Proactive Risk Management: The Board’s Role in Safety Leadership with Dr Mark Taylor

Sep 3, 2026

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ABOUT THE EPISODE

In this compelling episode, Dr Mark Taylor, a leading industrial psychologist and founder of Behavico Ltd, joins us to explore the board’s role in safety leadership and how proactive risk management can help transform safety culture into a strategic organizational advantage. Dr Taylor explains the complex relationship between safety culture, human behavior, and the systemic conditions that shape safety outcomes. He discusses the factors that contribute to incidents and how organizations can move beyond reactive approaches to recognize and act on early warning signs before conditions escalate into serious events. He also highlights the dangers of over-relying on certain lagging indicators and shares valuable insights on governance, leadership, and effective risk management to help build safer organizations and strengthen safety performance. This episode is packed with solid research, real-world examples, and practical strategies, offering a thought-provoking perspective on how boards and executives can strengthen safety culture and build a more proactive and resilient organization. Don’t miss it!

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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 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 so excited to have with me Dr Mark Taylor. He’s a leading practitioner in safety culture and behavior. Started as a diver, which we’ll get into soon, but an industrial psychologist who’s working consultancy at the corporate level. So very practical experience and most recently at board level. So, Dr Mark Taylor, very excited to have you with me today.

Thank you very much, Eric, for having me. Pretty much looking forward to this today.

Excellent. So, so let’s start with your story and your passion for safety, going from diver to all these really exciting roles in safety.

Yeah, I think it’s, it’s been an interesting career. It’s not one that I originally planned. Yes, you’re right. I started life as a diver and unfortunately, I had an incident that meant I could no longer work as a diver, so I took an interest in psychology. Um, and before I know it, I’m working on towards my industrial psychology degree and came across this area around safety and was very interested to find that, you know, over 90% of incidents involve people’s behaviors. So, it’s kind of like a career-defining question, really. If that’s the case, why do people have accidents? I’ve never come across anyone who was intentionally put themselves in a position where they want to any harm, of course. And so, I think from my perspective, comes now from, you know, from the front line through to Boardroom, and there’s a consistent lesson there that serious events are rarely the result of one bad decision. Um, they arise when the system makes risk difficult to see, difficult to challenge, or difficult to manage. Sure. I think my earlier operational experience, especially when you’re hands on the tools, shows how quickly it can feel that conditions can change especially when you’re in high-hazard work.

And I’ve seen that pattern replicated across many industries that I’ve been involved in, whether it’s utilities, construction, uh, or major accident hazard environments where I’ve spent most of my professional career. And when you look at the investigations, the immediate cause is rarely the whole story, right? It’s usually people making decisions that appear reasonable in circumstances that are available to them, right? You know, you know, you see time and time again where there is a way that the job is being planned, but the situation that those people are in is not the way the plan was working, right? So, they have to innovate different ways of working, and that’s where we can start to see the beginnings of some quite serious incidents. So quite often the question that most people come to is, well, they didn’t comply with something, they didn’t comply with the rule. The question really isn’t, why didn’t they comply? It is really what made the safe action difficult to do at the time. Why was it impractical, or why was it not supported?

Sure.

So quite often nothing seems wrong at the time It doesn’t mean that there were any warning signs because again, quite often what we’ll find, there are warning signs and it often means that we’ve got into a situation or people are in a situation where that warning sign has become normal.

Sure.

The risk is that they’ve become that used to it that they think it’s just the way things are, and they learn to accept it and just the way they work. Or it’s that you know, it’s fragmented or difficult to interpret when under pressure. If you imagine you’re under extreme time pressure, things that seem to make the job more difficult, but if you use the shortcut, would actually cut through those things.

Sure.

It’s the way that people do things, right? You know, if you’re under time pressure and you need a permit to work, to do a job, and you’re granted that permit, and then you need a second permit because the first permit covered you to do general work, not specific work, say electrical work, but time’s really against you. Do you go for the second permit, or do you think, well, I’ll be okay, I know what I’m doing, and just right. And also, you’ve moved away out of those the safety net of those controls and you’re operating.

Sure.

like a free rock climber or something. And that tends to be what you, you find quite often is many of these unsafe practices are not exceptional, they’re not unknown, and quite often they’ve become known unaccepted practices, right? They’re just not formalized.

And so, one of the areas that I wanted to dive into is the role of the board in this, because I think you introduced it very well. When, when people start blaming the individual for the mistake, then it’s about less a role for the board because it’s more about management driving direct responsibility, accountability. When you start getting into systems and some of the elements you identified, to me that shifts a lot of the thinking around how the board should jump in and what should they be looking at and where can they positively influence safety.

I mean, I think that you’ve hit the nail on the head there. Quite often when there’s an incident, it’s, you know, we look at look to the person. You know, you can imagine from a board perspective, we have systems, we provide them with the equipment, we provide people with the training, so it must be their fault if something’s gone wrong. And actually, we need to change that thinking, and it’s a person-last approach. We need to think about the situation, right, um, that people that, you know, we’ve created. And I think boards influence safety whether they intend to or not. That’s the point, of course, um, through their priorities, their questions, their incentives, resources, and the type of information they choose to believe. And it’s quite natural to look for information that confirms what we want to see rather than objectively, sorry, be evaluated to let them know about risk. So, I think when we look at a board and its role, um, it helps when a board treats serious risk management, uh, as a strategic issue, not as a compliance agenda item. You know, they quite often look, are you complying with these rules?

Are we legally compliant?

Sure.

But really, it’s more about the decision-making that the company makes, the conditions they’re creating, and how those affect frontline performance. So, they need to understand that. And, you know, it’s, it’s one of those things, those little things can have big impacts, not only in safety but just to operational excellence in general. So, you know, we don’t even have to think specifically about safety, although the moral imperative drives to that question. It needs to understand its critical risks and the controls that protect can prevent catastrophic outcomes. It needs to test whether those controls work in real operating conditions. You know, one of the biggest things we’ll see is, we have a control for that, but have you actually seen it operating in reality? Because quite often things will work well on paper but not in practice, right? I think a board also, uh, it helps when they seek information from operations through workforce representatives, investigations, audits, and near misses to try and understand really, are they vulnerable?

Right.

It makes it safe for leaders also to surface uncertainty and bad news. You know, if you look at many organizations where there’s been major disasters— and I recently looked at every major organizational disaster since 1980 to 2025. And one of the things that comes up there is when decision makers are making decisions, they need good quality information.

Sure.

But if you have an environment where people feel unsafe to raise their concerns, yep, then that’s going to influence the quality of information that people are making decisions with. And quite often they have a blind spot because they may be driving the right, trying to drive the right behaviors, trying to drive the right values. But, you know, the person at the front end could be thinking, well, yeah, I hear what you’re saying, but right now I need to get this done. This is for the good of the company. We need to achieve this target with financial pressures. And that’s so that’s, that’s, that’s the thing that they’re basing their decisions on at a point in time. And they don’t want to raise the flag, not because often they’ll feel there’ll be any retribution or retaliation from the company.

Sure.

But quite often they don’t want to be the one who’s the bad player, the poor team member, you know. And it’s simply that. And there’s nothing more malicious than that, I would say. Um, so I think you know, a good board needs to think about those things. It needs to look at workload, it needs to look at the competence of people, especially if they’re changing an organization. You know, you can often lose key skills and experience that is not formal experience in the sense of going through training, but just that know-how of how a particular operation works in their situation. You know, my uncle was an operator at a chemical factory, and he used to keep a little blue book with all these little notes on the settings and things. That was never formalized and they all had them.

Sure.

Well, when your organization’s changing, you can lose that native competence from your business. And those can be the little things that make things safe or unsafe or work or not work. So, you know, competence, maintenance, staffing, contractor interfaces are a key one because we’re introducing people to our home and look at how those competing priorities could affect some of the controls that the board relies upon. So, I think it’s really helpful when a board is curious about safety. Sure. And curious not from a point of injury rates or, um, staff but curious to understand what is going on. What, you know, from it, they need some ecological validity. They need to see the coalface in reality to understand that, and they need to hear from people working to understand the real-world experience of somebody at the front line rather than what they seem to have set out.

Sure.

And I think that leads me on to when boards create risk, they treat low injury rates, for example, as proof that serious risk is controlled, and it’s not.

Right, it has no correlation.

Yes, no correlation. And we’ve seen that time and time again. I mean, recently I was looking at a corporate strategy for an organization, and we’re looking at their performance rates, and they had a record low injury rate. I mean, this is amazing, it reduced year on year. And was starting to plateau. But what was also noticed was that SIF rate, their serious injury fatality rate, had increased by 45% in the same period.

How did they measure that? Yeah, that huge difference between the two. But how did they measure that increase around the SIF risks?

Well, they did have a good open reporting culture, I have to say. But they were looking at things such as high potential incident rates and things like that. Sure. And that’s good, although I would put a warning label to that because as soon as you start to measure it as a rate, people want to put a target on it.

Yeah.

And when people put a target on these things, people don’t want to report anymore.

Yeah.

You know, because it becomes about the metric, not about the information of a high potential incident.

Yeah.

So, I think, you know, boards create risk when they look at injury rates in that way. I think also when they start to reward short-term delivery without really understanding the trade-offs that they’re encouraging, you know, because there are, there are a lot of trade-offs we can see, and some of them can be quite explicit in terms of deadlines, and sometimes they can be even implicit. And so, I can remember a fatality of, uh, two men, uh, being killed in an excavation incident. So, they were doing an on-land excavation, uh, a very large metal plate. I can’t remember the exact weight. And they deviated from their procedure because they’re supposed to unsecure the bottom of the plate and then go up the excavation and then unsecure from the top before then lifting the plates out of the excavation. Okay, sure.

Yep.

And on this occasion, the, the men working on the job basically said, let’s get this done quickly. If you go down and undo the bottom, I’ll undo and unsecure the top.

Oh no.

And unfortunately, the guy at the top completed the task faster than his colleague at the bottom, and the plate then fell. And killed him and a colleague who were in the excavation. And you can think, well, what was the pressure? Well, this was weekend working, it was overtime, and a football match was on in the afternoon.

Oh no.

And so, the manager there said, look guys, it’s job and knock. In other words, finish the job and you can go off home, you’ve got your full overtime for the day. So, they’re thinking, let’s get this job done quickly. A weekend, go home and watch the football. And unfortunately, uh, those some of those people didn’t make it home at all. So I think, you know, when we look at short-term rewards and trade-offs, and I think that’s a good example of what a trade-off can look like, um, I think the other thing that a board needs to really focus on is it can create risk when it accepts reassurance without testing the assumptions. You know, people have a list of controls, they’ve done their audits, they show an audit report, it looks good, and, um, the, you know, the board say, great, so we’ve got our assurance activity in place, doing our job as a board. Um, but then they just accept it through confidence rather than through evidence of, and I think that could be a dangerous situation, and especially when those controls can often fail and when an organization comes under pressure. And they need to see, then create an environment where people could speak up about those situations.

So, they need one where encourages challenge about safety. I mean, a lot of organizations have stop work authority. Yeah, where people are given the right to stop work, right? What they often can fail at is making people comfortable in exercising that duty.

Yep.

And that’s something that they need to do. They need to allow people to feel comfortable, even if they’re wrong, to say, raise their hand, I’m stopping the job because it doesn’t feel right.

Correct.

Not because I know it’s wrong, but even if I feel it’s not right, I need to be able to stop a job and then look at it and determine whether it’s safe to continue or not. And that’s where I think a lot of organizations get things such as stop work authority wrong. They tell people, you have the right to stop work. Whoopee! All of a sudden, that’s it, my organization is safe because if something’s wrong, somebody will stop a job because it’s their duty to stop that job. Right? But if they don’t feel comfortable in stopping that job, it doesn’t happen. That’s almost a situation where an organization can wash its hands and say, well, there was plenty of people who could have stopped the job that day. And I just think that’s quite a key thing where boards can create risk.

But I would say it’s even more than just on the job, because I think that’s the easy one. But you’ve got planning, you have uptime workups, like in different levels where you could be introducing layering risk. And it may not even be a stop work. It could even just be, I’m raising concerns and I’m comfortable to question the environment and the decisions that are made.

