed to people need to meet our expectations. That there’s somewhere in the middle there is understanding as human beings, how we function and what we can realistically do. I guess my point is there’s three main cognitions that time and time again, if situations aren’t ideal. If we are under pressure, if we are fatigued, if we maybe have some stress, if the communication in the job isn’t good, then we end up with situations when our body lets us down, our attention lets us down, or our decision-making lets us down. That’s going to be nine times out of 10. That’s what’s going to happen. There’s going to be an environmental circumstance, there’s going to be a cognitive failure. If we think about our decision making, it’s a lack of understanding, our attention, it’s a lack of noticing something needs to be done, or we forget to do something. When you ask people, we know this almost intuitively, when you ask people, okay, is anybody’s memory perfect? Everybody says no. Is anybody’s attention limitless? Again, everybody says no.

Does everybody make great decisions time after time after time? And everyone says no. So, we know that these are limited, but sometimes in work situations, we say, Well, you’re a professional. You shouldn’t make mistakes. Well, I think you can see.

We’re human.

Yeah, the discombobulation between there. There’s no congruence with those two thoughts. We do talk about Traditionally, we prime people to look at things like radiation, gravity, so on and so forth, slip, trip, slip.

Energy wheel and so forth. Yeah.

But I think it’s really useful to It’s like saying the left hand doesn’t need the right-hand if you don’t actually engage in that as well. But I think it’s really useful to say things like, okay, what is it about this job can be difficult? What’s tricky? What’s going to cause you to struggle? What’s awkward? Because what you actually do then is you open people’s minds, because when you prime someone with pre-existing risks, that’s all that they can see. Cognitively, what you’ve done is you’ve almost got them to engage in some tunneling. You’ve cut off the vision. But when you actually get them to step back and say, okay, what is it that is difficult about this job? What’s it going to cause us to struggle? Then the They start talking about things that they’ve not thought about before that are going to get in the way of the job. It’s at that point where the job starts to get away from them.

Sure.

It’s not necessarily a safety issue, but what we find is when you start to lose control, not only is it a production issue, but it also then becomes a safety issue. If you’re not in control of a job, it’s not a safe job. I am a great fan of just winding it up and asking people, what is it that’s different? What is it that might be a bit dodgy about this? What is it we’re putting up with? If you go back to even the three cognitions of memory, attention and decision-making, let’s go back and ask, okay, what is it we absolutely need to remember that could be easily forgot?

Sure.

Okay, what is it we need to pay attention to that could easily go and notice?

Enjoying attention. Right.

It’s a different way of looking at things that in my experience, it pays dividends. People who are involved in the human performance movement, if you like, that’s the direction of travel. Sure.

Excellent. If we talk about accountability, I think one of the things you talk about as well as the word coaching tends to be overused. I’d love to hear more in terms of this. How do we drive accountability in the right way?

Well, I think accountability, again, we talk about accountability, but it’s usually for the person at the sharp end as opposed to the accountability of the people making the decisions and designing the environment further up. When things do go wrong, I think we need to basically hold up the mirror and They say, okay, well, okay, what situation did we place this person in? Is there something that’s routine? And then judge them with the same yardstick. Now, clearly, if somebody isn’t doing as they need to do as the standards require. But we talk about the substitution check test, and that person went off and then Basically, for the want of a bit of a word, they rebelled, but nobody else would. There’s a case for discipline there. But what we do know, if we just try and use that, the safety stick, we’ll call it, and hold people to account continually because we think that consequence is the only way to manage behaviors, not understanding that actually, if we apply what we could call negative consequences, that we’re going to drive people’s behaviors underground, we’re going to have a lack of transparency. Just one point on terminology.

I’ve heard the word coaching used in various ways. If I’m going to discipline someone, I’m going to give them some coaching. Not the same concept, right? No, absolutely not. The other The thing is, well, safety professionals take it away. You give them a different title. They’re no longer a safety officer or safety manager. We’re going to call you a safety coach. Then all of a sudden, they’re supposed to be coaches with coaching skills. Again, you’ve taken something and we dilute the meaning. Then that’s not to say that we can’t have people who are worker safety officers who can be great safety coaches. We just have to give them the support so they’re able to- And skills. Yes, absolutely. You need to give them the skills, and that needs to be supported by the organization of this is part of their role. Some things are going to be about compliance and about assured us. But equally, there’s going to be other times when the safety coaches are going to call them out, they’re going to help you with communication skills, they’re going to give you a reflection on how you’re showing up as a leader and a supervisor.

That can be tough if you’ve got people who’ve been in more of a traditional role for a long time, not just for them to do, but to change the perceptions of the people that they need to coach. Because as I’m sure you’re aware, when we are coaching, one of the things we’ll say is, Would you like some feedback? Would you like me to give you don’t jump in. If you go in as a coach, that’s your sole role, as I would term a safety leadership coach, then the people that you’re going to work with, they’re more likely to accept you because that’s your core role and that’s how they see you. It adheres to their perspective and their expectations.

Because coaching really should be about how do I develop somebody, how do I create awareness sometimes on certain factors that may be influencing the work, the quality of the work. It should really be just like a coach in a sports team that’s helping you perform at a higher level, not this disciplinary measure.

