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

Hi and welcome to The Safety Guru. Today, I’m very excited to have with me once again Cristian Sylvestre, who’s got a passion for safety based on science. Christian, welcome back to the show. I’m really excited to have you back with me today.

Thanks, Eric. Appreciate it.

So, let’s begin with your story, because you have a pretty diverse background anchored in science, starting in engineering. Tell me a little about how you got to where you are today in the safety space.

So, I started off as a process safety engineer and was introduced to HOP, process safety, bowtie diagrams, HAZOPs, and all that kind of stuff. I worked for a refinery that had the worst personal safety, or occupational safety, record in the organization. They asked me to take a look at things and figure out what we were missing and what we could do differently. I looked at the safety management system, and it was pretty robust. We were doing the things that everybody else was doing. I ended up looking at leadership. We were talking about safety, safety was high on the agenda, and all those kinds of things were in place. The only thing I could identify at the time was this idea of people not paying attention. So, I started getting interested in the causes of inattention and what we could do to help people be more attentive, especially when they were doing repetitive, familiar tasks, because that’s when most incidents happened.

Sure. And we’re going to dive into some of the neuroscience behind this shortly. But first, I thought it was interesting that you ran a survey earlier this year on the actions and decisions leaders took in safety in 2025, and what came out of it. Can you walk me through some of the findings and key takeaways?

So, we talked to people and asked them, what did you do during 2025, and did you get a good result from it? If you didn’t get a good result, why not? What we ended up finding was a number of what I refer to as simple, limiting half-truths. There was some truth in them, but they weren’t the full story. The most prominent ones were things like, “Safety can be consciously controlled.” Because I know a bit about neuroscience, I know the human brain is very good at determining what to use to deal with a situation. What neuroscience says is that only about 5% of the time it deems conscious control necessary. Most of the time, it uses habits, because most of what we do, we’ve done many times before. So that was the first one: safety can be consciously controlled. The next one was that a well-run, robust safety management system should prevent all incidents. My experience is that nothing is 100%.

Not in safety.

Exactly. So, the question that popped into my mind was this: when the system fails or the supervisor has a bad day, what do we have in place to keep people safe? A third idea was that only the environment drives behavior. People were focusing on what they could do around the person, and that’s a good thing to do. But if the system fails or the supervisor has a bad day, what have you got? So, I came up with a model based on the idea that people talk about the environment driving behavior, and I think that’s true, but also misleading, because there are two environments. There is the environment outside the person, and there is the environment inside the person’s head.

Sure.

So, anything we can do outside the person is a good thing. But we have to accept that it won’t be perfect. It’s never going to be 100%. When we ask people whether their management system is 100% effective 100% of the time, everybody says no.

It’s impossible.

Exactly. So, what I ended up getting interested in was what was going on inside people’s heads, because that’s the second environment we can influence to create a second line of defense when the system fails or the supervisor is having a bad day. Those were the three main things that came out of the survey. The work we do is to help organizations develop and implement that second line of defense by giving people the ability to deal with most incidents that arise because things aren’t perfect.

Right, sure. And one of the things I love is your theme around a second line of defense. Unfortunately, sometimes people commit to one strategy, one program, or one approach. But different things can work in different circumstances and scenarios. What works in one place may not necessarily work somewhere else. Tell me more about your perspective on that.

So, what we’ve discovered, or become aware of, is that if you want to reduce the number of incidents, there are four things you can do. You can eliminate the hazard.

Sure.

So, there’s no contact between the hazard and the person, right?

Yep.

Now, that’s really how safety started 50 years ago. It didn’t take us long to figure out that we can’t get rid of all hazards. So, then we set up systems to create effective controls. About 15 years into that journey, we started looking at the person side of the equation, and we made an assumption: because safety is important, people should be able to keep it front of mind. I wish that were true, but that’s just not how the brain works. So, for 50 years we’ve focused on eliminating the hazard, putting effective controls in place, and keeping safety front of mind. Eventually, after 30 years of behavior-based safety and similar initiatives, we figured out that conscious control might not be as effective as we thought, or that the return on investment wasn’t worth the effort required. So that approach has faded a little. To me, we got to a fork in the road, and we could do one of two things.