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Absolutely. I mean, I think Stock Work Authority isn’t just at the front line of. That’s where we tend to see it. And again, they are suffering the conditions of decisions that have been made thousands of miles away, months previously, quite often, as you quite rightly said, planning, if they’re planning a shutdown or, you know, a key one is when you go into budget meetings and you hear debates on budgets and, you know, an organization has to, you know, slash several million from its to spend that year. And, you know, it becomes a blanket, right, you’ve all got a target reduction to be of X percent. And, you know, in my early career, I remember going to the CFO of an organization because I was really concerned and said to him, what do I do? I, I’m really worried here. And the CFO gave me the best piece of advice someone could receive. He said, Mark, what you do is you lay out the as-is, you show the impact of the cost reduction with the regrets. We can no longer do this, we can no longer do that, and then you show them the risk, and then you put it to the leadership team to, by consensus, make that decision.

And he said, it’ll be interesting to see how many people feel uncomfortable with that when you put the decision back to them. And, you know, that was a fantastic piece of advice that I’ve used on several occasions, you know, because I’m advising, this is the risk, and is it what you want to do? And quite often people don’t, to be quite frank.

Yeah, they don’t necessarily realize the impact of those decisions.

Correct. And I think, you know, really the board needs to stop asking the question, are we compliant? Because that’s the main thing, especially when you’re getting budget cuts. What do we have to do? Which is usually a compliance regulatory question. And it’s not what about risk? And really the question they should be asking amongst that is, where are we vulnerable and where do we need to manage that? So, I think, I think if I was to kind of cap off around boards directly, I would say a board does not need to know every operational detail.

Of course. Yeah.

You know, especially when we separate board from executive, they are not there to operate, they’re there to govern.

Right.

But part of that remit is to create the right culture, and leaders create conditions. Whereas teams create norms, you know, so they have to set, so a board doesn’t need to know every operational detail, but it does need to know whether the organizations can see, discuss, and respond to the conditions that make serious failure possible, because those things are there, they’re there as weak signals, so they need to make those signals come from. They need to be able to turn the volume switch up. Yep. Hear those weak signals and then be prepared to act on them.

I love your pivot to talking about risk when it comes to safety. Because it’s too often what I see is a conversation on some lagging indicator. And as you said, a comfort that that lagging indicator is a presence of safety, but it’s completely unrelated. But when we look at risk, you’re now expanding the scope of the conversation, the scope of the themes that get discussed. And what’s the role of those scorecards in your mind? Because there’s still a scorecard, there’s still a desire, and I’ve seen it time and time again. If you put a recordable rate, then the board will ask questions, which will then drive action in the following few months around low-level recordable rates, which is not the action you need to see. And then you have a big serious event. But what, what should be the role of those indicators? And, and are there some new indicators they should also be looking at beyond some of the questions you raised?

Yeah, you know, scorecards are useful, but they’re not the same thing as understanding risk. As you said, already said, low injury rates do not necessarily mean low injury or fatality potential. Sure. You know, there’s, there’s, you know, we all get fooled by the incident triangle, you know, this, uh, 300, uh, minor— 20, uh, sorry, uh, unsafe behaviors, 29, uh, serious injury. Well, it’s simply not true all the time. I mean, look, the triangle is correct from an empirical finding, you know, you can find those things, but they’re not predictors of fatality, correct? And that’s because Serious injuries or serious events really rest on a two-factor model. And so, the first factor is what I would call drift, where people are working outside their operational controls. And the second factor is the exposure to high hazard potential. You need both things. So that creates a bit of a quadrant where everything. There is no drift and there are no incidents. That’s great, that’s perfectly controlled. And then we have ones with high exposure energy, but the controls are there, the conditions are not there driving these poor things, these poor practices. So, we have well-controlled major accident hazards, for example.

True.

And then we may have a situation where, you know, there are no high hazard potential exposures, but the conditions are there for one. So, what you’ll start to see is lots of minor, minor injuries, but never a fatality because quite simply brushing a broom on a floor is never going to create a fatality.

Impossible.

We need a wonderful, you know, kind of film-style tragedy or something. Like, you know, so where it really comes in is where we’ve got the conditions that are driving drift from controls, where we have lots of workarounds, and then the potential for an incident. So, for example, you know, there was an incident where a person. There was a small explosion on an offshore platform outside of the UK. And I went to do the investigation. I’m thinking, this is going to be tough. And somebody came walking through the door and said, it was me. And I said, what do you mean it was you? Because I caused the explosion. So, this is one of the quickest investigations, right? You can imagine the leadership, sure, great, we found the problem, get rid of it. You know, this was This was, this was actually, when you listen to the story, what happened was there a safety-critical metric on maintenance and inspection to do with pilot relief valves. I’m not going to go into the detail of a pilot relief valve but think of a ping-pong ball on top of a straw. When there’s a gas release, the ball lifts up, gas passes to a flare stack, it’s burnt off, so you don’t get over pressurization of a system, right?

That’s the technical bit. Okay, so I said, well, what do you mean? He goes, well, I was supposed to test the, uh, the gas in the cylinder before I put it into the system, and I thought I was putting nitrogen into the system to test the valve and it wasn’t nitrogen, it was oxygen. And so, one of the things you know is you never mix oxygen with a hydrocarbon system because things tend to go boom, right? Okay, and in this case it did, but with minor, minor impact, although the platform was called to muster, the incident management team was all prepped up as a result of this. So, as we dig into it, I said, well, why did you, why did you have to do the test? And the, the, the gas monitor he was using wasn’t working. And it’d been known for a long time this was not working, and it caused it in the, in, in the safety-critical metric. And he was under pressure to catch up. And so, he said, so I knew the number on the cylinder was for nitrogen. I said but did the color not tell you it was oxygen, because, you know, every cylinder has a color code.

Yep.

I want to look, you can see the color of the cylinder, it was in such a poor state. We’d been mixing the gases in a quad before we shipped them offshore. The meters weren’t working, and this guy was put under pressure, and he recognized the number that said this was nitrogen. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case. It was simply the supplier’s inventory number for the cylinder, not the content.

My goodness. Right.

So, we could have sacked that guy for not breaking the procedure. We didn’t, I have to say. He was counseled. But what we looked at was whole trail of things that we had done wrong as a leadership team to put a person in that situation. You know, so very simple things. How did our logistics chain work? What was our cylinder control and management process? So, we managed to fix an ongoing problem where it’d be very easy to just get rid of the person and, uh, and we would still have the problem. And that’s what I mean when we start looking at injury rates and those types of things.

Sure.

When we’re looking at those potential. So, injury rates don’t really tell us much. I think the danger is a green dashboard can create false assurance. I think, and it’s very easy to accept being comfortable. You know, those two interpretations of when you see a scorecard: green means we’re good, risk is low, or green means we’re not looking hard enough. And when you’re setting a leadership team, it’s a lot nicer to say green means we’re doing okay than of course, so it’s a natural thing. But the problem is they could create and confirm comfort when we should be challenging more. Yeah, and I think part of the problem as well is how hard those things are looked at because targets, so we’ve all had the debate of a target zero. I would agree with that, that target zeros can lead to people measuring the scorecard rather than the risk.

Sure.

Goal zero is something different to me because that is a moral imperative, not a statistical target. But as soon as we start setting targets to these metrics, they can often stop. If they’re not in the right leadership context can stop giving you information and start being a tool to appease or comfort the new the information that leadership team is hearing. So, boards need information about control, degradation. They need information about drift, workarounds, repeat failures, maintenance backlogs, staffing gaps, and high potential events. They need that type of rich information, not simply a number with a, with a red, amber, green color coding, which is where most organizations fall into. And I see that when, for sure, uh, investors put, uh, directors onto boards, they’re very numbers driven because of quite often they come from a numbers background and they don’t understand really that they’re kind of, they’re kind of bought into, you know, a high number of incidents means fatality likely rather than understanding that’s not the way that risk works. Sure. So, the question is not whether the dashboard is green for them, it should be the question is whether the organization is becoming more resilient, right, or more fragile.

And they can only do that with asking the right questions. So, they need to be asking: which indicators tell us about exposure to serious risk? Which controls prevent catastrophic outcomes? How do we know they work in practice? How can we tell if they’re weakening? What concerns are not visible in the dashboard? And what are people having to work around to get the job done? And if they can start getting answers to those questions, they become more informed about risk.

Yeah, and much more contextual information, less relying on key indicators. But again, reinforces the need to have people that have experience to be able to interpret, to ask those questions, just like you did as part of your board work.

The key thing I want to get across, I would say, today is about serious events and early warning signs.

Yeah.

A core message for me would be the board may not see the exact event that’s coming, but it can often see the conditions that make an event more likely. Again, I’ve got examples of this from a drilling operation where after Deepwater Horizon, a person was put on the job to look purely at bottom hole pressure to assess if there’s any risk, and yet despite that he didn’t feel comfortable then acting in his role, and because the operational pressures, uh, overrode that. So, I think there’s a, there’s an issue as well that both need to understand. It’s all right having controls, but you really need to understand if they’re going to work under pressure when you need them the most. Um, yeah, I think that’s really starting to talk about predictability, and you know, we are talking about looking for workarounds where people can drift into practices that become accepted. We need to understand the trade-offs, the invisible trade-offs that people can see. We need to understand when those two things happening, fragile controls start to occur. In other words, controls that we rely upon start to break. So that’s like the disease process, you know, um, drift, trade-offs, and fragile controls, and risk starts to generate.

That’s the disease. And then we need to rely upon an immune system, and that’s going to be looking at things like, you know, have we considered all the risk? Are we learning? Is stop do people feel comfortable stopping work? Those types of things. So, that’s kind of where the warning signs tend to rest. So, the board needs to really understand and know where the risk is present, and no single report injury or assurance process gives a board a complete picture. Boards need multiple lines of sight. They really need to be looking for direct contact with the frontline and their operational teams. They need evidence, and I stress the word evidence, that critical controls are verified in real conditions. They need to be looking at those high potentials and looking past the immediate cause and into the root causes. They need to be looking for things like repeat deviations, repeat failures, because that’s telling you that something systemically is not working. We need evidence that people can stop work on site when they need to and challenge decisions, and not only at the front line, as you mentioned earlier, Eric, it can be in a planning situation, a budget meeting.

Someone needs to, you know, to feel comfortable raising their hand and saying, do you realize if we do this, we can no longer do this, and that creates a risk, and not have it justified away in that meeting. And therefore, they need to understand what happens when they do raise concerns. We need that feedback cycle as well. I can think of a case where somebody did do that. They raised a concern, they were, I would say, threatened with demotion and other things. And yet it got pushed through, and the month later the event happened, and because that person had challenged that action, there was no major event. And when I’m talking about a major event, I’m doing something on the size of a Piper Alpha type event. So, you know, it’s really important that we, we do listen to those challenges. Safety is not created by a board policy; it’s not created by a target or a green dashboard. It is created through different conditions in which people have to make decisions. The most effective boards do not ask only how many incidents we have, they ask whether they’re vulnerable, are they resilient to issues, they ask what people are seeing and what would stop us from hearing it, and that way they know they can get the information they need.

So, the board’s role is not to predict every accident. It is to make sure organizations are capable of seeing the conditions that make serious failure possible and act on it before those conditions become an event. And that would be what I would say to summarize.

Excellent. Well, Mark, thank you so much for joining me. Really insightful thoughts here. Um, if somebody wants to continue this conversation, wants to reach out, what’s the best way for them to do that?

They could drop me an email. That’s [email protected]. “Behavico” is spelled B-E-H-A-V-I-C-O. And through my LinkedIn, I’ve got a LinkedIn profile there. Seek me out on the wild west of LinkedIn. They’ll be able to find me there.

Excellent. Thank you so much, Mark.

Thank you.

Thank you for listening to The Safety Guru on C-suite Radio. Leave a legacy. Distinguish yourself from the past. Grow your success. Capture the hearts and minds of your teams. Elevate your safety. Like every successful athlete, top leaders continuously invest in their safety leadership with an expert coach to boost safety performance. Begin your journey at execsafetycoach.com. Come back in two weeks for the next episode with your host, Eric Michrowski. This podcast is powered by Propulo Consulting.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Dr Mark Taylor is a leading practitioner in industrial psychology and founder of Behavico Ltd, a specialist boutique consultancy focused on safety, human factors, and organisational resilience in high-hazard industries. He has held executive leadership roles, advised boards and executive teams, and helped transform safety performance across numerous organisations. He contributed to crowd safety for the London Olympic Games and serves as a Board member of the Tripod Foundation, supporting the advancement of incident investigation and organisational learning to help organisations prevent major accidents.