Yeah, absolutely.

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Two topics I know we talked about before when we first connected is around cognitive and social psychology and how it impacts safety in the organization. On the cognitive side, in terms of how we process information, I know when we first talked, you talked about three different air types. I’d love to explore a little bit this area.

Yes, so it’s just really going back to memory, attention, attention and decision-making. Because if your memory is compromised, then you may be going to miss out an essential check, you’re going to miss out a part of a job. It may be going to misremember how to do a task. If you misremember how to do it, you’re going to get it wrong. Attention is a case of I don’t notice something. And if you don’t notice something, you might not be able to react. Also, you might think that if you have a valve that needs to be shut, and sometimes then that might still be open because you’ve missed it. You haven’t noticed that you haven’t done it. So sometimes the memory and the attention, they come close together. And decision making, I think what you’ve got a decision making a lot of the time, it’s down to the information you have. It’s almost like garbage in, garbage out. If you’ve not got good information, acting on good information, then you’re mistaken about the situation. And Any solutions you come up with, any actions you take, are not going to be right for the situation.

Sure.

For me, the two massive areas for information are verbal communication before and during a job and the quality of your written information. In addition to that, I also like to talk about biases because we all carry biases. In fact, we say blind spot bias. The biggest bias is believing you don’t have any biases. Again, a lot of my work is in energy. If we look out with energy and we look to aviation, and if you do work in a human factor space, then we revert it, revert aviation as the pioneers of human factors and really getting lots and lots right. But you will, when you do your crew resource management essential training, which they used to call cockpit Resource Management, which is how you operate in the cockpit. But then within time, they realized, actually, it’s about how you… A lot of it’s about how you communicate with the crew members. They changed the terminology to crew resource management. But when you do your mandatory training, you will be taught about biases. For example, you’re going to be taught about what we would call plan continuation bias, which is the impulse, the tendency of once you start a job, you just don’t to stop, even if those conditions become less and less ideal.

I think we’ve all been there. You’ve maybe been out there cutting the hedge, and it starts to get dark, and you just want to get the job done. It’s a very normal thing. Obviously, for pilots, they’re told, if your approach is poor, just circle around, come back again, and then land. Don’t try and land it for the one of a better term, you’re a little bit wobbly. They’ll teach that in aviation. I think just in general, in safety, we could do a better job of teaching people about what I would call the continuation bias. I think optimism bias is probably the biggest one we all face. I met someone a few years ago, and he said something that really stuck with me. He said, when you go onto an asset, when you go into a plant, perhaps the most dangerous thing on that plant is the sentiment, perhaps I should know this, because people don’t actually… If they think that they should know it, they don’t want to look foolish by leaving themselves open and saying anything. If I was to counter that, I would say, probably the most dangerous thing is the sentiment of it will be okay.

When I hear those words, even myself, then to me, that’s a trigger. There’s something saying, actually, you need to step back and reappraise the risk. For me, optimism bias is a huge one. As you said, no one actually thinks they’re going to get up in the morning, go to work and get hurt. As human beings, if we’re healthy, actually, we are optimistic. We do have this almost idealized picture of the That’s why we make New Year’s resolutions that we don’t keep. We join gyms. We go three times, and it takes us two years to actually cancel the gym membership. We get credit cards with Teaser 8 because we think we’ll pay it off in in the months, and then it moves on to the higher rate. Organizations know this. They know that as human beings, we’re very optimistic, which is generally a good thing, but just not so much in the safety space. Sure. Just one more thing on the optimism is we have to teach biases and train them as the most natural things in the world that usually have some healthy purpose, but it can’t. Applied in the wrong setting, it can be detrimental.

For example, plan continuation bias, the drive to keep going That can be a great thing, but it’s just not going to be a great thing if it’s going to get you permanently disabled or you’re involved in a fatality. But if you think about sports, if you think about Pushing yourself, it’s good. It’s what we do as human beings. It’s how we thrive. But I guess language is important for me. I hear people banding around the word complacency, and I’m just never a fan. I think if we’re going to talk about complacency, we need to be very, very clear with people that what we mean is an underestimation of risk. We use it in the strictest sense of the meaning, because if you point fingers at people and say to them, you’re complacent, what are you doing?

That doesn’t go well.

No, it doesn’t go down well. It’s like we said, you’re negligent You’re careless. None of those things are great. If we want to get people brought in, bought into safety, we want to bring them on side, and we want to get them to act Safety is a value, and there to be that trust between supervisors, managers, and workers. Walking around using words like complacent, we’re on a hide into nothing. It’s not going to help our cause at all.

No. We’ve talked about cognitive psychology in terms of how we process information. Love to talk about social psychology. Essentially, how we interact with each other in a group setting, how that also impacts safety.

