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

Sep 3, 2026

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

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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!

READ THE EPISODE

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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Managing Psychosocial Risks to Build Safer Workplaces with Kylie Long

Aug 20, 2026

Managing Psychosocial Risks to Build Safer Workplaces with Kylie Long

LISTEN TO THE EPISODE: 

ABOUT THE EPISODE

Don’t miss the latest episode of The Safety Guru! Join us as Kylie Long, a seasoned expert in workplace health and safety, explores the critical role of managing psychosocial risks to build safer workplaces. She provides a practical guide for leaders to better understand psychosocial risks, their business impacts, and how they can be effectively managed across organizations. Kylie explores the psychosocial risks that can impact workers’ mental health, including the importance of identifying and addressing aspects of work design and management that may cause harm. She also dives into the significant financial and cultural impacts psychosocial risks and injuries can have on organizations, from burnout, high turnover, and absenteeism to broader impacts on workplace culture and performance. Learn practical strategies for overcoming leadership challenges, managing psychosocial risks, and creating sustainable improvements. Tune in for valuable takeaways on strengthening psychosocial safety in your organization, building safer, more supportive workplaces, and enhancing overall performance and well-being. 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 Kylie Long, who is a workplace health and safety and psychosocial risk expert coming from Australia. Kylie, welcome to the show. Very excited to have you with me today.

Good morning from Australia. Thanks, Eric. Thanks for having me.

So, let’s get started with a little bit about your background because you have pretty diverse background that got you in this, into this space.

Yes, I do. So, uh, I’m a registered nurse. I still work as a registered nurse, uh, with over 30 years of experience in that space. But about 20 years ago, I shifted into workplace health and safety, primarily to move away from the shift work point of view, um, and working on a 24/7 schedule availability for the year. Uh, but my focus was always on cardiac where people got better, and then I moved into emergency space where I see the back end of when things go wrong. Um, so I transitioned into workplace health and safety, and I see how workplace systems directly impact people when they’re working under pressure, particularly in the emergency department.

Sure.

So, things that I would often see that really link into the psychosocial space that I work in are things like, I see staff with burnout or chronic stress or fatigue.

Sure.

Bullying, poor leadership behaviors and practices as well, as well as sometimes unclear roles within organizations, and also things around unmanaged workloads, which is particularly a hot topic within the nursing profession here.

I’m sure. I think in Australia, but also pretty much worldwide. I’ve heard a lot of it in NHS in the UK, pretty much every, every part. And same as the shifts, the burnout, very, very common. You touch on psychosocial risk. It’s something that Australia is really leading in, in that space. Tell me a little bit about what it is and what are some of the risks that it presents.

So psychosocial safety is not anything new inside workplace. Um, people tend to think it’s something new that need— leaders need to be doing, and organizations need to be doing. Uh, it’s just that there’s some more structure around it at the moment, particularly in Australia with the legislative requirement. So, it’s basically the legal requirement to protect your workers from psychosocial harm in the same way that we would protect our workers from a physical injury. It really focuses on identifying controlling aspects, um, of work design and management that can cause damage to the mental health of a worker. So, some key hazards or things that you might see in the workplace from an organizational perspective, you might see things like excessive workloads, and we just spoke about that before. Unrealistic deadlines, poor organizational change management. Change management’s a big one in organizations. Not many organizations I see do it particularly well. There are always learnings from change management processes. Intrusive sort of surveillance or poor physical work environments as well. But as a leader, you might see things from a leadership perspective. There might be poor support for your workers. There might be low job control over the tasks they’re actually doing.

Or it might be continued sustained high job demand. So, you know, that continual like working under pressure and, you know, you know, having high output that you need to be doing within the workplace, or really things around unclear expectations and poor communications, a particular one around then. And then there might be individual behaviors that workers might be displaying towards each other or, you know, displaying towards leaders, things like— the typical ones like bullying and harassment, aggression, and then that sort of toxic workplace relationships within organizations, which ultimately reflect the culture of the business.

Mm-hmm. And some of these are quite self-evident, but what would be some of the business impacts for organizations when they’ve got presence of these psychosocial risks or even on workplace culture?

