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 Kelvin Genn, Executive director from Art of Work. We’ll be talking about how to reduce the distance between the board and the frontline, enabling leaders to ask better questions with curiosity. Kelvin has worked at the board and executive levels across aviation, healthcare, defense, manufacturing, mining, construction, government and telecommunication. A very broad range of experience. Kelvin, welcome to the show. Very excited to have you with me today.

Eric, glad to be speaking with you.

Excellent. So maybe let’s get started with your journey because you have a very interesting journey through safety over the years. Lots of experiences, learnings, pitfalls. So, tell me a little bit about how you got here.

Yeah, that’s always interesting. Good point for reflection. And I keep thinking the more I more experience I have, the more I’ve learned, the more I need to know. So, in that journey, I began my journey in the military, and I spent about 13 years in the Royal Australian Air Force. And in that job, my job was to do workplace health and safety, both in a support role, but in an operational role. And so, it was interesting from my perspective, coming into a military environment, very much command and control and very much from the format that we just need people to follow directions. And given that they follow directions, all will be good in that space. My 13 years in the military very much taught me that that was a very flawed premise.

Yes.

So that’s how I began. From there, I migrated out into industry from that point forward, I then started to work in logistics, a big, large logistics organization. And I then moved into a very large global support services company that had clients like the military and had some experiences that were unusual, like supporting the first Gulf War and doing other military operations from an external point of view rather than an internal point of view. And again, learned a lot in that perspective and from there really moved into health and I was looking after patient quality and safety for a very large healthcare organization with 110,000 clinicians in it and again had a lot of experiences in trying to understand our notions of safety and had to really reform my thinking. And that was helped a lot with my interactions, and I suppose the partnership that I formed with Professor Sydney Decker and from there moved into a large engineering business and did large mobilizations of engineering projects across Australia and Africa and North America and Europe. And it was from there that I sort of moved into where I am now, art of work, and started to take those learnings and try and reinterpret them and share them back with industry.

And over those years, I know when we originally spoke, you’ve experienced lots of different shifts in thinking and ideas and safety, from behavior-based safety to resilience engineering models and designing people out. Tell me a little bit more about kind of what were some of the takeaways you saw from a lot of those methods? What worked? What were some of the challenges?

Yeah, you go through different cycles and learnings and experiences, I think over your career. And as you can reflect, I’ve had nearly about 40 years of that experience. And coming from the military, we really started from the point that we just simply needed to design the person out of the system. All the potential for error was by having people in the system.

Sure.

So, every effort that we needed to make was to think how we could remove people from contributing to decision making to all those things. And that sort of moved forward into a large focus around, if you like, the behavioral management models. We just needed to comply and work out how we could constrain and reduce their contribution and keep them. I often talk about coloring within the lines. Just keep them coloring outside the lines.

Right.

And as we got into. And increasingly you test these ideas out and you would see that you would not be solving the core problems, you would be going and applying these strategies. And you just saw the reemergence of the same issues and problems and time and time again. And so that really questioned my thinking. And really the critical change for me was coming into the work of Professor Sydney Decker and Professor Eric Hufnagel and Dave Woods. You know, all these people. It was Sydney that introduced me into this thinking and really into the ideas of complexity. And I think it was insightful work in that resilience engineering space, which goes back to the premise of understanding complexity and that the system is imperfect, it cannot accommodate and describe the nature of the work and all the variations that people have to deal with. And from that it was clear that people were the solution in the problem, not the problem that had to be resolved. So, people were constantly bridging the gaps in what was not present in the System, what you’re not provided with the different circumstances and. And the challenge became a different challenge in how do you harness people as a solution in that space?

And how do you enable them or give them tools to make better decisions to support them in that process? So, in that shift, that shift was a shift from thinking about expertise. And I think you start to get into this mode where we’re subject matter experts in a whole range of different areas and that we simply need people to follow our direction and wisdom to achieve the right result. And increasingly I’ve learned from my experience of being out in the field that what we missed in that process is the wisdom that sits out there with where people do the work, where work is done.

Yeah.

And what we need to be able to do is harness their intelligence and insight and combine that with the subject matter expertise to work in a collaborative fashion in this space. So, it was really health that really gave me that experience. And in health, the reason was we were working with medical error in that space and the complexities of making decisions in patients. And there were nearly two schools of thought going on at that time. One was what we need to do is just create protocols, and we just want the clinical teams to follow the protocols and all will be good. Now, the problem with that protocols are linear by nature and patients are not. They’re multifactorial. And so, you would have a lot of different. And what we really learned in that space is that the clinicians that are good were much more intuitive and communicative and engagement. They were much more about being curious and learning from the patient and the people around them than being enslaved in the protocol. That tended to be somewhere where people felt safe, that they stayed with, but it wasn’t helping the patient to be safe in terms of how they were treated.