We’re basically social creatures. We’re tribal creatures, where we have a tendency herd mentality, and that can be good because we can form. If you can get a mass or a body of people doing the right things, then the joiners, people will fall into that. If people aren’t doing the right things, then it can be negative because you don’t have that critical mass where people join in the group or part of the group. Nobody really wants to put their head above the parapet and be the jobs were Earth or the clean guy. But what really interests me about social psychology is if we look at the helping literature, if we look at the literature of why people get involved and why people help each other, then I think that we can learn a lot and why people do or don’t. If we look at the helping literature, again, it’s slightly removed from safety in some terms, but if you think about a culture of care, not a culture of compliance, but a culture of care, that’s really people trying to help each other and looking out for each other. If you go back to what I would consider is in some ways the best and easiest way of looking at the safety culture, which is independence, dependence, and interdependence, is you want to get to a stage where people are interdependent and helping each other.

If we look at the literature and the studies of bystander apathy and conformity and compliance, then we started to realize, really, it drives home the message that we are creatures. We have a herd mentality.

That was a great example in terms of conformity. Love to explore one in terms of more around the herd mentality.

Yeah, I think there’s probably a great example of that. It’s not necessarily an experiment. But Gerry Harvey was an organizational specialist many years ago, and he tells of a story called the Abilene Paradox, whereby he was in Texas. He was visiting his mother and father-in-law, and they were sitting on the porch on what was a hot but pleasant Sunday afternoon when his father-in-law said, I heard there’s a new restaurant opened in the other town. Why don’t we get in the car and go and get a meal? Everybody said, Yeah, that sounds like a great idea. This was in the days before air conditioning was as good as it is now. They went over and They had a meal. The food was barely palatable. The car journey was horrific. It was a 100-mile round trip. They came home and someone said, sitting on the porch, the mother-in-law, the father-in-law, Gerry and his wife, and someone said, Yeah, well, that was great, wasn’t it? Then someone said, I didn’t think much of the food, and then everybody just let loose. It actually turned out that no one wanted to go in the first place. You end up in a situation, and it’s just how human beings are.

You end up in a situation where you have the worst possible outcome because no one feels comfortable enough to actually say what they really feel. People think that they’re the only one who feels like this, or they suspect they’re the only one who feels like this. The fancy names for it, like pluralistic ignorance, and there have been many experience done on it. The bigger the group, the more likely, if you only got two or three people, it is more likely that someone’s going to say, I’m not comfortable with this job. I don’t think this is safe. But when you’ve got a group of six or seven, it It’s far less likely someone’s going to speak up. We know about that from all the conformity studies. We really are herd creatures. If we’re going to get to a place where people will speak up and they will share their opinions and they will point out risks. We have to be very pointed and almost religiously saying, okay, what is it we see? Does anybody have any concerns, questions or comments before we get started? What’s our comfort level with this job? That should be before every job.

We can’t take it for granted. I’ve heard many times people say, my people know that they can.

Actually, more often More often than not, it’s the leaders that say to me, it’s their people don’t know because they really do lack that self-awareness. Yeah, that makes sense. Excellent. Thank you for sharing that.

I think I said earlier on, when I started out, I looked at nurses, nurses speaking up behavior. That’s why I actually ended up examining four for my PhD. But there’s a classic study, I don’t know if you’ve heard of it, it’s called the ASTRO-10 Study. In the study, and I remember back, psychology used to be quite… It didn’t have quite the same ethics as it has now. I’m not sure this would get past the Ethics Committee. But what happened is they set up nurses on a ward. You’d have a nurse going on to a ward, and these nurses, individually, they weren’t all together. The nurse would receive a call from a doctor, but the doctor was actually just one of the researchers that was, if you want social experiment, playing a trick, call it what you will. He would say, hi, this is Dr. Jones. I want you to go down to see patient Smith in bed number 9, and I want you to give him 20 milligrams of astra10. Now, I’m telling this, I’m paraphrasing. I want you to give him 20 milligrams of Astra fen. The nurses had all recently been given training on this new drug called Astra fen.

What they didn’t know was a placebo. They were sugar pills. There was nothing. It very clearly said on the pill bottle that the maximum dose was 10 milligrams. It actually might be five milligrams. My memory escapes me. But what happened was that nearly every nurse that was placed in that situation gave the medicine to the patient. And what’s really interesting, though, is thereafter, when you take a control group of nurses and you talk about the experiment and you say, what would you do? Every single nurse said, there’s no way I would have given the patient that drug. We end up doing things because we’re told to and because that’s how we see ourselves in these social situations. When you understand that, you understand the influence of a supervisor or manager saying, get this done. I’ll get this done. I’ll get this done, but be safe, but I need it done in this time and sending mixed messages. It’s like, okay, so what would you really want? What we’re probably going to get is they are going to do what they’ve been told to do, and that safety request becomes an optional, an additional extra.

Right. So covered a lot of ground today from just the social psychology and how we operate in more of a herd mentality, which can be, as you said, good or bad. And the cognitive psychology in terms of some of the biases that we have, particularly with other topics, but even just how we can miss information or how biases can impact our choices. We touched on human performance, but also the air-producing conditions. A lot of ground we’ve covered. If somebody wants to get in touch with you, Jared, what’s the best way to do that?

Just reach out on my website, which is www.cognivate.com.

Excellent. Thank you so much for joining me today, Jared.

Eric, it’s been a pleasure. Anytime. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

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