We could either retreat into what we were already doing and focus only on things around the person, such as eliminating hazards or putting effective controls in place. Or we could get curious and ask what else might be possible. Because I’m interested in science, we started looking at neuroscience, and what we found is that most behavior is driven by the subconscious. So now we’ve got four things we can do if we want to reduce incidents: eliminate the hazard, improve the effectiveness of controls, strengthen conscious control, or build subconscious skills and habits. What I noticed was that subconscious skills and habits were largely ignored. To me, if we’re serious about safety, we need to use everything at our disposal. So, I became interested in how we help workers manage subconscious brain modes better. Those four things all have an impact on incidents. Above that, leadership and culture can move the result one way or the other.

And what we found is that, depending on the industry you’re in, focusing more on one area than another may actually lead to a better result.

Because different industries have different parameters. In oil and gas, for example, the environment may be very different from that of someone working alone, independently, in the middle of nowhere. You need different skill sets for a highly unpredictable environment than for a fairly predictable plant environment.

Yeah, correct. If you’ve got a manufacturing facility making widgets in exactly the same way every day, then focusing mostly on things around the worker may not be a bad strategy. But if you’ve got concreters working at someone else’s site, where the rules change and the way the work gets done changes, then you really need to give the person the ability to manage their subconscious brain modes, because that will determine most of their behavior.

Sure. Let’s dive a little bit more into the neuroscience and some of the areas that you’ve looked into. Is competence enough?

Look, I think competence is a good start, but the problem is that competence alone isn’t enough. This is fairly clear in neuroscience: knowledge is not enough to drive behavior. I’ll give you a non-safety example. I have friends with high cholesterol. The standard ways to address it are pretty clear: change your diet, exercise more, or take a pill. Most of them choose the pill. I talk to my kids a lot about the idea that it’s not a question of hard or easy, but which hard: hard now and easy later, or easy now and hard later. There is some evidence that statins may increase the risk of dementia, because cholesterol is part of how the brain functions. It needs a certain amount. So, I have conversations with my cardiologist about protecting my heart without compromising my brain. For us, competence is an important starting point because it tells you a person knows what to do. But knowledge isn’t enough. Subconscious brain modes like complacency, impatience, rushing, frustration, and fatigue come into play, and they can shift behavior in ways that may not be desirable. When we talk to people about complacency, what we notice is that most of what people do is familiar, so they do it on autopilot.

Exactly. Give me a statin and I’ll be fine. And what I talk to my kids about a lot of the times is that it’s not a question about hard or easy. It’s a question about which hard. So hard now, easy later. Easy now, hard later. So, there is some evidence that taking statins sort of increases your risk of dementia because cholesterol is part of how the brain functions. It needs a certain amount of cholesterol. So, I have conversations with my cardiologist about, okay, you’re protecting my heart, but maybe you’re wrecking my brain if I go down the station’s way. For us, competence is an important starting point. So, what competence tells you is that they know what to do. But the problem is that knowledge isn’t enough. So, the subconscious brain modes like, you know, complacency, impatience, things like rushing, frustration, and fatigue come into play, and then they move behavior from one end to something else that may not be all that desirable. Sure. So, when, when we talk to people about complacency, what we, what we, what we notice is that that— so the thing is that when most of what people do is familiar, so therefore they’re going to do it on autopilot.

And when they do it on autopilot, they use habits. A habit exists on a spectrum we refer to as an attention spectrum. You can have attentive habits, which help you detect what could hurt you and give you more time to get out of the way. And you can have inattentive habits, which don’t help you detect what’s coming your way, so it becomes a matter of luck whether you get hit or not. Take texting while driving as an example. That’s an inattentive habit, and people tend to see that as complacent behavior. If someone drives with their eyes on the road and looks for things that could hit them at intersections, we tend to view that as situational awareness. The issue I have is that, for the last 50 years, safety has tried to turn autopilot off. But whenever you try to turn autopilot off, you’re picking a fight with biology, and that’s a fight you’re never going to win.