So, it was really health that made a really big difference to my thinking. And really understanding that complexity was something that we needed to engage in and use different tools. And those tools were fundamentally built around being curious.

Yeah. And I think let’s delve a little bit more into that part because I agree with you. The answer is really in those that are closest to the front line. I think you’ve made a very strong case for that in terms of the knowledge that’s there that often gets overlooked. But it’s a very simple concept, yet so often overlooked.

Why?

Why is it so often overlooked?

Look, it’s interesting. I think this comes into the nature of leadership and management to some degree. I often think about where people feel most comfortable and what people are rewarded for sure. And nearly there’s. We’ve got different domains within management, so we obviously got the executive and the senior leadership with within organizations. And then we’ve got. If you want that broadcast of people, we generally label middle management, who tend to be the people who have to deal with the resource limitations and deliver the outcomes that the business expects in that space. And then you’ve got the line management people directly in that space. I think in our work in this space, we often find that leadership are much more open to challenging the notion and thinking differently about how work is done and trying to learn differently. The group that is more challenging is the middle management piece who are much more comfortable in a controlled environment where they’re much more comfortable in defining the nature of work and how things need to be done, holding people accountable to that process because it’s a much more uncomfortable piece to step into. A piece where you’re open to curiosity, inquiry and in essence allowing things to emerge and develop, but you can’t predict exactly where that’s going to go.

So, in a controlled system, middle management, I think often more comfortable in working with a flawed system because they justify working in a flawed. In a flawed system saying, yep, we’re doing what’s been asked of us with what. With what’s been given to us and we’re getting the best results that we can, as opposed to taking a risk and doing something different, which might be much better, but it could fail as well.

And that’s been my same experience. And sometimes people talk about concrete middle or clay layer, but I think it’s actually very different. Those terms came from more of the change management space. It’s. While engaging the frontline employees is very empowering for them. It’s in many ways disempowering for middle management because I used to control the decision making. What gets escalated, what gets moved forward and suddenly I don’t fully control it. It’s empowering for the craft.

Yeah, yeah. And I suppose there’s some notions in that space it’s come around holacracy and those sorts of principles where that whole notion has been challenged as to what role that it has.

So, what are some of the ways that you bring this to life in an organization? Because as we talked about, it’s a simple yet incredibly powerful principle. But that’s so often missed in organizations. How do you bring it? What are some of the things to keep in mind as you start to empower? Obviously, the risk around the middle management and how they respond to It. But what are some of the ways that you’ve seen work successfully?

It’s interesting because I’ve been having some of these discussions with some CEOs and board members even in recent days, and we came to this notion of thinking about leadership and them expressing a notion of having informed leadership in this space, which I thought was interesting. And so, the challenge is how you enable leadership to have a clearer view to the nature of work is done and how work is done so they can have better intelligence to work with about the decisions that need to be made to enable them to achieve the business objectives. And in essence, so part of that, and our notion has been trying to have leaders more connected to where work is done and having opportunities to do that, but that is a space that they’re not comfortable in as leaders. As leaders, they don’t really want to be exposed at the front line to potentially have, if you like, a deficiency in knowledge and expertise when they’re talking to the people who are doing their business out there, doing the work. So, part of this exercise is thinking about shifting the perspective of leadership to enable them to engage more directly in that frontline space differently.

And I think it’s about giving them the confidence not to be the expert, to be the starting point of that.

Sure.

So, a lot of that has been giving them the tools of curiosity, I suppose. We’ve used a lot of tools around appreciative inquiry, thinking about how you engage and invoke and let people tell their stories and not be the person who has to judge or correct or fix anything that is presented to you in that transaction. So that’s been. I think the first part is thinking about how we reduce the gap in the distance. The big problem for senior leadership is there’s all these filters that sits between.

Oh, yes.

