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.

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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.

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.