So, we will go on autopilot when things are familiar and feel safe. That’s part of human nature. But just because we can’t do anything about autopilot doesn’t mean we can’t help people be safer. You can always choose a habit, but you can’t choose the habit in the moment. What you repeat, you get to keep. In our work, we help people migrate from inattentive habits to attentive habits. If you think about competence, in Australia there are about 1,200 road fatalities a year. In the United States, I think it’s around 30,000 to 35,000. It’s not as if people suddenly became incompetent. Something else came into play. They did something that increased the risk, and maybe they got unlucky. That’s why the fatality happened. So, we can’t just say, “They’re competent, let them go.” People also need to understand what drives behavior and how to minimize the risk associated with behavior depending on what’s going on.

So how do you build those habits, the right habits?

So first and foremost, there are a couple of obstacles you need to get through. As human beings, we tend to think everything is conscious because it feels that way. But neuroscience is clear that just because it feels that way doesn’t mean that’s how it works. The second obstacle is that people tend to notice inattention only when there’s an incident. Why? Because the conscious mind naturally comes into play when things are new or different. That’s the gist of it. The problem is that the conscious mind is really slow, and it uses a lot more energy than habits. So, the brain doesn’t want to use it unless it’s absolutely necessary, and it seems to deem it necessary only about 5% of the time. It’s much easier and more efficient to use habits. The problem is that habits happen with little or no conscious thought, and that can lead to inattention. What we’ve found is that unless you overcome those two obstacles, it’s very difficult to get anyone committed to doing anything different. So let me ask you a question.

Sure. When we’re inattentive, what’s the most common safety consequence?

I would say, you have, when you’re not attentive to what you’re doing, you could, your mind goes somewhere else and you’re not focused on the task.

Yep. And from a safety consequence perspective, what happens most of the time? Nothing. Okay, so you’re unusual, right? Because once in a while, most people answer that some kind of incident happens. But everybody thinks that only because the conscious mind is attracted to things that are new or different. An incident is new or different from what you normally do, so your conscious mind comes into play, and you realize, “Ah, I was inattentive.” So, think about it this way.

But most of the times you don’t even realize that you were inattentive. Exactly.

Now, if most of the time you were inattentive and had an incident, what would you teach yourself to do? You would teach yourself to be more attentive, whatever that took. You would undo the habit. Exactly. But most of the time when you’re inattentive, nothing happens. So you repeat the inattention over and over, and it gets embedded in your habits. Worse than that, you don’t even know it’s happening. That makes it a huge blind spot for the person, the supervisor, and the manager. And what we know about human beings is that we do nothing about our blind spots because we don’t even know they exist.

Right. And sometimes that’s referred to as drift. Drift can also happen at the supervisor level. A supervisor can become habituated and think, “Christian always does a great job,” and start missing the shortcuts you’ve taken.

Yeah, and drift is the right term because it’s not a 0-to-100 thing. It slowly builds. When I talk to people who still text while driving, I ask them how they got there. How did they get to a point where they were texting while driving for five or six seconds? When they think about it, they usually say that maybe at first they did it for a second or two and there were no bad consequences. Then the repetition widened the habit. Now it’s two to three seconds, because one to two seconds feels safe. That’s how complacency comes into play. It really is a form of drift.

So, we talked on competence, we touched on complacency or drift. Some people are comfortable taking on risk, and in fact, we have different risk tolerances. Why are people comfortable taking risk?