For more Information: https://behavico.com/

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Safety Through Design: Preventing Incidents with Proactive Hazard Elimination with Dr. Lianne Lefsrud

Jun 11, 2026

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ABOUT THE EPISODE

We are excited to welcome Dr. Lianne Lefsrud, seasoned expert in risk management and Risk, Innovation & Sustainability Chair (RISC) in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Alberta, to The Safety Guru for a fascinating and in-depth discussion on safety through design. Backed by solid research and related industry examples, Dr. Lianne explores a proactive approach to safety by sharing the inverted triangle framework, which applies the hierarchy of controls principle to identify the most and least effective safety measures and create multiple layers of prevention through design. From the normalization of ignoring alarms to the gap between training and true competency, this conversation highlights the critical shifts organizations can make to move from reactive to proactive safety. Throughout the discussion, Dr. Lianne also discusses the importance of thoughtful facility design, how emerging technologies are transforming the way we manage risk, and shares practical steps organizations can take to prioritize improvements that mitigate the greatest risks. Tune in for valuable insights and practical strategies on safety through design, proactive hazard elimination, and embedding safety into organizational system design and operations. Don’t miss this episode!

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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, success story begins now.

Hi and welcome to the Safety Guru. Today I’m very excited to have with me Leanne Lesford. She’s a professor and risk and innovation and Sustainability Chair at the University of Alberta. Leanne, you have quite an exciting and interesting background and amazing story. So really excited to have you with me today. So why don’t we get started with how you got your passion for safety and your journey in safety, because it was quite unique.

Yes. Thank you, Eric. So, yeah, I’m like many folks grew up in the 70s when things were wild and crazy. And I grew up on a farm. And what did we have? I had a pony and we had guns that we shot and pitchforks and machinery that we ran. And as it turns out, agriculture is one of the highest hazard industries and one of the least regulated, and it has one of the highest fatality and injury rates because it is kind of the wild west in terms of how people do work. And they tend to be a jack of all trades with very minimal training and very minimal supervision. And we were children growing up on the farm in that era, in that time. And there were a few rules like don’t go on the ice when it’s springtime and don’t stand behind the tractor when it’s backing up and don’t point a gun towards your brother and don’t ride your pony under the tree limbs. But other than that, there was very, very few guidelines in terms of what we were allowed to do. And so, I went into engineering after high school, followed my brother.

And one of my first jobs was working for BP Resources in Shava, Alberta. And I was a battery operator, summer job, co-op job. And that job was to not blow things up. Right. So, we’re looking at, you know, how do we meter and separate the sand and the water from gas and oil wells? Right. And you bring it into a central battery. Don’t blow things up. Okay, good idea. My next job was actually working for PCL construction in the Northwest Territories building roads. And that job was explicitly to blow things up. We actually blew up rock, and we need to straighten a road between it was Fort Providence and then up to the Northwest Territories into, into Yellow Knife, and then also up to Fort Ray and Fort Edsel, which are two dene dog rib communities. And they had this, this road that was quite curvy and they wanted to straighten it. So, then we were blowing up rock and then we were straightening the diamond of the road. And it made me realize, you know, just, you know, as we’re. We’re packing the dynamite into the holes, and then you put the, the blaster cord in, and then you roll the cord back and then you.

We laid underneath this dozer like a kilometer away from the blast site. And press the button. And that was before wireless, right? So, you press the button, you could feel the sound wave of the explosion coming through the ground, right? We’re laying underneath this dozer. And then a couple of seconds later, these rocks were being ejected from the blast site and thrown like a kilometer, kilometer and a half, raining down all around us as we’re laying underneath the dozer. And I’m thinking to myself, and if I were standing like one or two meters that way, I’d be dead, right? Like the size of your head that were blasting out of these holes. I thought, this is really interesting. And. But the blasters had, were, were very highly trained. They knew exactly what they were doing. And the safety controls around the site were, were quite impeccable, actually. You know, and, you know, similar to when I worked for BP Resources, very, very highly trained. They knew exactly what they were doing, right? Then after that, I did ice surveys on the McKenzie River. And again, it was a bit of wild west, because here we were on the river taking ice cores and samples on skidoos, and it’s minus 30.

And you’re like, okay, the biggest risk isn’t falling into the river at this point. It’s actually freezing to death, right? And so, it’s, you know, how do we. How do we manage those kinds of risks? And then we were out on the ice, you know, up to, you know, a day or two before it broke up, right? So, it was all these other very hazardous activities associated with taking ice course, right? And now there’s a bridge that goes across the Mackenzie River at Fort Providence. So, there’s no more ferry. You don’t need to worry about ice roads anymore. So that was the work that, based on the work that we did there. And then I started working with, in environmental engineering, looking at facilities, noxious facilities. So how do we take care of our waste? And I Ended up doing my master’s and it was with the US army and they were, had all these chemical munitions left over from the Cold War. And there was VX and sarin and mustard gas and various sorts of munitions and tonners, which is just that it’s a ton of chemical munitions and rockets and landmines and such.

And the problem with a lot of these, these, these chemical munitions is that as the, the VX and the sarin and the mustard gas age, they degrade and they become corrosive and then they corrode the outer case.

Lovely.

Really worried. I know, really lovely. So, they were really worried about auto ignition of these munitions, and they said what do we do about it? So, then my master’s research was actually looking at how do you design a facility using inherently safer design principles so that you can take care of the problem, which is the chemical emissions and not auto, not auto igniting and then also protecting the community around. So, I just, I did that. I worked with the US Army, I did a bunch of surveys, and it was really in the, again in the 90s looking at how do you engage stakeholders in design of a facility to recognize what the hazards are and to design the hazards or design the risks out of the system. Right. So that’s really what we were doing. We’re designing the risks out of the system. How do you eliminate substitutes, minimize, moderate, like how do you get it right out of the system entirely? So that was really super interesting. After that I didn’t want to have much to do with the US army anymore. And so, I went to work for the railroad for seven years.

I’m trained as a locomotive engineer and a conductor and I was cleaning up derailment sites, rock falls, landslides. I know. So, it was a lot of super fun work. And it made me realize that, you know, in the time in the 90s, a lot of companies, they would just budget for, for incidents, right? At the time, CN would put aside, you know, $200 million for derailments. It was inevitable that there would be these derailments and they were effectively self-insuring for the inevitability of derailments. And crazy worked. I know, crazy, right? But it’s, but it wasn’t uncommon and some companies still do that. They set aside a certain amount of contingency every year expecting to have a certain number of incidents. And it really struck me as being this, this trial-and-error approach towards risk. I thought, my gosh, this seems kind of crazy. You think that we should be able to prevent a derailment like we’ve been railroading for 100 years. We know what the hazards are, we should know how to control those hazards. Right. So then after that I went to work for a regulator, which is the association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Alberta.

And I wrote practice standards, practice reviews, environment committee and continuing professional development. Because I was really wondering, like, how can we better regulate the practice of engineering? Because engineers are embedded in all these companies everywhere, right. They’re supposed to be the ones who ensure that protection of the public is paramount. It’s embedded in who we are and what we do. And it made me realize that a lot of regulation is an act of faith. Like you put the laws in place, you presume that companies or people are following them and you in some cases will audit them and try to see if they’re following. But an audit isn’t. Outsider. It’s really hard to see what’s really going on, right? Really, really going on. You know, unless you’re embedded in there for extended period of time. Even then, you know, if you’re a Transport Canada person or a Transportation Safety Board person doing a ride along on trains, it’s still really hard to see what’s really going on. People are often on their best behavior. You don’t see the worst.

No matter how you do it, you’re going to get the best face because they know the risk if they truly surface what’s going on.

Yeah, exactly right. So, you always get the best face. Exactly right. So then after working at the rail, sorry, at the regulator, I did my, my PhD in business strategy because I wanted to understand organizational decision making and how do companies see risk, understand risk and then become better motivated to manage risk.

Sure.

So, I did that, my Ph.D. and then I went to University of Michigan for a couple years and then I was recruited back to University of Alberta in, excuse me, 2015 to be an assistant professor with the David and Joan Lynch School of Engineering, Safety and Risk Management, University of Alberta. So that’s where I’ve been for the past 11 years, doing research, working with a bunch of industry partners and really interested in corporate decision making. And how do we better equip companies to see those hidden hazards? Right. To understand their blind spots and then to better manage it. So, it’s not like companies want to hurt or kill things. Not at all. Not at all. Not at all. Not at all. Right. Heaven forbids. My gosh. You know, they all want to make sure everyone goes to work and then goes home safe at the end of the day. Because it’s a safe company, is, is a better run company, is a, is a more profitable company. Right. So, it’s, how do we help them see those hidden hazards, see those blind spots and then improve their operations as a result. So that’s kind of my passion.

My father’s still on the farm. He’s still got a bunch of scars, of course, because he’s a bit of a danger, danger guy himself. And I was just there last weekend and he’s like; I think I got a chunk of metal in my eye. I’m like, dad, where are your safety glasses? Like, you know, I’ll get you some new ones with the things on the side so that you don’t have to worry about stray splinters. So, it’s very personal for me from a, from a family perspective. But then, you know, I’ve, I’ve seen enough across different industries and worked with, you know, doing investigations and workplace fatalities and working with next Akin and again working with companies. It’s like we all want to solve this problem of how do you better see hidden hazards, how do you better improve blind spots and how do you make work the workplaces a safer place? And we all are in this together. It’s my passion and, and I love connecting with people who, it’s also their passion. So, I appreciate being on this podcast. Thank you.

Absolutely. Great background, great story. One of the areas you work in is around safety through design. It’s something that’s being talked about more and more in industry. What does it really mean from your standpoint?

It basically relies on the principle, and folks have probably heard this too, of hierarchy of controls. Right, right. So, the purpose of a hierarchy of controls is that there’s, you know, that, you know, it’s an inverted triangle. At the top of the triangle are the most effective things. And the most effective are to eliminate, you know, and then the least effective is the sharp end of the triangle. The bottom is personal protective equipment. Right. And if a company or an individual is relying only on personal protective equipment, they really don’t have any protection at all. Right. When it comes to high energy hazards, you know, a glove isn’t going to protect your, your hand getting run over or crushed by something. Not really. Right. It’ll just kind of hold it all together. So, the, the intention is that you’ve got this, this hierarchy of controls. It’s most effective to least effective. And then the intention is that you would also have in that kind of a layer of protection. So, you’re not relying on one form of protection, but many forms of protection. And if we can rely on more that are like less of the PPE or administrative controls, which tend to be kind of the, the less effective, more easily bypass able controls.

You know, if it’s administrative control, like you know, hazard communication training and you know, it’s a new guy and he didn’t get the training, then it’s an ineffective control effective. Right. People, if my dad is not wearing the right glasses, he’s still going to get shards in his eye. Right. So, it’s poor protection. So really this idea of hierarchy of controls and there’s other related principles. So, you’ve got safety by design. The EU has safe and sustainable divide design and it’s really being used in Europe for emerging technologies like software, nanotechnology, bioengineering and it’s meant to protect workers, consumers and the environment. So, it’s, it’s kind of a broad umbrella.

Broader.

Yep, broader umbrella. And then we have prevention through design, which is used by US NIOSH, and it’s really used in construction, manufacturing industry generally. And it’s really to think about everything from hand tools to heavy machinery to how do you design the hazards out of the system to protect workers. Right? So that’s prevention through design. And then there’s related concept. It’s inherently safer design which is used in the chemical process safety and nuclear industry. And the concept is what you don’t have can’t leak, so if you, if it’s not in your pipes, it can’t escape. Right. So, it was put into place after, after we had that methyl isocyanate leak in Bhopal that killed all those people. And basically, it was an unnecessary intermediate byproduct that wasn’t needed for, for the process. Right? So, they had, they had this unnecessary intermediate product that they stored in a large quantity on site, and it ended up, you know, a whole bunch of, for a bunch of reasons releasing in the middle of the night. It was heavier than air and people were sleeping close to the ground and they, and you know, it was thousands that fatalities as a result, I think even hundreds of thousands of.

Well, hundreds of thousands affected. Right?

Affected.