And where the business is. So, we all, you know, I think Sydney Deckers use a term that we have, looking good indexes. Right. So, what we. What we tend to do is that leaders try and have processes of governance, and they try and, you know, in the safety space they’re looking for all these data and feeds, most of that has been sanitized and qualified to be looking good when it comes through to them. Rarely do they get the unfiltered and difficult work. And some of the conversations we’re having with leaders now is being uncomfortable about the greenwashed dashboards that come through and thinking about how you get the other information to flow through the narrative where things are challenging or problematic and celebrating that as being a shift in that space. So really, I think the thing that we’ve been working with is firstly empowering leaders in that space, but in doing that is doing it in a way where you aren’t disempowering the operational management in space. Because the last thing that you want really is for your leadership to arrive at the front line, make all these discoveries and suddenly come back to your middle management with holding them to account for these things that they in that space.

So, part of it is about shifting them, but shifting the middle management team with you in that space to collaborate and work to shift the way that they’re engaging. And I suppose it’s engaging that space is how do we enable people; how do we get better intelligence and how do we shift from this cause and effect and blame to how do we move to being a problem-solving collaborative as such. So, it’s a, it’s a shift in that, it’s a shift in dynamics of how people interact, communicate and hopefully shift to this learning space of trying to understand and being in a continuous improvement of problem-solving loop.

Right. And I think what you describe is the most senior, at least in the conversations I had, the most senior people in an organization, CEOs, the board probably get the most filtered message. And I’ve talked to many people as they got promoted to CEO and their comment is often, I used to get information, now I’m not sure I trust the information that comes to me. And it just, it gets managed by people that are better at managing as it gets closer to the top. And that element of how we connect back to the front line, I think is really, key. How do we make this an ongoing component, Appreciative inquiry, Very, very powerful tool. I remember starting using it 20-some-odd years ago, if not more. Just great ways of getting ideas and getting people to share their stories and listening to the goodness of what’s working. Well, you touched as well. When we first connected, you talked about one inspiration you also came across was around Edgar Shine’s work around culture change. You talked about the curious inquiry. Tell me a little bit more about that part as well.

Yeah, and you know, again, I think Edgar Shine work, you know, it’s well documented, well celebrated, but yeah, safety is still immature in its adoption of the thinking of Shine. And really for me, I think one of the big things for me was the notion of expertise and of curious inquiry is it’s nearly an individual thing. But you have to start with yourself in that space and see whether you can step in and being a curious inquirer and sort of combines with Shine’s work, but also with Hufnagel’s work as well, is looking at work as done, really engaging in the stories of work. And whilst I’m saying that I’m saying don’t engage in the safety of work, engage in work is done, I think that’s a really big difference. It’s a shift because often with safety professionals, they step in and I think when they’re going to engage the front line, they have to talk about safety. I would suggest they should never talk about safety to be controversial. And what they should do is be curious. And for the things that you see that are most challenging is step into that notion that Hufnagel has about trying to understand why that makes sense to the person that you’re interacting with.

You know, how. How. What are the conditions and everything that support around that, that lead to that point, because that will then enable you to then think differently about the notion of expertise and where you might source and partner expertise and where you might harness that perspective differently. So, for me, curiosity now is the number one tool that a safety professional should have. You’ve probably experienced this, but I’ve been involved in many, you know, significant incidents and investigations, and I can remember a number of occasions where an event has occurred and the leader investigator has just been appointed and they’ve come to me, they had no interaction other than the reporting of the event at this point and told me, I know what caused this. And so, before they’ve spoken to anyone.

Before talking to anyone. Well, yeah, obviously learning very well.

Yeah, yeah. But it’s that notion of, you know, I’m going to come in here and put things right and my experience has told me these are all the reasons why this. You’re immediately in a very difficult space. And we do a lot of that safety experts is we step in knowing what the problem is with these processes and what the solutions are to them. And I think nearly universally, we should not be the source of any of the solutions in that space. We should be an enabler, a facilitator of it, not the source of it. There are exceptions, but in general.

Yeah, but you’re also killing the knowledge that the sharing. If you start prejudging and you’re coming in with a pre. A preview of what occurred. 

Yes. So if I be as controversial as I can in this space and, you know, for a long time in safety we’ve talked about, what you walk past is, you know, what you accept or encourage in this mode, the interesting space is being a curious mode, you cannot do that, you cannot intervene or something. So, this is where I think this is really challenging and difficult. If you’re trying to move into the space of understanding work is done and being truly curious and you’re experiencing something that is clearly problematic. Right.

Sure.