So, I think the safety industry refers to this as risk, but if you look at the neuroscience, what you find is that risk is a very conscious concept, and the conscious mind determines only about 5% of what you do. So it isn’t really about risk, even though that’s the terminology we use. I did some research and went back to ask when we first started using the word “risk.” It goes back to the 15th century, when the Medici family was lending money and wanted to determine what interest rates to charge based on the likelihood of being repaid. So, the word has been in human vocabulary for about 500 years. It’s not part of our evolution. When you start looking at what’s going on in people’s heads, what you find is that, rather than risk, it’s more about a sense of danger. That sense of danger depends on what’s happened in the past. If you text while driving for one or two seconds and nothing bad happens, your sense of danger drops. You know consciously that it’s illegal and that it increases the likelihood of an incident, but because your experience tells you nothing bad has happened, your sense of danger stays low, and then you take it a step further.

We all have that functionality, but some people seem to have a higher tolerance than others. That’s probably personal. It may be somewhat genetic, or it may relate to what they were allowed to do as kids. I don’t really know. But I do know that some people’s tolerance for risk is higher than others. The real question is this: irrespective of where they are on that spectrum, can we teach them how to behave more safely? That’s really what we’re about.

And another topic where I’m sure you’ve had the same experience: usually, in a room, I’ll ask how many people believe they’re capable of multitasking. I usually get at least 40% to 50% who, even knowing it’s a setup, still raise their hand and say, “No, I’m really good at multitasking.” Tell me a little bit about the brain’s ability to handle multitasking.

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So again, what something feels like and what it actually is are two very different things. A lot of the time, when we work with leaders, I ask them: if you had to choose between the way it feels and the way it actually works, which would you trust? Hopefully that prompts them to choose reality over feeling. The issue with multitasking is that it feels like you’re doing two things at once, but what you’re actually doing is task switching. Every time you switch tasks, your brain has to stop one neural circuit and start another, and that doesn’t happen instantaneously. We do a small exercise with people in groups of three. We ask the person who thinks they multitask best to do the exercise while the others time them.

First, they say the alphabet, A, B, C, D, and count from 1 to 26. We time that. Then we ask them to alternate between the two, so they go A1, B2, C3, D4, and so on. We time that too. What you find is that the second part of the exercise is much more challenging than the first. It takes longer and people make a lot more mistakes. When you ask why, the answer is that although it felt like they could multitask, they’ve just proven it’s much harder than they thought. Then we connect that to the research. Some studies looked at people who were driving and found that when they did more than one thing besides driving, their reaction time increased.

Okay, makes sense.

So, what they found was this: they measured the reaction time of people who were just driving and compared it with people who were driving while also having a phone conversation. After putting the phone down, it took about 30 seconds for reaction time to return to the same level as when they were simply driving. Normal reaction time was about 0.4 seconds. When people were also on the phone, it went up to 0.8 or 0.9 seconds. It basically doubled. They also looked at cognitive load. If we arbitrarily assign a cognitive load of 1 to just driving, then driving while listening to the radio adds about 20% more load. Driving while using a phone raises it from 1 to about 2.3 for hands-free and 2.4 for handheld, so there’s not much difference between the two. One is legal and one isn’t.

The worst one they found was text-to-voice. Text-to-voice came in at 3.1, which is more than three times the cognitive load of just driving. Yeah, because when you’re trying to verbalize something that needs to be put into writing, your brain has to work much harder. And the more cognitive load you put on your brain, the higher your reaction time. If you’re driving at 100 kilometers an hour, every second matters. If your reaction time doubles, you’re much less likely to stop in time. I also found this interesting: Ryan McMahon presented at the NSC conference in 2023, and he was with an insurance company. Looking at data from users of certain insurance apps on mobile phones, he found that over the last 10 years, speed at impact had increased by 10 miles per hour.

Not because we’re driving faster, but because our reaction time is slower. So, when people have an incident, they’re hitting whatever they hit at 10 miles per hour faster, and that has led to a 45% increase in severe injuries. We’re not speeding more. It’s a reaction-time issue. We tend to think that inattention while driving is mostly about what you do with your hands and eyes, and that certainly matters. But a lot of what we miss is what we’re doing to our brain. One of the things we try to teach people is this: if you want to look at your phone, whether you’re walking, running, or driving, be still when you do it. I don’t look at my phone when I’m moving for exactly that reason. Even if I engage in a simple conversation, my reaction time will drop, and I don’t know when I might need that reaction time to protect myself.