Yeah, yeah. So, it was. And then, you know, thousands that were those fatalities as a result. So, this whole idea of these concepts of how do we actually design the hazards out of this system? Right. Or so it’s, you know, and inherently safer design. The four principles are substitution, minimization, modernization, simplification. So, it’s really. How do we substitution is, you know, change the nature of the hazard by swapping it out for something less hazardous. Minimization is using a less hazardous material or energy to reduce the severity. Moderation is changing the physical state or operating conditions to reduce the severity. And simplification is how do you make it user friendly to minimize errors and emissions? Okay, so when we go to construction, an example might be you avoid complexities at the human machine interface. So, you could have automatic safeguards, emergency shutoffs, you could standardize your valves. Right. You could have easy to understand controls or alarm room rationalization. So that’s the idea of simplification. So how do we make it easier to understand such that we are not complicated, like we’re not overwhelmed, cognitively overwhelmed as an operator, as a worker. Like it’s obvious, you know, we’re going to do the right thing.

We’re going to pull the right knob because it’s the right color and it’s the biggest one and it’s the closest to our hand. Right, right.

Or it’s not alarming too often. Right. Like a deep-water horizon where I think they shut off the alarming for five years on the, on the well, because it was likely alarming too often as opposed to trying to understand why it is alarming.

Yeah, yeah. And probably they could have used some alarm rationalization there to simplify it. Right. You know, another example would be using your right foot for the brake in the gas. Right. So, you can’t step on the brake and the gas simultaneously. Right. We’re simplified. It’s a way of simplifying in our brains, you either accelerating or breaking. Right. That would be another good example. Right. Keep it simple. Right. So that’s kind of inherently safer design. And but if you, you know, think about the, again, the top of the most effective of that, you know, even before those principles, is elimination. So how do you completely remove the hazard to eliminate the frequency and severity entirely? So, if we’re thinking about, you know, a cause effect diagram, what does that mean? It means if you’re going to assemble your modules at grade, as opposed to having to lift stuff up and do it at height. Right. So you’re seeing, you know, PCL now they, you know, did this whole big module, the scraping furnace, they developed it all in modules at grade and then they assembled it and then they just kind of rolled it right into the refinery, so they didn’t have to stick build anything.

Right. It was all done in a, basically a factory or manufacturer setting. Right. As opposed to stick building on site.

Sure. It’s almost a prefab environment.

Yeah, almost a prefab environment. Right. So, you know, the examples of elimination might be you eliminate your solvent cleaning. Right. So, you don’t have to worry about solvents and any inhalation issues. You could remove redundant machinery or site clutter. Right. So how do you just clean out of the site? You could switch to cordless tools at height to remove tripping hazards. That would be another example. Right. So, you just get rid of all of that. Get rid of it entirely. Eliminate. Right. So that’s kind of the most foolproof because if you don’t have it, the hazard, then it can’t, it won’t hurt you. What you don’t have can’t hurt you effectively. Right. So that’s kind of elimination. Right. You know, we’ve talked about, there’s other principles. Substitution might be you reduce a hazardous processor tool with a safer one, like electric tools for pneumatic tools, you know, so you don’t have to worry about the pressure associated with pneumatic tools. It could be fiberglass insulation instead of asbestos insulation. That would be another example. Or using induction heating instead of open flame for industrial welding or curing. So those would be another example of where you’re substituting, swapping for something less hazardous.

Okay. Minimization is. You’re looking using less hazardous materials. So, you could keep minimum inventories in hand just in time delivery, you know, in situ work would be an example of that could be replacing massive, centralized battery bank with smaller distributed power packs would be an example. Right. So, if you’re worried about thermal run away from your lithium-ion batteries, you don’t want to have, you know, all your batteries in one place. Right. You could have a cascade. You really want to have these smaller distributed. That would be an example of that. Or it could be, you know, limit your work in progress on site to minimize clutter. That would be an example. Right. So, you’re not doing this assembly stuff where you’re, you’re cluttering up. Right. Moderation is really about how you change the physical state. So, you could store refrigerated liquids at atmospheric pressure instead of high pressure. So, this, when it comes to like, like liquid hydrogen, for example, you know, do we have to store it at high pressure, or can we store it at atmospheric pressure? If we put it in like, you know, in hydro state, you know, maybe with you’re using ammonia as a carrier, then you don’t have to worry about pressure anymore.

Right. So, it’s again, that would be an example of, of moderation. We talked about simplification already. Separation is where you separate the people from the hazard. Okay, so this is where you’re segregating, segregating people away with setback distances. It could be barriers, it could be exclusion zones, it could be doing the work at night if you’re working on roads rather than during the day when there’s traffic around. It could be machine guarding, sound enclosures, blast walls, those are all kind of separation type principles. Could be circuit breakers, interlocks, you know, secondary containment would be an example. It could be guard rails on your, on your platforms, on your scaffolding. Could be a one-way flow layout on your site or a manufacturing facility so you can avoid collisions. Right? So effectively you’ve got traffic management on your site. That’s a mechanism of separating, right. And then next is warnings, right? So, warnings are kind of interesting and you mentioned about Deepwater Horizon, right? Because warnings could be those alarm systems, backup alarms, beepers, proximity detectors, atmospheric monitoring. But warnings are only as good as, as if they’re working. They’re not bypassed and people pay attention to them, and they understand what they mean.

Right. So, this is why, you know, when we’re getting down into the correct, the funnel or getting down to the pointy end of the hierarchy of controls, warnings are still good. And they can be engineered in like an automatic alarm. But if the alarm is going off all the time, the fire alarm, and I’m not leaving the building anymore because it’s gone off for the fourth time this week, then effectively the alarm, different problem. It’s a different problem. Effectively the alarm isn’t working anymore. It’s become normalized that we ignore the alarm. So that’s why warnings, people like, oh, we’ve got, you know, proximity detector, we’ve got beeping alarms, sure, right. But they’re only effective if, if they’re followed, right? And again, they start to feel that. That’s why, you know, I put them in with effectively administrative controls because that’s what they are. You rely on a person to, to do something, right? Have a procedure associated with the alarm and then next is procedures. And what that is, is it’s really about changing the way that people work using defined procedures and schedules. So that’s the start work checks like do we understand the hazards, field level hazard assessments, job procedures.

Could be like original equipment, manufacturer maintenance procedures, right? Could be access controls, emergency response plans, inspection schedules, rotation of workers, you know, everything to do with, you know, how do we do work, how do we do this work? Right. It’s mainly meant to again, change the way that people work, right? And some of these are more effective than others. And we all know, like, if I were to, you know, pull out an OEM manual for maintaining my dozer, how many pages is in it? It’s probably thousands, right? Thousands. You know, how do I find, you know, is it this kind of battery or that kind of battery do I need to take off the, the counterweights this way or that way? You know, like, do I do these bolts? What order do I remove the bolts in? Does it matter? Of course it matters. Right, so. So, the manuals and procedures, oftentimes companies will have a lot because what they do is, is complex, it’s complicated, right? But oftentimes it’s overwhelming with people. It’s or for people, right? So, you know, here you are, here’s another manual. Here you are, here’s another manual. You know, you have people have a shelf full of very, very dusty manuals that no one takes out because it’s a lot.

It’s. They’re overwhelmed by these manuals, right? So, and if there’s a problem, what’s the solution? It’s, you know, throw another procedure on it, right? So again, people like, oh, we have a procedure for that. Is again, very poor defense because more is not better. Less is better. You really need to declutter. You need to basically say, you know, how can we simplify this for the folks doing the work such that they can have that just in time, information, the right information so that they’re, you know, removing the bolts in the right order, right? Or following the right manual for the right model of the or this year’s equipment, right? So, it really matters. So that’s procedure, you know, training, you know, is another favorite, right? People like, oh, you know, you know, lack of training. Let’s just throw more training on it. You know, training is, yes, we need to be trained. Absolutely, absolutely. Absolutely. Of course. But the problem is that training is an input variable. What we really need is competency, which is the output variable. So how do you actually, you assure that people are competent to do the task at hand?

What does that look like? So, it could be again, for those high hazard tasks like confined space entry or hydrogen H2S training, hazard communication, emergency response drills so we can have the emergency response plan. If we don’t actually train for a drill, then I don’t know what stairwell I should go down in. I don’t know that I should, you know, count, you know, the people who are coming out of the building, again, some sort of occupancy list who happened to be at work that day. Like I don’t understand those, those parts. So, it’s important that when you, you train folks, you actually practice the training, and you demonstrate competence in that training. Right. So training is great, but it’s not the only thing. Right?

Yeah. That piece on competence to me is, is, is probably one of the key ones. There’s a lot of training that’s been done and unfortunately many crafts that’s being done through eLearning, which is even worse because you can completely disengage from the actual training. You would never want to have a pilot who’s flying your plane, who’s read the book. You want them to go through a drill and to simulation and to demonstrate they’re capable every single year. And it’s not that hard. You just, you run a regular process to make sure that you understand what you’re doing, and you run different challenges that people have experienced over the last year. But you would never expect to get on a plane where that has not happened. But yet you’ve got power line technicians that are doing extremely high hazard work that got trained 30 years ago and that’s okay.

Right. And, and on the job training is fantastic. Right. And especially for the, the new folks to, to demonstrate competence. The, the trick is thought to make sure that on the dog training is done by a competent person. Right. So if it’s Joe who was trained 30 years ago and he’s going to do the on-site training for the new guy and all of his, his potentially bad habits are baked into his shortcuts and how he does his work, then the new guy is, you know, is also learning his bad habits. So, it’s really correct. Yeah. Ensuring, you know, continuous and ongoing assurance of competence for all workers. Right. And you know who’s most likely to get hurt? It’s the new guys, the young and inexperienced workers. And it’s, and it’s the older, more experienced workers who do this shortcutting. Right. So, it’s. We really have to ensure both tells. Yeah, exactly. Right, absolutely. So, training.

Correct.

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And then the last one is PPE as we’ve mentioned, you know My father, you know, in his glasses, you know, but it’s safety harnesses, it’s anchoring, respirator, safety glasses, gloves, hearing protection, all those things. But again, it’s just all you’re doing is kind of shielding the person from the hazard. Right. And it is, it’s pretty meager, meager protection. So, this idea of all of this, whether or not it’s inherently safe to design prevention through design, or safe and sustainable design, it’s all this. The concept is that we’re going to focus on the hierarchy of controls. We’re going to focus on the top end, the most more effective ones, to ideally eliminate those hazards out of the system with engineering controls. Or, you know, substitute, minimize, moderate, simplify, separate.

So, we’re really focusing in, on those engineering type controls. And the philosophy is that you do it early in the system. Early, right? You do it early. It’s hard after the facility is built to change your, to go change it. Right. So correct. Like all of these principles and the philosophies behind them are that they’re most effective when they’re done during the design stage. So, the earlier that you do it, the better. Right. And ideally you would do it during like a design safety review. Right. And that’s really, you know, at the very, very beginning. So when you’re thinking about, okay, how are we designing this facility, how are we building this car, how are we building, you know, the knobs on an airplane or, you know, a screen on a, in a control panel of a refinery in the control room, you’re really doing it at that stage. So how do we help people? And again, eliminate, substitute, minimize, moderate at the, at the very, very much at the design stage. Right. So, it’s really. How do you think about, you know, at the conceptual stage, what do you think about it? You’re doing kind of research and development.

You got sort of a design, and then you’re really at that design, the detailed engineering design stage. So, you’re kind of, okay, how do we, how do we do this from a detailed engineering design perspective? And that’s, you know, before your procurement, construction, commissioning, it’s in the design stage. That’s really where you want to do it.

And I think that’s the part I love the most because unfortunately, safety tends to be very reactive to something happening. And the majority of controls that get put in after an event tend to be at the bottom of the hierarchy of control. And so, they’re just slapping more training, more PPE things along those lines. But the opportunity, I think is to get in front of it before the incident ever happens to really start designing sites, environments and even thinking like what I liked about your example around the modular building, it goes even down to which sites are we going to build. Like if you’re building an LNG facility, certain sites may not be conducive for what we want. So, we end up having to build a very vertical structure. But then we are not doing it in a prefab environment. So, we’re introducing a lot more risk. So, all of those things to me are, is how we can get in front and be much more proactive from a safety standpoint.

Yeah. Or even, you know, where do you set your facility? Right? Like if you’re in a flood inundation zone and you know, like wow, okay, then what you’re doing is you’re, you’re, you’re putting your whole facility at a, at a greater risk for a whole bunch of other things. Right. Or hurricane zone with, you know, increase wind. Right. So. Or an earthquake zone. Right. When you look at, you know, where do you put your nuclear power plants in, in Japan.