You can recognize the nature and hazard of it. And we’ve worked with leaders, taking them into this space of even working with them to step back from their immediate desire to intervene and correct the problem. We really come from a point that is once you do that, you’re going to cut off the air supply. So, you will not see anything else that is going to happen that might be problematic. Because when you’re in the space of your truly curious and you’re engaging with work that’s done and people share, they’re often sharing it with you because of their frustrations or because of a whole range of other space things that are happening in their space that they can’t get correct, can’t do what they need to be doing.

Sure.

So, by seeing something and acting in that space, there might be something far more interesting or problematic that once you take that intervention, you’re not going to see those transactions happening forward. Now, I’m not suggesting that there’s no intervention or action to happen when you see these sorts of transactions, but it’s a much more subtle approach that you need to take. And rather than doing it in the moment, it needs to be done elsewhere.

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And there could be as well ways. I’ve seen leaders that don’t come from the craft, that didn’t get promoted from whatever expertise of the shop floor is because they don’t necessarily know what’s right or right wrong, what’s wrong. They come in from a position of curiosity. Tell me about why we’re doing it this way. What are some of the risks in front of you? So, right with that inquiry, you’re not jumping into conclusion and to attack, you’re jumping into tell me and understand. And then you may realize, okay, we never actually thought through the risks of this job or something else as opposed to judging.

Yeah, Correct. And it’s an interesting point you make because naivety can be an asset. Right. And we often even say that with new engineers coming in, their naivety can enable them to ask the questions that need to be asked. And that’s a difficult thing because where you’ve got leaders that have come out of working in those environments and worked their way through and have emerged into those leadership space, they had trouble stepping back from the knowledge of the time when they were working these spaces. And I think that’s part of. As a group, they need additional support to try and transition out of the knowledge space into the curious leadership space, can step back their experience. Now, that doesn’t mean that experience doesn’t have some currency. It’s in a different space to that transaction.

Yeah. One of the things I know that we discussed when we first connected was that in many cases, if there’s a process that’s more difficult, it increases the likelihood to introduce shortcuts. And I know I had somebody on the. On the podcast earlier that talked about how convenience kills. Ultimately, very similar concept that if it’s complicated, we will find a convenient path out. Tell me a little bit about this element of complexity that gets introduced and how do we unpack it? Because part of the system, we talked about the complexity, part of it is we created the complexity as well at times in the system.

This is an area we’re very interested in. We are doing a lot of work around this space and in the notions of if we go into that space of, you know, critical risks and critical hazards that sort of face and think about the control strategies. Now, I think fundamentally, we had quite a flawed approach to critical risk and critical controls because we’ve burdened it with subject matter expertise. And in essence, what happens is, if we’re working, you can pick any critical risk and control that you like, but in essence, particularly in the world of bow ties or whatever, what happens is you’ll get all these subject matter experts into a room, they will design a whole set of controls, often as industry. In recent studies, when we’ve looked at this, nearly 80% of them are administrative. Only in that.

Which is unfortunately the case.

Yeah. Yes. And the people in that room are not people who do the work. They’re not immersed in all the complexity. So, I’ll just park that aside. So, in the work that sort of come out of resilience engineering and some of Hufnagel’s ideas and some of the work that we’ve been doing, is we’re really interested in work that’s done in the space around critical hazards and firstly in the notion of capacity. So that notion is about what do we give people to do the job? You know, it might be the tools, equipment, the work methods, the training, the support, all those things. But then there’s the other domain of demand, is what is the nature of demand that they must work within? So, this is the KPIs, the delivery timeframes, all the unreasonable pressures that people must function. So, what’s interesting in the control space, and this is how do you design the controls and how do you test them as to what people do? So, the approach that we’ve been doing is taking the work out to where work is done and taking the people who do the work through those controls to feed us back to us is how do those controls align to the task that they’re doing or the job that they’re delivering isn’t making their work easier or harder.

It can be as simple as a very poorly designed piece of personal protective equipment. That’s interesting, but there’s lots of space in there. So, in that domain, we’ve taken feedback from that, and what we’ve seen emerge out of that is where the controls are poorly designed and don’t fit well with the work, and they make the work considerably harder. It’s a significant and predictive workaround.

Makes sense.

Different way to do it. So, this is the nature of when we’re trying to understand why people, you know, take a different approach. You know, do something. You, if you’re not understanding that demand piece in there is about what they must achieve within that, what are we giving them to do that and how well is it designed? They might have a much better idea about how to do this, but we don’t harness that. So, when we test controls and we test effectiveness, we’ve got this notion that whatever was done in the room is a good design and it’s effective. If we go to a work site and we go and do an order of people doing it, that has no connection to what happens out in the field. And it’s. So, part of this is, you know, you need to. We need to really think about the unintended consequences. If we design something, put something in place from a safety perspective, what are the effects of that? What does it do from an, you know, it might mean that the business has to have additional resources that they haven’t budgeted.