Because I don’t know about you, Eric, but there seems to be some people that pay no attention to anything at all.

Yeah, a lot, especially these days with phones becoming more and more common.

Yeah, exactly. I have no control over what other people do. The only thing I have control over is what I do. So, when we start looking at behavior outside the workplace, we realize there’s a certain functionality we have quite a bit of control over, provided we know what to do and we’ve practiced it a lot. The issue with workplace safety, and one of the things I don’t like about the profession, is that it tends to look only at the work environment. In a work environment, you have much more control over what happens around the person. But think about it this way: have you ever heard the saying, “The more you do for them, the less they do for themselves”? If you’re only doing things around the worker, are they going to become more attentive or more inattentive?

More inattentive. Exactly, they’re going to get more inattentive.

So, when there’s an incident, what are they going to do? They’re going to blame the supervisor or the system, right? Then people do even more around the worker, the worker becomes even more inattentive, and we go down this never-ending hole. What that does is feed a victim mentality. And when people adopt a victim mentality, they don’t own their behavior. It’s all about what other people do around them, and that’s not healthy. That’s one of the things I dislike about focusing only on things around the worker. My philosophy is this: do what you can around the worker but also teach the worker how inattention develops and what they can do to become more attentive, because they have more control over what happens to them than they think.

Correct. There’s a lot more control over your actions. But again, it’s a choice.

Yeah. You can’t make me upset if I don’t let myself be upset. I have no control over what happens around me or what the world throws at me, but I do have control over how I react. And that’s about rewiring my thinking so I can cope with those moments better.

So, I loved your example about multitasking. The irony is that people often see talk-to-text as a safer behavior, whereas you’re describing it as very unsafe. And when you were talking about things you can control in the work environment, one issue that can be partly controlled there, but is often seen as intruding into other spaces, is fatigue. Fatigue is a combination of how I rest at night, my sleep patterns, and also schedules and demands in the work environment. Tell me a little bit about fatigue and how neuroscience plays into it.

All cells in our body burn oxygen to produce energy, but they also create waste products. In the body, the lymphatic system removes that waste. The brain is too compact for the lymphatic system to reach it in the same way, so waste can build up there over the course of the day. As that waste accumulates, it interferes with the neural networks and stops them from working as efficiently as possible. As you get more tired, your reflexes slow, paying attention becomes harder, and you start making poorer in-the-moment decisions. The problem is that if you wait until you’re obviously tired, your brain is already mush, and you’re unlikely to make a good decision in that moment. So, what we teach people to do is recognize the early warning signs of fatigue. Given that about 5,000 people die at work each year in the U.S., and around 30% of those deaths are fatigue-related, while roughly 35,000 dies on the road, we tend to focus on helping people deal with fatigue on the road.

Early warning signs of fatigue on the road might include hitting the rumble strips, failing to dim your high beams in time, oversteering, overbaking, understeering, or underbracing. All these small mistakes that you don’t normally make can indicate that fatigue is setting in. So, we teach people to identify their own specific early warning signs and to stop and do something about them as soon as they notice them. What you do depends on what’s in front of you. If you’ve still got three hours to drive, stopping for a coffee may only help for 30 minutes, so you may need to consider something else. Early warning signs are highly person-specific, and so are the ways people respond to fatigue. I can have a cup of coffee and stay awake for three hours. Someone else can have a cup of coffee and fall asleep. So, you have to understand yourself and what works best for you.

The problem with fatigue is that when your brain is mush, it doesn’t make good decisions. Sometimes people get in a car and drive when they’re fatigued even though they know that’s not a good idea. That’s why you have to teach people to detect it early.