Japan, Right, right, right, exactly. And how do you design it or not put it there or design it or not put it there. Exactly. Right. You know, and when you think about a nuclear facility, you need cooling water. Okay. Where else could you get your cooling water if not from the oceans? So, there’s all these other things, right. That you could be thinking about and that would be that you’re right. And that’s, you know, the, the purpose of my master’s research was okay, how do we even think about the sighting of a, of a facility? Right. So where do you even put it, you know, and you know, setback distances is a great example. Right. You know, because what is a setback distance? It’s, it’s, it’s effectively it’s a separation and separation distance. Gives you time, right? So, time to respond for a community or first responders or whatever. Right. And the setback distance is even, you know, and you look at a refinery site, like where’s the lunchroom. It’s the farthest corner in a blast proof building away from all the facility. Right. And that gives you, gives you separation in time. Right. You know, the occupancy of that shelter in place facilities are not underneath the reactors, right.

Or in Texas City.

Yeah.

Right by the blast zone.

Yeah. You know, and that, anyone. And that’s part of the reason why you look at offshore facilities. Like when you look at an offshore platform or drilling platform, you’ve got A highly compressed footprint. Right. And you know, you really have to then think about, you know, where do you put your flare, where do you put your reactive your reactors and how are they then separate or high pressure, high temperature vessels and how far are they make sure that they’re the farthest distance possible from, from your, from your, where your people are. Right. And that’s really again how they’re, they’re really trying to, to separate. And you use those inherently safer design principles, but again at the design stage. Design stage. Design stage.

Correct.

Right.

Yeah. But you could still do it following an incident. But ideally, I really like what you’re saying is like you design it in. And there’s so many opportunities in this in terms of certain sites that I’ve seen that we’re building things that probably shouldn’t be the best locations for it. But it may be more economically viable. But are there some alternate ways of building.

Yep. Or alternate ways of operating? Like railroads are an interesting example because you know, in Canada, you know, the railroad came in and where do the towns built, you know, next to the railroads. So right around the railroads. So, what do you have now you have railroads carrying, you know, class one, class two, special dangerous everything. Railroads aren’t allowed to, to deny any lading. They have to take anything; they have to ship anything. Okay, so, okay, so what does that mean? It means that they could be, you know, shipping ammonia. You know, they can price it a certain way so that ammonia, it’s, it’s less likely to be shipped. But if you’re going to ship ammonia versus train versus a truck, a train is actually a safer way like by, you know, like 10,000 times safer. Right. In terms of accidents. But what happens then is you’ve got all these hazardous goods being carried through the center of towns. Right. And Lac Megantic is a good example of that. Right. So, so what does this mean? It means that do we need to have different train handling for special dangerous. Does it mean we have to slow down those trains going through populated areas?

Yes. Doesn’t mean we have, you know, different kinds of tank cars. Right. The DOT 111 route, you know, we no longer have those tank cars. So, you know, it’s really thinking about how we operate differently, you know, understanding, you know, in some cases we can’t change the location of where work happens or where we operate. So then how do we, how do we make sure that we use all these other principles in terms of, of designing either, you know, the track or the tank cars or the speed, you know, and, you know, slowing things down isn’t, is an example of, of moderation, right? So, it’s slowing down the speed, the force, the amperage, the pressure, the temperature, the noise. Like, how do you, how do you moderate your activities, right, Such that, you know, in speed, a great example, you know, what’s the likelihood someone’s going to be, you know, hurt or killed or either the driver or someone who’s walking across a road is speed. Right? And that’s why, you know, the speed limit through school zones is 30 km an hour. Because the difference between 30 and 40 makes a difference in terms of children.

Would a child survive or not? I mean, it’s a horrible thing to think about. But again, speed, right? That’s an example of moderation.

So how could an organization start thinking about how do I build this in? And then you also have helped organizations with some really tangible examples of applications. You’ve given a lot of examples of each type of control that you can put in. But what are some of the steps an organization can start thinking through to really build safety through the design?

Yeah, great question. So, and in many cases, like we’re not working with, with new builds, we’re working with operating companies, right? So, they’re in a certain operating phase. And as I mentioned, I’ve been involved, you know, following some workplace fatalities. And some of those examples are, you know, an operator of a dozer’s working on a tailings pond, a frozen tailings pond. Right. And the problem with that ice is it’s not really ice, right? So, tailings water has got, is mixed with a whole bunch of volatile organic compounds. You know, it’s, it’s got a whole bunch of other slurry type things in it that when the ice freezes, the strength, it acts and behaves differently than the Mackenzie River, right. At minus 40. Very, very different. Right. So, so what was their solution? The solution was one of elimination. We’re not working on ice anymore, period, full stop. Right? We don’t go on tailings ponds at all anymore when they’re frozen. So that’s an example of, you know, so we’re not going to measure thickness. We’re not going to, you know, worry about can the ice carry the weight of the dozer. Dozer is really heavy.

The risk is too great. We won’t do it, period. Okay, so that’s an example of, of, of complete elimination. And it was really understanding what the hazard is. The hazard is the ice and effectively falling through. And then you got, you know, confined, you know, your confined Space, you know, and you can’t get out of the dozer. Another example. But the first step really is companies understanding what are those hazards, right? What’s the stuff that kills people, those, those sticky hazards. And you know, we worked with another company, Nutrient, looking at across all their operations, mining, refining, transportation, retail. And in some cases, they don’t necessarily. A company might not necessarily know their hazards. Okay, you’ve got, you know, two guys in a small-town handling fertilizer, anhydrous ammonia, you know, doing could be $20 million worth of business for this small town for agricultural products, you know, crop inputs. And they, you know, they’re again, they’re, they’re running, you know, trailers, you know, they have to worry about power lines, they’ve got forklifts, they’ve got, you know, all these different hazards, moving equipment. And they’re not necessarily thinking about line of fire. They’re not thinking about line of fire, right?

Because what are they doing? They’re in production mode there, its springtime, you know, they want to make sure that the farmers have what they need to be able to get the crops in super important. So, it was interesting to work with companies like that because you can say, you know, well, refinery or mine might understand line of fire really well, or confined space energy. When you start to go into transportation or even into retail, they may not have the same understanding of the hazards, right? What are those high energy hazards? What’s the stuff that’s going to kill you? And then let’s think about what controls look like. So, the first step for companies is just even understanding what their hazards are, right? What are their hazards? What’s the stuff that’s going to kill you? And then how are you controlling it? And we worked with a bunch of companies, you know, in mining, you know, Suncor, Sync, Crude, Nutrient, you know, and other companies, construction companies like PCI and then basically saying, you know, what are the stuff that’s causing the incidents? Right, the hazards. And then how are you then controlling that and what are those controls look like?

And are you inspecting on the right thing’s things? Are you auditing the right things? Are you talking about the right things in your start work checks? And in many cases, they’re not right. And you know, they’re focused on, you know, housekeeping slips, trips and falls because it’s easy to see, right. Without necessarily being able to see. Again, these hidden hazards, right? And the blind spots and line of fire ones are really, really hard, right? Really hard. Because people don’t understand stored Energy you can’t see necessarily easy to see stored energy in a cable. Right. Or in a pipeline or power takeoff or, you know, they’re not. We’re not really wired to see stored energy, potential energy. Right. In that way. And it’s really helpful for companies, for us to go through that. And we’ve done this with several companies, go through and do this inventory of hazards and then compare the hazards in terms of what’s actually causing the serious incidence, fatalities, actual or potential, like the near missy stuff. And then, you know, again, back to their incidents, sorry, their investigations, their audits and inspections. And then, and then we change how they do work, change the critical controls assurance questions that they’re asking.

Right. And then putting, wherever possible in these engineered controls. Right. So how do we substitute, minimize, moderate, simplify such that we. We’re changing the work for the people. Right. We’re not relying on them to change how they work necessarily. We’re changing the work itself. Itself, the nature of the work. Like the dozer is no longer going on the ice as an example. Right. Or they’re assembling the module on the ground and then at elevation is. It’s the last thing they do. But no worker is any higher than, you know, 8 or 10ft off the ground at any one time when they’re assembly. Right. So that would be an example of how they can do that.

And how do you practically do this because you’ve built tools and capabilities in this space. Tell me a little bit more about the behind the scenes of how do you catalog those risks that often get missed by the organization that has them?

Yeah. So, what we do in our company, Insight Risk Systems, and we have some patented algorithms, we use AI machine learning, specifically natural language processing. So, we can actually look at companies, tens of thousands of incidents, actual and potential. Right. And we look at the words that they use, like the incident descriptions that they use. And then we can pick out the hazards, and we can pick out the controls. Right. And we do what’s called a knowledge graph. So how do we start to link the hazards with the controls? What does that look like? And then we look at the audits and the inspections that happened before that incident. So, we look at the two months prior, matching on the same location, matching on the same hazard.

Right.

And then we can say, were you auditing or inspecting on the right things or not? And we can actually. And then we look at the similarity of language of the incident itself and the similarity of language in terms of how they describe their audits and inspections and then we can look at the gaps and overlaps. So are they. The overlaps would be. Yes, we’re, we’re good match here. The gaps are. Oh my gosh, we forgot completely about, about confined space entry for our truckers who might have to enter the back of a tanker truck. Oh, wow. Okay. That’s going to be something that maybe you should think about controlling for. Right. And again, we’ve worked with companies, you know, and some of these companies too. They’ll have millions of audits or inspections, like millions. Right. So, because this is what they do. Right. But many companies will have all this data, all this data, but they don’t actually analyze it. Or they may analyze it but only do like descriptive analytics, maybe perhaps some, some frequencies, but they don’t. But in comparing across incidents versus inspections and audits, it allows us to then improve their inspections and audits.

So we do this with companies and it’s really very enlightening for them, especially for like a large multinational, like whether or not it’s agricultural inputs or multinational energy company, to be able to see across their operations, right across their business units, across their geographies and then to help them rationalize, to then say, okay, are you doing it the same across, you know, what are the best practices? How do we rationalize those? How do we simplify? So you don’t have, you know, 200 key performance indicators, because if you have 200 priorities, you have none. How do you shrink that down to a manageable number and then focus on the important things? So, we’re not doing more critical controls assurance, more questions. We’re focusing on the right questions. We’re focusing on the questions that are going to help you find the stuff that’s going to kill you and make sure that it’s controlled. So that’s, that’s the work we do with Insight risk systems. Like I said, we worked with a bunch of companies, data analytics, and it really allows companies to see the hazards, the stuff that’s going to kill them, think about critical controls and then think about how can we apply this kind of hierarchy of controls thinking, prevention through design, inherently safer design thinking, even though they’re at the operation stage.

Because now we can start to think about elimination, substitution, minimization to really focus explicitly on those hazards. Stuff that’s going to kill you. Right, because we’re not going to, we’re not boiling the ocean here. We’re picking out certain fish. Right.

And yeah, exactly.

How do we focus on those, on those pieces that are the important pieces?

Yeah, very cool. Because it allows you to really prioritize. Where am I going to put the emphasis? What controls need to be improved, what work should change as opposed to unfortunate pieces following the near miss. It sounds like there’s still not enough controls or changes that were implemented to actually find and resolve the underlying issue.

Yeah, well, more PPE, more training, sure, fine. That’s still the pointy end of control. Right? So yeah. Or more procedures.

Exactly.

We don’t need more procedures. Right. We need, we need fewer procedures and more, more specific ones. The just in time procedures.

Absolutely. That’s very interesting. So, if somebody wants to get in touch with you, what’s the best way do that?

Probably LinkedIn is the best because then that’s. You can see me as my work at the university. If you want to do research, that’s great. And then insight risk systems, if you’re interested more in those tangible tools. And again, we’ve got AI machine learning. We’re working with companies in terms of developing apps. We’re working on a trenching app right now. So, we have the ability to then say how do you take all this intelligence and then embed it in real time decision support, and you know, someone’s phone. We’re doing stuff like, you know, VLM LLM, you know, so we can look at, you know, even images like how we can help you analyze images and in real time basis and identify those hazards. So, we’re doing a lot of really cool things.

That is very cool. Thank you.

Thanks.

SHOW NOTES

The images below were provided by Dr. Lianne Lefsrud to help listeners better understand the inverted triangle of the three frameworks and the hierarchy of controls principle discussed during this episode. All copyrights are owned by Insight risk systems.

For more information, please visit https://insightrisksystems.com/

ABOUT THE GUEST

Dr. Lianne Lefsrud, PEng, (CEO) is the Risk, Innovation & Sustainability Chair (RISC) at the Faculty of Engineering, University of Alberta, where she leads interdisciplinary research and teaching in risk management. She has analyzed decades of incident data in diverse, high-hazard industries like hydrogen, mining, construction, railroading, and bioengineering.