Sure.

They might have to engage different contractors. There’s a whole range of impacts in that space.

Right.

So, I think in that workaround space, the reason, you know, everyone talks about, you know, people doing workarounds, it’s because we don’t stand enough in the shoes of the people who do the work to understand all the different demands that they’re trying to balance.

It reminds me of completely adjacent space in the quality movement. Some of the changes that came out, I think it’s back in the 80s and 90s GE was had this cool equation which is the quality of the change you’re trying to implement times the acceptance of that change goes the effectiveness of the change. Right. So, you could have the best quality change 10 out of 10. But if the acceptance, because it doesn’t make Sense is a 1 out of 10, your effectiveness is 10. And essentially their message is you’re better to have maybe a lower quality, quote unquote solution that was designed and engineered by the craft employees that resonate with them, that made sense in their contacts and therefore had a higher buy in. In which case the effectiveness of the change, even with five times five is still better than a ten times one.

Yeah, we, I suppose from our perspective, we use a lot now the tools around human centered design and user experience models, which are nearly absent in safety, you know, and you sort of wonder why. But that goes into the space that you’re talking about is that it’s important to test these things with user experience models and is it credible? Is it usable? Does it make sense to the person who’s is it findable? For example, all these things are things that we don’t do in safety. We prescribe and write another 80-page procedure to do something which has no relevance to the nature of how the work is done right.

Now. It gets to a question, we touched on this briefly, but when you’re trying to get to this inquiry mode, having frontline engagement, one of the pushbacks I’ve heard many times is I might end up with different solutions in different locations because this group, this is what they think will work versus a centralized office. One person says, okay, this is a policy worldwide, but maybe it doesn’t work the same way in different locations, or they have different work methods, or the equipment is different. How do we reconcile this desire for consistency with when you’re getting more grassroots engagement, you’re going to have multiple, potentially multiple different solutions.

Yes. So first, if you go into resilience engineering, you know, and the philosophy is there, it really demands of us to embrace variability which is counter to A lot of the safety stuff that says we’re going to make one size fits all this is just. And what we know in that space is I suppose a couple of. But the approach that we’ve worked with for a long time is the notion of freedom within a framework. So, there are certain, you know, and in doing that it’s understanding the nature of the work that you’re doing. And, the levels of freedom can change depending on the nature of hazard or risk that you’re working with. But you’re ultimately recognizing that you want people to make decisions about the choices. So, we’ve done some work in this space with a very large mining company where we looked at critical controls and the specialized controls and tested them in one mine site, which might be in Australia, and we tested the same controls in another site in South America. And what we found in the Australian context that control works very well and in the South American it worked very poorly.

And that’s because when we’re talking about controls, the piece that we are poor at is understanding human dependency about what are your human and organizational dependencies that work depends on and control. So, it was very clear in this example where the South American had very different structure around the support for how this control function and the environment they were working with from the Australian environment. The one size didn’t fit, fit all. But another control worked much better in that environment.

Sure.

And so that’s within that thinking. I think this is important that it’s very hard to get. There are certain things you can get to, certain, you know, universal things. If we talk about things like, you know, fall from hydroelectrical, there are some things that you can get that are at a high level, but stepping below that into the operational design. What we need is a much better list of here’s a range of options that we’ve got. This works well in this context, and you choose right. So, this is the informed decision making. So the benefits that we can have is by letting work is done and having that expertise and having some subject matter expertise which harnesses the knowledge, thinking about how do we bring that to the front line and letting them make the choice and saying in this circumstance this suits us well, we’re going to adapt and use this approach to manage the hazard and risks that we’re working with and empower them to do so. And if that works, it doesn’t work. Use that as an intelligence collecting where you feedback and evolve your learnings. So, I think there’s nothing wrong with having systems and standardization, but Rick Just really understanding where they have currency and application and not doing it.

And I’ve seen this so many times, seen it in the aviation industry a lot, where they come in and make one rule right across the organization and in a different aircraft environment, it’s had significantly increased the level of hazard because they haven’t interpreted something else that’s happening in space that they’re not aware of in the generalized rule.