And that ties well into the next topic I want to cover, which is production pressure. Sometimes, as you just described, people get in the car because they want to get somewhere, achieve something, or get home. That can connect directly to production pressure. I see production pressure as something that can be self-imposed, where I put pressure on myself because I want to succeed. It can also come from norms around me—the vibe, as you might say in Australia—that tell me I need to produce and push, push, push. It can come from reward systems that recognize and reinforce it. Or it can be supervisor-driven or leader-driven, where the message is more direct: we need to get a certain number of containers out, or whatever the unit is. How do you address this concept of production pressure from a neuroscience standpoint?

For me, production pressure isn’t the issue. The real issue is the speed of thinking. Production pressure leads to fast thinking. So, we teach people to recognize when they’re becoming impatient, rushing, frustrated, or driven to achieve something and something gets in the way. You can teach people to recognize that and to slow themselves down or calm themselves down, depending on what’s happening. What neuroscience says is that if there is enough adrenaline and cortisol in your system, your habits, your knowledge, and your conscious decision-making can go out the window. You end up doing things that, in retrospect, you may not have wanted to do. The interesting thing about impatience, rushing, and frustration is what happens in your head. Once you recognize that you’re being challenged or threatened, your amygdala comes into play and blood flow to the prefrontal cortex—the part behind the forehead that helps regulate behavior—diminishes.

It drops to the point where there is enough blood flow to keep the brain cells alive, but not enough for them to operate effectively. So, essentially, it sidelines your ability to regulate your own behavior. In most of the incidents we’ve investigated that involved rushing, frustration, anger, or anything like that, people regret what they did. They say, “That is not me.” And I get it, because in that moment their ability to regulate themselves was compromised. The way to deal with that is to accept that if you’ve got a workplace that pushes people into rushing, frustration, or anger, then doing something from the outside is good. But as we said before, sometimes a supervisor will have a bad day. So, you also need that second line of defense, where the person can recognize when they’re entering an impatient state and know what they need to do to avoid an incident. It’s very clear: if you’re rushing, frustrated, or angry, you’re more likely to have an incident.

Right. So, people need permission to push back. Sometimes the concern is that people will use that as an excuse to do things more slowly. But we’re not talking about moving at a snail’s pace to be safe. We’re talking about doing things at a normal pace. If you speed up a little from your normal pace, it may not make much difference. What we’re trying to prevent is working at twice your normal speed, because then you’re much less likely to stay focused on what you’re doing, and that’s when incidents happen.

Or you’re distracted and fixated on something else—like needing to get this done. Or, as we talked about before, you’re driving while fatigued and fixated on getting home instead of thinking about the circumstances.

Correct. When we talk about the work we do, we stay away from the word distraction and focus on inattention, because distraction is something happening around you, and you have no control over that. Inattention is happening within you, and you do have some control over what you do about it. To be clear, this isn’t about getting people to be 100% attentive 100% of the time. That’s not realistic. But most of the time, to prevent an incident, you only need people to be a little more attentive. A little more attention means you’ll see it earlier. If you see it earlier, you have more time to get out of the way. And often, that’s the difference between a glancing blow and a direct hit.

Fascinating conversation. We’ve covered a lot of ground. What I really take away from our discussion is this idea of a second line of defense and the recognition that the person matters. If I teach you how to use your body and your brain more effectively, you can make better decisions and resist rushing when you feel yourself falling into that trap. Those are very useful skills. That doesn’t distract from the fact that systems and other factors also need to be addressed, but we can’t forget about the person doing the work.

Yep. That’s what we believe. Rather than writing the worker out of the safety equation, we need to give people the skills to act as a second line of defense in their own safety. At work, you’ve got systems, supervisors, and a fair bit of control over the environment. Outside of work, where most fatalities happen, there is no system and no supervisor standing over you. So, this helps people avoid incidents anywhere.

Right. Absolutely. Well, Christian, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast. If someone wants to get in touch with you to learn more about what you teach from a neuroscience standpoint and how to implement it in an organization, how can they do that?

All right. The best thing to do is go to our website, habitsafe.com.au. There’s a contact page there. You can submit an inquiry, and we’ll get in touch with you.

Well, thank you so much.

Thank you for having me, Eric. It’s been a joy.

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.