With a PhD in Strategic Management and Organization, and over 25 years of experience in operations, regulatory affairs, and strategy advising to governments and senior leaders, she brings a unique systems-level approach to risk management.

Dr. Lefsrud’s research spans over 200 peer-reviewed articles and proceedings, with a forthcoming book from Oxford University Press. Her work has been featured in Forbes and a TEDx talk, recognized with 30+ awards, and developed alongside more than 100 graduate students she has supervised.

For more information: https://insightrisksystems.com/

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Redefining Safety: Embracing Risk and the Power of Language in Safety Culture with Dave Whitefield

Feb 5, 2026

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ABOUT THE EPISODE

Tune in for a fascinating and thought-provoking conversation with Dave Whitefield, a seasoned safety and risk professional with more than 30 years of industry experience. Dave joins The Safety Guru to discuss the challenges facing the safety industry and why meaningful safety improvement depends less on metrics and more on people and culture. In this episode, Dave explains why embracing risk, rather than trying to eliminate it, is important and how empowering workers to actively manage risk leads to better outcomes than simply enforcing rules. He also shares the role of trust and communication, and how the language we use shapes culture, influences behavior, and impacts how risk is understood and managed. The conversation highlights the vital role of leadership in shifting from correction to learning, and in creating environments where people feel supported to speak up, take ownership, and grow. This episode offers a thoughtful perspective on redefining safety through connection, effective risk management, and meaningful change. Listen now!

READ THE EPISODE

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 Dave Whitefield. He’s a culture expert in safety and risk. Dave, really excited to have you with me. I’d love to get a little bit of your background, how you got into safety and how you got the passion that you have for safety risk, but also culture.

Yeah, cool. All right, thank you and thanks, Eric, obviously, for having me on the podcast. I’m very excited. My origin story is that I failed a subject at university and that’s how I got into safety. So, I way back, it wasn’t very many years ago, but in 91, apparently, I was doing an undergraduate psychology degree thinking I would go down that path of maybe like sports psychology or performance psych. And yeah, I failed one of my first-year psych subjects and couldn’t do the second year. And it had this other; the degree was being delivered in a health faculty and had this other major of work and health. And out of about 120th, 20, sorry, 120 who started that year, about 20 of us ended up doing this work and health major and was one of the early tertiary degrees in certainly in Brisbane and I think in Australia at the time. And so, yeah, I kind of got into it by doing that and then struggled to find work. I was a motorbike courier for a year, which was a pretty risky job running around the city.

Yeah, it was ironic. And then basically I got referred in. I’ve always been able to talk as we’ve chatted a little bit, obviously, Eric, but people will tell I can talk. And I got a referral, did some safety training, and I started with that. And so, I’ve been a safety manager a number of times, but I’ve actually worked for myself more than I’ve worked for others. And I’ve been a sort of consultant. I’ve also owned a training business with some others for about eight or nine years, and we grew that. I did a postgrad OHS degree and then I, about 10 years ago finished another postgrad in essentially social Psychology of risk, which was really the thing that helped. I’ve always been in that people side and the risk side. And. But that. That postgrad was, yeah, looking at social psychology as it applies to safety and risk and. And here I am still trying to work out what I want to do when I grow up.

And so, I think it’s a good pivot to understand so. So, what’s holding us back in safety? We’ve had this conversation for.

Yeah, for a little while. Tell me a little bit about what. What’s really holding our ability to progress?

Yeah, it can be a frustrating industry to be in. LinkedIn can be a pretty toxic place, I think, for safety at times. And then within industry, you know, if you went into the workforce, if you go on a supervisor level, particularly, and you, like, go, yeah, let’s make this better by involving the safety department, you know, like said, no one ever, like, it’s. We’ve created a bit of a problem for ourselves. So, on two levels, I think at an industry level, I think we can get better at kind of embracing the idea that there’s multiple disciplines and philosophies within safety. Some of them we’ve been used to, like, hygiene and ergonomics. But the idea that there are systems thinking, legal, behavioral, safety, process, safety culture, which is my focus, there’s sort of sub disciplines, psychosocial, psychological. And I think we can get better at going, what’s the nature of the problem? And therefore, what approach would be better as opposed to. I think what we tend to do is go, oh, I’ve got a fix for that, or I’ve got a solution. And I think part of it is, I think we think as generalists that we have to be able to do everything.

So, like, just the amount. And this happens in Australia, the amount of safety professionals that give legal advice is probably pretty scary because we go, well, yeah, we’ll run a due diligence workshop because we think it fits within the safety realm. But it’s actually, that’s a legal perspective and really should be done through a legal.

So, there’s no legal training in most safety professions.

Yeah, we’re a bit bound up in that. And then obviously some of the other stuff we spoke about, I think that once organizations have got a really good foundation. When I say really good, they’ve got good, basically, hazard and risk management. So good that safety 101 stuff, they understand their hazards and risks. They rarely have surprises and new hazards and risks. They got pretty good stuff. They still have incidents, but they’ve got good Control. They’ve got enough systems, and they’ve probably got too many. Once you’ve got that, the strategies that you’ve been using to do that, you know, you can’t just keep applying them more. And there’s a need to change and. And that’s tricky. I think systems focus is a really attractive thing. It’s reinforced by regulators and auditors, so we get really anchored to that. If I equate it to Hudson’s culture maturity culture spectrum, it’s being in calculative. So, I see that a lot. And then within that, the other thing we spoke about. Sorry, I will get to the point eventually, is that when I go into workplaces, one of the first questions I ask is, what is safety about? And one of the most common responses is it’s something to do with an outcome, preventing harm, preventing injury, which is a challenge.

Going home the same way you arrived. Which it is true, and it should be. It’s just that when that’s all it is in a. At a company level, then that creates problems because it becomes basically, again, whether you got hurt or not, or whether people made it home becomes the quasi sort of definition of safety. And that is a strong anchor that’s hard to break. The irony is it works at a personal level. Like if a manager says it’s really important you all get home, that’s still appropriate because they’re expressing care, which is an input. But when the company basically gets really anchored, and this happens through measuring recordable injury rates. Absolutely all the quantifiable stuff. So, the underlying question that I ask once we’ve surfaced the idea that there’s this really strong anchor, is if everyone gets home for a month, was it safe? And there’s a little bit of silence. You sometimes awkward silence and thinking, and it’s like discomfort.

Right.

And by the way, the answer isn’t definitely yes or no, but it’s like, it could be, but it might not.

Be, it might not be. Right. And this is the part is you measure it. And so many times I’ve seen it where it’s a 10th best year of safety and then something significant happens. Right. Or we’ve had great, great performance around zero harm for years, and then significant events occur. Deepwater Horizon is a perfect example. I think it was seven years of recognition for something that was deeply unsafe. Yeah. By all accounts. But at that point it was called safe.

And there’s this seduction at the company level. And I get why, by the way, they get anchored to love of measurement. I totally. Because the challenge for us is always, well, if not, then what else? Sure. And now this occurred to me, and it could easily be one of these arguments that is entirely in my head. But I think what happened about 30 or 40 years ago when we were recognizing that outcome measures lost time, injury rates, recordable rates were not appropriate. The question that was asked was, okay, well if we’re not measuring that, what else should we measure? And that’s how we came to measure inputs. Now measuring that’s fine. Setting KPIs and setting targets around it, that creates trade-offs, usually with quality, quantity.

100%. Yep.

But I think the question, maybe the question should have been can you measure safety? Like, we’ve, we’ve never asked that question. Question. I mean, I ask it, I’m like, can you measure safety? Well, to do that we’d have to define what it is the most common outcome is. The most common definition is whether we hurt somebody. And we’ve just established that’s not a good measure. So yeah, it’s, but again, nobody’s doing this on purpose. It’s, it’s a, we’re caught up in that desire for measurement. The other reverse question, of course is if somebody got hurt, it doesn’t mean it was unsafe. Correct. And again, there’s this awkward tension of like, not necessarily. And I’m like, correct. Right. So, my thesis at that point is generally once you’ve got this really good foundation, once you’ve stopped hurting people and you’ve gone through reactive, you may need to adopt a more nuanced and unfortunately complex. That’s a definite trade off I’m trying to grapple with, but a more nuanced idea of what safety is about so that the organization has got a more meaningful view. But if we bring that right down to frontline, if I sat with a frontline work team and said, hey, was today safe?

You know, how do they answer? And my experience is they go, yeah.

They give a vibey answer, which is not partially safe.

Yeah, it’s, it’s actually quite valid. But you can’t do anything with it. It’s totally useless from an organizational point of view. But if we push them on it and go, well, how do you know they’ll often fall back to what we made at home. And that isn’t a measure. So, while I correct, I’m doing sort of culture is the culture change is sort of the method, the strategy or the methodology? I suppose the strategy is about trying to create that. What’s the middle point? What is safety about? And I think it’s tricky trying to redefine it. So, shorthand is talk more about risk.

But I think that’s an important shift. Right. And I’ve grappled with this as well. I think we’ve made it worse by creating this concept of zero harm, zero injuries, zero incident. People start chasing this goal of zero, which then we know what happens. When you start chasing this goal of zero, it redefines what safety is. Frontline team members, typically when you say zero harm, they say it’s not possible, or zero injury, because they’ll say something could go wrong, equipment could fail, things the environment could change. And I think it’s okay to actually have something that’s not measurable, that pushes you to think about risk or a state of safety, the presence of safety as opposed to the absence of events.

Yeah. The interesting thing is I think we’re actually close. So, when we get to that tension point where they’re like, all right, we get it, stop measuring harm. Right. And it’s like, what else? And I’m like, okay, well, the issue is we can’t just start measuring other inputs because that’ll cause these other trade-offs around quality and quantity. So, 100%. I’m like, well, what if we focused on the things that actually contribute to safety? What are some of the inputs to it? Now that questioning. If you ask a group of frontline workers, give me examples of things that contribute to safety, they do say traditional stuff like equipment and procedures. They’ll actually say rules. But they don’t say paperwork.

But they do say rules. Nobody says paperwork.

Yeah, but they get the rules and procedures are part of it. The most common answer at Frontline is something about themselves, like experience, knowledge, training, skill. And then they talk about other features and traits like communication, support. And they say really cool stuff like trust and care and leadership.

Yeah.

And it’s like. And so, then I kind of. You can play with this and go like, I can ask a group of senior execs, is trust an input to safety? And it has to be right?

Right? It has to be. The research shows it too. But yes. Yeah.

If you want learning, like a prerequisite to learning is being told stuff to be told stuff. People need to have trust that when they speak up, they’ll be 100%. So that’s a prerequisite. So, trust, we know, is an input to safety. It’s entirely unmeasurable. You can’t create it through systems, but it’s still a thing.

And we accept it in business that trust is a thing that needs to exist, and you can’t measure it as well.

And we, you know, we like to measure things like our reputation. But you know, usually when we try and measure it too much, like we do a customer referral ratio and we say, you know, on a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to refer you first to a friend, but then the call center operator knows how they get measured and says a score of 9 or 10 is good. Like, you know, they, you give me the system. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But the concept of it is, is correct. So, it’s. And I have found that it’s been easy for us in safety to kind of say what doesn’t work. But I think it’s up to us to provide that viable alternative. What, what does something else look like that, that can be done that’s practical, even if it’s a little harder. And I think giving leaders some of the context. So, zero harm’s an interesting one in that I, I get how organizations get there and its popular, it’s easy.

You don’t want to. Yeah, you don’t want to put a target of number of people you’ve injured. It’s a very easy one to put.

Yeah. But it causes a lot of dysfunctions.

Well, so, yeah, and I sort of, so I acknowledge why. It’s just that then there’s. And so, my answer is always like, well, I think that zero harm causes more or has more negative trade-offs than positives. So yeah, when I’m doing work with leaders, I kind of say, look, there’s a bit of a grammar that I want us to be able to work with. Trade-offs, compromises, power, trajectory, ethics, these are things that we need to think about. Whenever you’re doing anything, so you’re going to propose something, what are the trade-offs? What’s this going to look like in five years? What does this do to power? You know, these types of questions. And then the tricky bit in there, and this sort of, is part of my other bit, is this idea that a pathway towards safety is risk. So, I see managing risk and risk as the input and safety is the output. And I know there are different views on that, but it’s, it works in that argument. And so, my kind of, my thing is embracing risk is like actually saying, yeah, risk is at the core of what we do.