I like how you position this in terms of freedom within a framework, because it’s not anarchy, it’s the structure to it. But you can have localized decision making in many of these pieces. Again, it reminds me, I’m going back to the Quality days and some of the research I was doing a while back around Toyota as an example. One thing that people didn’t get is Toyota could have. They were building the same vehicle anywhere in the world, but it could have one method in one plant that was slightly different. And people would say, okay, this is the right method. But then two weeks later that could change because they found a better way to deliver the same thing. So, there’s this element of constantly learning from my operations, constantly driving, continuous improvement. And so, the solution from last week may not be the solution for now, if there’s controls to it, because it’s not. You want. You don’t want to get different Corollas in different parts of the world, different quality.

I really. And equally I’ve, you know, studied a lot the Toyota quality method, you know, and there’s a lot to learn, safety in that space. And often we sort of these things pass and, you know, we forget to look back into these methods and do that. So, I think. And that method, you know, the Toyota method, and ultimately that whole approach to quality management was founded in some good principles, is trying to make decisions where work is done all the time.

Exactly.

Collective intelligence. That was its purpose. And encouraging. That’s the key in safety. We’ve done the opposite. You know, I’ve been involved in situations where there was a problem with a hazard control and a procedure that was identified and taken five years to work through to get the change made in that process. Because sometimes I think it becomes harder to change the notion of how work is done within a safety context than to alter verses in the Bible. It’s probably easier to do that. Thanks.

Yes. Love it. Kelvin, tell me a little bit about the Art of Work. One, I love the name of your organization. Tell me a little bit about what you do within the Art of Work.

Yeah, so we’re really Interested in work as such. So, I think when we came at this from, we started, you know, very much a lot of our work comes from it through a safety lens of one form or another. And the first thing that we do with organizations is really immerse in two things, is we’re really interested in the work that’s done and how it’s done. And we talk a lot about how we enable people in that process.

Sure.

We do a lot, as I sort of indicated before, of talking less about safety when we get brought in and thinking about the nature of work. And it’s interesting because we do a lot of work in learning teams, that sort of work. We do a lot in terms of redesigning systems to be much more human centered in that space. We think a lot about how we get the right information to the right person. So, we talk about systems within this space, particularly safety management systems, of how that becomes something that comes to you rather than you to the system in that space. So. So you shouldn’t even need to know where something relates to. If you go to a particular area which has a particular set of hazards, you shouldn’t even need to know where to go and find information about that system. It should just come to you when you’re there, through geofencing or whatever, all those sorts of things. So, we’re really interested in work and by immersing in work, a lot of safety things emerge. And it’s quite interesting. You start to see things about. It might be the teams and the capabilities; it might be the way a shift and people are organized and communicated.

It might be a way that we design measurement in that space. And we’re quite often finding that the safety measures have been very unhealthy. An operational measure is much more useful in this space. One organization we’re working with our, they had some issues around the amount of back injury that they’re getting, for example, and so they had very conventional measures around lost time and all those things. And that wasn’t helping them as such. Of course, what they did have was a measure. They’re a large retail warehousing business and they had a measure that the operations use around the overstocking of the warehouses and that was a key measure for them. And so, what was found is where the warehouses were overstocked, it correlated with the that they had and that’s because everything was stored over and above on the racks and, you know, there’s a whole range of issues in it. So again, this is an example of thinking about work rather than safety and then just work with the stores to identify, let’s not have another safety measure, let’s tap into something that actually gives us, they’re already interested in and it gives us intelligence to help us in how do we work in and assist that work to be done in a more productive and safe manner.

So, in the art of work, I think we’re really interested in bringing this idea of improving work as being how we focus on this and safety is an emergent property and that’s very much coming from a people centered approach. I think about all the different industries we work in; we’ve got expertise in none of them, but the expertise is already there within the organizations that we work with. And what we try and do is bring that expertise to be harnessed and utilized to solve the problem.

It’s a concept of curious inquiry you just talked about.

Yeah, yeah. So that’s the art of work is we’re very interested in work, we’re very interested in how we empower and engage people and we’re very. And in that, you know, the work that we do around the organization, shifting the leadership’s view in that space to be more open and hopefully we get them to be a little bit more adventurous and curious as a result.

Sure. Excellent. Well Kelvin, thank you so much for joining me today. If somebody wants to get in touch with you or the Art of Work, what’s the best way to do that? What’s the website?

The website is Art of work is one-word solutions and if you Google Art of work.

Excellent. Well, thank you so much for joining me, Kelvin.

Thank you.

Cheers.

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.