We completely accept, in fact that there are unpredictability and uncertainty in everything we do. And that is not always the most attractive and easy thing for leaders to do. To embrace the idea that they don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow because I think they’ve been told they meant to. Like I think that leaders believe that they have to have a corrective action for every incident and they don’t. But I think it’s a really strong myth in safety. And in Australia if you talk to lawyers, the lawyers will be like stop coming up with useless crappy corrective actions that actually then get used against you to demonstrate what you could have done beforehand. Like, you know, so and same as I think that leaders think they have to prevent all human error, and you can’t. So, you know, so the viable alternative is, well instead of trying to prevent error, what if we said how do we manage human fallibility? Yeah, that’s the alternative in that language. Instead of trying to have a corrective action for every incident, what if we learned first and then decided if we needed to correct?

And in many ways if I think about on the aviation side, it’s been accepted pretty much in the 90s that humans are going to make mistakes, period.

Yeah, yeah.

And so, I can train you on things that are going to increase your probability to make errors. You will make mirrors. Everybody has only one person raised their hand when I asked them who’s never made a mistake. And, and so the guarantee is there so accepted. You can train around how you respond to it, you can prepare for it, but you also have to acknowledge when that error occurs, can we prevent from having a catastrophic consequence? If, if we could. Which is the risk side.

Yeah. If people are going to be fallible so you know, we can focus on in what ways do people make sense of this and how might they be fallible? And that’s a much more proactive way of looking at humans. Then how do I prevent human error? Because yeah, exactly, it’s impossible. So, look, if we want to get into zero harm stuff, partly it’s an anti-human philosophy.

Replace the human. You’d have to have a robot and even then, the robot’s programmed by a.

Human so well just to achieve zero would have to be perfect and humans are not perfect. It’s an anti-human goal. I mean one person I studied with made the comment that perfectionism is a psychological illness. So, I would never go so far as to accuse a group of senior leaders of having that. I would more say I’m just not sure you’re always aware of what you’re saying is you know, the outcomes of it and that that’s why the front line go it’s ridiculous because they feel it. They it’s Never hard to convince the front line that there’s risk in everything, that there’s risk and uncertainty. It’s the weird. That’s why I think leaders almost think they’re meant to do that. That’s why I think they’re meant to go to zero harm. So partly I try and give, you know, he’s a context. So wicked problems is an example of a methodology that I kind of go, hey, let’s talk about problems. All right? And some problems are simple and, and I normally say, what’s the opposite of simple? And they go, it’s complex. And I’m like, well, because I’m being me today, I’m going to put complex in the middle.

The good news is a lot of problems you solve are complex. But what if there are problems that can’t be solved? That’s really as a thought experiment, you know, simples at one end, complexes in the middle. What if there’s ones that they’re actually just uber complex? It’s just a language thing. But these wicked problems thinking came out of, I’m pretty sure the states in the 50s and 60s when sort of when policymakers were trying to tackle big things like health reform and social welfare and these big types of human based problems. And what it comes down to is for me, could we run into issues if we approach an unsolvable problem as if it was solvable?

Right.

So, it’s actually just a strategy issue. If you have a solvable problem, then you can put parameters around it, you can set deadlines, you can do certain things, you can define success. If you have an unsolvable problem, you have to treat it differently. And because otherwise where do you stop is actually the issue. So, one of the strategies when you have a wicked problem, and I think that safety and risk, by the way, and culture nearly everything with people is a wicked problem. We can’t give up on it. So, one of the strategies is you need to have a declared stopping point, otherwise how far do you go?

But it gets to the point. I love your quote when you or the question you ask people is, is it possible to make things less safe in the name of safety?

Yeah. Yeah. Can we, can we inadvertently increased risk in the name of safety?

Yeah.

And everyone says yes, but, but I.

Think that’s the part of getting. There’s a discomfort because you don’t want to give up. There’s an incident, you want to find a way to say it’s preventable and you come up with an action. The board requires an action. Right?

Yeah. So, for Me, I introduce something like wicked problems. Not as a sort of a tool. Well, actually, it’s sort of a. It’s a thinking. It’s a thought brick sort of thing, a way to anchor to it. So, if we accept that safety and risk of wicked problems that can’t be solved, they just have to be tackled by the way, which doesn’t mean we give up, we have to tackle them. That’s language. And by the way, when you hear people jibber on, like me about wicked problems and hear the word tackle, you’ll now hear, well, most politicians only use that word tackle, because most problems that politicians deal with are wicked problems. And so, they should not promise to fix them, they should just tackle them. But one of the principles is you need to have a declared stopping point, otherwise you keep going forever. The problem with safety is, the problem with the language of safety is if we say what’s safe enough, we get caught in, well, like, no harm.

It’s uncomfortable.

Yeah, right. So again, the language of safety is not as useful as the language of risk, because if we anchor to risk and say, is there a stopping point? How much risk are we meant to manage? Well, it turns out most companies already have that written down in their policies. They usually have a risk statement of as low as reasonably practicable or as low as reasonably achievable. Some sort of statement that says, we will bring risk down to this level, but we accept that there’s going to be some residual risk.

Right.

And in Australia, our legislation says that. Our legislation doesn’t say, keep people safe, it says, manage risk as far as reasonably practicable to keep people. And so, there’s an irony in that most companies that have a risk policy and risk structure and risk systems already have that functionality built in there. It’s just that safety comes along and then says, no, no, we have to prevent all harm. So, again, one of my arguments I put forward is by embracing risk and saying the best we’re ever going to do is manage risk as far as reasonably practicable, and also then being able to say, actually, if we embrace risk as being part of what we do, that means there’s opportunity in risk, there’s innovation, there’s learning. But in safety, if I say, is risk good or bad? The immediate answer is nearly always like, oh, I think it’s bad, isn’t it? Aren’t we meant to get rid of it? And that puts it at odds with all the other people sitting around the leadership team. Like, if I talk to the commercial person, risk is Opportunity. It’s how they make their money. And you’ve got the safety person going, no, no, no, we have to get to zero.

We have to eliminate all risk. And I think that’s one of the issues, is it. It puts them at odds. And so this idea of framing everything around risk, I think it simply provides a more meaningful grammar. And then. And then what we sometimes end up doing in companies is to give it a bit more structure. We develop an artifact or a new model where we take the output of this question, what keeps you safe? Get all of that. There’s lots of things said. Distill it down to about five or six things and turn that into an artifact or a model to anchor to, if you will. And then that becomes a central focus for, you know, if we said, well, what’s safety about? Well, safety is about having the right people and the right systems and communication and care and listening and trust. And risk is still. Still. So, it’s a roundabout way. And then, of course, you got to make sure your leaders have got the capability to engage and influence and have these curious conversations and. Sure, that’s the tricky part.

Well, a tricky part, sorry, part. But I think it links back to what you started out with, is safety is actually multiple different disciplines. It’s more complex than just you have one safety person. Culture is very different than engineering at Risk as an example.

Yeah, it’s a throwaway line, is sort of like, don’t ask me to design a guard, but, you know, don’t ask an engineer to change culture. Like, ironically, though, I could design a guard. It just might not be good. But I will say engines can change culture because also, like, you know, what do we mean by culture? That’s part of this conversation. But people do change culture by being part of it, obviously. But the intentional design, that’s the bit I’d say to leaders. I’ve had people ask about, you know, we want to. It’s pretty loose language, but, you know, we really want to get a safety culture around here. And I kind of go, do you mean, like, you’ve already got a safety culture? Do you mean you want, like, a different one or a better one? You know?

Right.

But then there’s debate within some areas of safety about whether safety culture is a thing shouldn’t just be culture or shouldn’t it just be. Should it be climate or should it be just how works done? And I don’t disagree with that. But it’s a good example of how fragmented we are, as I think we can do Better at being clear on saying, here’s my approach and this is what I’m talking about. And this is the little bit that’s good for.

So, so let’s go there. In terms of culture and culture change, you propose that rather than talking about harm, we are talking about risk. How does that change the language around culture?

Yeah. Cool. So, I mean, effectively for me, language is almost sometimes used. The sort of idea of language is kind of the currency of culture in that you can. Well, first of all, it’s what is culture. So, I use edge’s definition and model basically like shared beliefs and assumptions learned by groups as they tackle problems taught to others. So yeah, like to shift what people are thinking and doing. Language can do that. So, an example is, is this shift towards risk. And so I, at a leadership level encourage leaders to literally talk more about risk than safety. And there’s. I’ve got some models that I’ve been working on to sort of try and define what that looks like, even to the point like embracing risk, which is just sounds a bit like what does that mean? But you know, a lot of companies manage risk, but I think manage implies you’re still treating it like it’s something that’s external. And then I think some companies reject risk and I think that’s what some zero harm companies can feel like. They just reject the very notion of disruption and events and incidents. Whereas.

Right.

If leaders can sit with it and go, we understand there’s uncertainty in everything. When an event happens, they’re not happy with it, but it doesn’t freak out everybody. They understand that errors and disruption and variability and these are, these are normal things. And in fact, like is an incident information or is an incident, you know, the enemy? And so, you can see this happen when an incident happens? Well, actually the opposite. When an incident doesn’t happen, more mature organizations get more worried, like their incident rate drops way off. More mature organizations are going, hang on a minute, are we missing something here? Less mature organizations start celebrating and then next minute chaos happens. At some point something bad happens. And so that’s pretty high level. My example I’ll give if I can Share one at a really local level is the practicality of talking about risk over safety. So, one of my clients is a fuel transport business, and these drivers go out to customers, including farms, and they have to deliver fuel into tanks, and the farmers own the tanks. And the traditional sort of prescription or instruction was, you know, only fill a tank if it’s safe.

Sure.

And I guess, and often straight away, when I share that, people kind of like, oh, hang on, what’s a safe tank? What’s a safe tank? Now, in saying that, you can define it through some procedures, you can say it’s got to have an external ladder with a cage, it’s got to have a bottom fill kit. It’s got to have a sight glass. It has to be labeled. So, you can. You can set some binary things. The challenge is stability. And rust or corrosion is essentially impossible to write a procedure on. Now, when I’m working with the companies, I often frame up, I’m like, how many risk decisions are being made every day in the business? And there’s obviously thousands and thousands being made. And so, these decisions are currently being made. They’re just being made against the background of safe or unsafe. And the issue is, it’s sort of like, is that the way it works with a tank? Is rust safe and unsafe, or is it like, in this gray area in here? So, we just simply change the language with the drivers to be, you know, don’t fill a tank if it’s too.

If it’s too risky or unless it’s an acceptable risk. It’s still the same process, but the language matches what they’re currently doing, which is they’re thinking, they’re doing a little mini risk assessment.

Sure.

And then with the leaders, one of the challenges, again, I guess I try and talk to leaders about is you’re already trusting them to make these thousands of decisions. That’s the current case. So what if instead of this thought of we need to keep them safe, what if our goal was, how do we help them manage risk? So, it shifts the focus. Well, it puts the focus on the human, but it’s not the human as the object. It’s the human as the subject. It’s how do I support that human? And it’s actually empowering them. So, when we go back to the power conversation, I think a lot of people feel disempowered because they feel like the company’s just telling them how to be safe. They get held accountable if it goes wrong, but they don’t have any responsibility to make the decisions. So, this idea of that’s a philosophical thing. Your goal isn’t to tell them how to be safe. Your goal is to help them be safe, help them manage risk. Now, sometimes we’re going to give them procedures, but in this case, when we said, how do we help them decide whether a tanks too rusty?

And so, we got a bunch of expert drivers together and we’re like, what do you reckon? And they. They start telling stories and they show photos and them. And we do videos and we, you know, basically if somebody came and said, well, how do you make sure they know what, you know, what too much rust looks like? We go, well, we do this and it’s pretty loose. But we think it’s as best as we can do in this circumstance. And they were already doing it before. We’re just trying to help them do it. And so, the language matches what they’re doing. And then the final bit of that is this is more of an end thing. If they. When they’re talking to the farmer, instead of saying to the farmer, I can’t fill that tank, it’s unsafe. Which will usually get into a fight. Like, farmers love being told their tanks are unsafe, I’ll tell you. Yeah, exactly. Right. They’re just not happy about it. So, the language is, I can’t fill that tank. It’s too risky. And of course, the farmers aren’t happy, but their first question is going to be, what do you mean?

And then the drivers are, well, when I look at the corrosion or when I look at the stability or it doesn’t have a bottom fill kit. And they can be like, oh, but, but, but it’s fine. And then the drivers can be like, well, look, it’s too risky for us. It’s an unacceptable risk for our business. You can’t argue with that.

You can’t. Right.

And I think the only reason we’re doing that is to make the conversation more meaningful. But it’s partly because safeties broken. Because we talk about safety as this binary on off thing. It’s safe or unsafe. We made it home or we didn’t make it home. And that might be true sometimes, but it’s not true all the time. And that’s the tricky part. That’s complex.

And so, somebody could easily say, you’re just changing the language. How does it change context, actions, behaviors? Right, yeah.

Just to be clear, that’s exactly what I’m doing. So, it turns out language changes how we think 100%. Yeah. This is a power that can be used for Good or evil. In this case, we think that it’s adjusting to the language to better meet what they’re doing and how they’re thinking. But again, one of the challenges for organizations, that question you posed before often framed up the front, can we do things in the name of safety that can unintentionally increase risk? I know everyone says yes. And I say, give me examples of how a lot of them are too much. Too many procedures, too many rules, too many checklists, too many signs giving people too many things to think about, that sort of stuff. So, the issue isn’t that we don’t know we’re doing it. The issue is we can’t break away from it. We’re anchored to it. Correct?

Yeah. So, it’s not will, it’s technique for me. And so that’s why I think language can be a useful tool on that one. So, with the how do we break that over correcting. And so, I think leaders are kind of used to this. When something happens, their first question is often, what are we doing about it? And so, I say to them, well, you want to anchor learning first. That’s the strategy, learning. Anchor to learning, then decide. But the language that sounds like is, we might teach them to say, hey, what do we know? So, we’re on the phone. It’s not what are we doing? It’s what do we know? And hopefully there’s enough trust that the person at the other end can say, not enough yet. And they say, cool, let me know when you. Let me know when you think we know enough to even look at it. Because if the person at the other end thinks they’re going to get a phone call that’s going to say, what are we doing about it?

They’ll find something to do.

They’re going to make shit up. They’re going to. Or they’re not going to take the call or they’re going to hide events like, yeah, that. But I get why leaders do it because every leader who does it know that the leader above them is about to ring them.

Absolutely.

It’s why everybody’s got to be aboard. It’s got to be top down. This approach of, well, again, a question I might ask is, could you have an incident and not know what happened? And usually people are like, I guess that could happen. Could you have an investigation and not have any corrective actions? And usually they’re like, oh, I don’t think so. And so, I’m like, right, right. So that’s another strategy here is the systems themselves. Sometimes lock in the process. So, if you do a scam, I don’t know, its scam, North American, it’s an Australian model scam, very well-known Australian investigation model. But okay, I know there’s some variations coming out for those listening who are screaming at me, but, but basically once you start one, you have to have corrective actions. It’s like baked into it.

And so, it’s built into the system essentially.

Yeah. And so that’s in the same way that, you know, monthly board reports, the recordable injury rates baked into it. Right. Like it’s, it’s, somebody’s got to decide to stop and then see what happens.

And I’ve seen it stop, which, yes, is courageous, but then you have to typically replace it with something else.

Okay, cool. And I acknowledge that he’s like, what else? Yeah. And so that’s why I think too when I say language. It’s a really good comment by the way. I’m just changing language. I’m like, yeah, I know, but the language. And some systems change, I think too. So, we can say, for example, with some of my companies where we’ve done this work, we develop this model of what does a safe day look like. And what that model describes are the traits, features and characteristics of safety in action. And the data from that comes from when we ask them what contributes to safety. So, it’s entirely qualitative, but it’s like, yeah, what contributes to safety is having the right people using our systems care and listening to each other, managing risk. So it’s got these features in there. So that artifact becomes also usable as a tool. And then some of my clients, then you use that as their investigation model. Some of them use it for strategic planning, it becomes the central focus for it. So yeah, that question around like how do you actually do culture change? It is tricky, but language, systems change, you got to have people on board.

Of course, a bit of education. We need leaders to have the capability to do it as well. So, the leaders understanding what we mean by safety, risk and culture. I often do a section on psychology of risk in my workshops which is talking about conscious and non-conscious thinking and talking about biases and heuristics and timing to sort of go, you know, yeah, this is what’s happening. Actually, if I can share another really quick example, this is one of the most difficult ones I know a timing wise. So, the framing of this is about risk trade-offs, which risk is the most important risk to manage. And I’m not talking safety risks. So, I’m talking things like safety, quality, compliance, environment, schedule, cost. So, the framing here is we’ve got a task where we want somebody to do a check. It could be a pre inspection, it could be a prestart, it could be an inspection of an office area. Doesn’t matter what it is. Some sort of checking function which is a safety outcome.

Sure.

Because we’re systemized and we understand that humans are fallible. We’re going to give them a checklist. So, they’ve got a shopping list. It doesn’t make it perfect, but it makes it more likely that it’ll happen. Well, so we give them the shopping list, and we ask them to do it. So now the shopping list is both. The checklist is a safety tool. Once it’s filled out and it becomes a record, it’s now a compliance tool and there’s nothing wrong with that. It now is evidence of something as a record. Unless it’s got some knowledge in it as a record, it’s useless for safety. Now it’s done its job. So cool. We got happy days. Now we imagine that this worker is under a bit of time pressure and they’re going to make a decision. They’re going to make a trade off to either do the check and not have any checklist filled out or to sit down and do a quick tick and flick and. Yep. But not have done the check.

Right. So, the question for senior leaders is which one do you want them to do? Which trade off do you want them to make? The check or the checklist?

The check for sure.

Now the harder question, and this is clunky, I apologize for the way this question’s going to come out. The question when I’m talking to senior leaders is senior leaders is what you think they think you think.

Because you focus on the checklists that you’ve completed and you measure it, every senior.

Leader I’ve asked that question to is like, oh yeah, they probably think we want the checklist.

Right.

Particularly if it’s contractors, even more so.

But we tend to ding people if they didn’t fill the checklist because we assume that you didn’t do the risk assessment.

So, this dilemma of you’ve said you want the check, but you’ve just told me that you know that they probably think the checklist is an example of an unintended consequence. Nobody went out and did it on purpose, but you did it. Now when I ask them how do you think that happened? They’re usually pretty switched on and they’re like, well, it’s all we ask them for, right, so when we come back to this idea of language, its language is there is, there’s words, but there’s also focus. And language has power and energy. So, the absolute asking, hey, have you got that checklist? Have you got that checklist? It’s even worse when we use language like and this. Sorry, I’m about to get a little emotional here. But this language where literally workers will say they’ve heard this, if it’s not documented, it didn’t happen.

Yep.

Oh, yeah, that, that language is so powerful and it is directly responsible for this trade off that senior leaders will admit to of going, we want them to do the check. But I accept right now that they probably think we want the checklist and it’s simply because of the language and the focus in the organization, because that’s what everybody gets rewarded on short term is everyone gets in trouble for not having a bit of paper. Now the good news is, how do we tackle that? Well, we teach leaders to ask about the process first. So, they use their language and their focus to go, how did you pick anything up during the inspection this morning?

Did anything come out of the question?

Yeah, that’s all you’re doing is. So, it’s language change. But language when delivered by a leader is more than just words, it has power. And what we’re doing in that is basically convincing them that actually I’m more interested in the process than the paperwork. It in the same way I tell leaders, be careful of the first question you ask every morning of your team and there’s a way to test this too. Of go up to your team in the morning and say, how are you doing? And then wait and see if they pre answer a question for you. Like, anyway, schedule’s looking good and that’s priming. Right? Or the classic on site with safety people is they walk up to somebody on a construction site and the person’s already reaching down for the bit of paper and they didn’t ask for it, they just assumed that’s what they’re going to ask for. That was done through language. So therefore, correct language and focus is.

The strategy language and systems. Because I think the. Well, yeah, the part I like about the combination is system tends to build it in the process, tends to make it mechanical, repeatable, consistent. Because if we just do the language, then new leader comes in, if they haven’t learned the language. You go back this. I think the two components really key.

Yeah. And I think decluttering would be an example here. Like I’ve heard some people worry about the language, but also like, well, do you actually need that checklist every day? So, in the psychology part, if we break down the way people make sense of the world and things like flooding, bounded rationality and heuristics, it actually could be safer or less risky to use a checklist less often because people, even if they like the checklist, they get used to it. So, this isn’t saying tick and flick. This is just people start guessing what’s on a checklist. So, we might want to have maybe a daily check and then a weekly checklist. There’s no law saying we have to do all these checklists every day. We just made it all up. And I get why, because companies feel more comfortable with it. But then I think sometimes through looking at the psychology of risk stuff and the way people make sense, we can present a case to go. Actually, it could be safer in this case, removing the checklist portion. And the fuel transport business we did that; we got rid of. When they do their pre starts, they have a checklist available, but they don’t have to tick the boxes anymore to create a record.

And so, which is basically an aviation model too, by the way. Like not, not a maintenance model necessarily. But when pilots do pre starts, they have a checklist, but they’re not necessarily getting a bit of paper out and filling it out every now.

Generally, it’s a physical. It depends on the aircraft. But there’s also a physical component you take off. But the interesting piece is I’ve never seen a pilot not followed because they see the value and the reminders around it. And I’ve seen both engaged with it.

Right.

Because they’re both see.

Exactly. Yeah. We’re talking to truck drivers who are going. We think the pre starts are really important. We just think the bit of paper you make us fill out afterwards is a load of crap. So.

Right.

We. And if somebody comes along and says, how do you know they’re doing it? You go, go and watch them and go and ask them now also we’ve got maintenance records which showed that there were no issues and in fact, if anything minor reporting went up because they felt they had no time to do it. So yeah, that systems change, I think is. Yeah, absolutely. It’s. For me it’s secondary as an example because my philosophy is primarily culture. So, I approach it through does this.

But it reinforces culture. Right. I think it’s the two. The two bring it together.

Yeah, absolutely. It’s all mixed with it. Yeah. And then the risk component is well, if we’re going to declutter, how do we know what to keep and what not to keep? And then the question is, well, if you’ve got this concept of what are the five or six most critical things that are influencing safety or inputting safety, it’s like, well, does that system help that? Because if it doesn’t, that’s a. That’s straight away on the case for is it needed now again, by the way, that’s. Once you accept that humans have a capacity for, you know, they’ve got bounded rationality that I can only look at so many signs or think about so many things at once, then we can layer actually a really solid case for going. We got rid of that because of this. This. But I get that it’s scary. It was. It freaked out that fuel transport business, getting rid of that record. We didn’t get rid of the checklist; we got rid of the record and.

It sure of it. Of it being completed.

Correct.

They were really, Dave, phenomenal conversations. A couple of things that kind of jumped to mind was that this element of safety has lots of different specialties and you’ve got to have different. Like you talked about culture. Culture is not the specialty of an engineer as an example, but engineering out hazards, risks is so really that broader view of understanding. There are multiple disciplines in it. Shifting from harm to risk, I think is a really, key element.

Yeah.

That also changes language. And we talked a lot about language. I think it’s very powerful. It’s interesting because they. A couple years back, a couple decades back, you heard a lot about the power of language in the customer space. Yeah, experience, but not in the safety space. But this whole element of changing the language and I like the other part you talk about in terms of systems. Hugely important. Dave, if somebody wants to get in touch with you, what’s the best way for them to do that?

Yeah, LinkedIn’s definitely the easiest. Or my website, so that my business is people and risk and the website’s www.peopleandrisk.com and yeah. Dave Whitefield under people and risk on LinkedIn. So that’s the easiest and happy to chat and connect. And I’ve got some videos and some articles and papers and stuff.

I’ve written a lot of articles.

Yeah, I try. And it’s a good practice. Right. Is getting your thoughts out of your head into paper. They don’t have to be great; it’s just the practice of getting them out. I think is a really cool thing to play with.

Yeah, awesome. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Thanks so much, Eric. I really enjoyed it.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Dave Whitefield helps organizations tackle safety without doing more safety. He does this through a specific focus on improving safety and risk culture maturity, built on an organization’s existing foundation of hazard management and formal safety systems. The framework for this approach has been developed primarily from a social psychological paradigm, and is based on over 30 years of experience across a wide variety of roles and industries, as well as tertiary qualifications in behavioral science, occupational health and safety, and social psychology of risk. Dave’s work is designed to help people and organizations more meaningfully engage with safety by embracing risk.

For more information: https://www.peopleandrisk.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dave-whitefield-3b45501/

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