So, if you’re looking at the business impacts, there’s things that are from a financial perspective, but also from a cultural perspective. So generally, Generally, when we look at sort of the data in Australia particularly, and I’m assuming it would be across, you know, globally as well, the psychological injuries actually cost 4 times than the physical claim injuries. And workers who sustain a psychological injury generally can take 5 times longer to recover, and they might be 5 times longer away from the workplace than physical injuries themselves. So, there’s a huge financial impact to a business there.

Sure.

If it’s not a claim that goes through, it might be things like increased absenteeism, but it also could be presenteeism as well, where we talk about that sort of silent sort of resignation that you’re just going through the motions. You haven’t resigned, but you’re just going through the motions and doing what you need to do on a daily basis, which really impacts the team performance, but also the productivity of the team as well.

Right.

You might have also see if there are people moving away from the business, you might see like high turnover rates, which then would ultimately cost businesses because they have to go and recruit, onboard, and train people. Or they might need to look at their succession planning when people leave. Like someone’s got to— if they haven’t got good succession planning in place, then there’s a gap there for a period of time. Um, there’s— if you’ve got burnout and disengagement from your workers, that can lead to things like slower decision-making and increased errors. So, I know that particularly from a nursing perspective, you know, when you do have that burnout, that there is increased risk of errors, particularly, you know, medication errors, those kinds of things. And I guess if you’re fatigued or you’re at, you know, stress levels increase, you are more prone to make mistakes, and you might need to rework things as well, which obviously costs businesses as well due to that time delay. And then if you do have that toxic sort of work culture, you might have an increase in conflicts or complaints coming in, or there might be things like blame behaviors and that disengagement again.

Yeah, so generally people feel like they can’t speak up because if they do speak up, they’re like, they’ll be sort of targeted, I guess, is the concern that they had, that the workers do have. 

Sure.

And then I guess from a leadership perspective, leaders might feel burnt out, or they might feel like they’re just doing firefighting decision-making, where they’re just doing that sort of reactive decision-making. And then it’s, you know, disruptive to the organization as a whole. So there’s lots of different things that sort of can come in, even if someone doesn’t put in a psycho— psychological claim. There’s sort of the other flow-on effects for the business.

Sure.

I guess a team that sort of functions in that sort of survival mode, they’re not sort of looking— they’re not sort of functioning in that sort of innovation and continuous improvement model which businesses want to focus on. So, it really does have There’s lots of impacts that it has on a business from not only an organizational perspective, but it flows down to leaders and workers as well.

Yeah, and ultimately the bottom line, if you’re not innovating as what you’re describing, it frequently has a bottom-line impact, but also, it’s an impact on physical safety. Because if you don’t feel comfortable speaking up, you’re also more exposed to one, make mistakes, but also, uh, to get into harm’s way.

Correct. Yeah.

And so, what are some of the best tactics an organization can take on to address and improve on the psychosocial risk?

Uh, so the, so from, from a leadership perspective, they can really start looking at some of those sort of key hazards that particularly in Australia that the legislation focuses on. So, identifying the hazards. So, start looking at the teams and start looking at things like, do we have excessive workloads? Or unrealistic deadlines? Do we have chronic understaffing and constant overtime? Like, are people missing their meal breaks? Are people staying back late on a, you know, regular basis? Right. Are people not sure about what their role actually is, or they might have conflicting priorities and they’re not sure what their priorities are for the week or even for the day? Um, so some things, some practical things like, you know, if you notice that your workers are skipping breaks or they’re staying back on a daily basis or they’re looking constantly exhausted, have a look at your workload and have a look at the staffing issues to see if you need to bring in— particularly during, you know, the peak times in retail that we look at, Christmas time— do we need to bring in more staff to cover that area at Christmas time, or Winter, when it’s the flu season, do we need to bring in more staff to cover sick leave rather than working down in the number of staff for that day?

If teams are confused about what their priorities are during, for example, an organizational change, need to focus in on what the change management tactic is that we’re using within the organization. And communication’s a key one as well during that process. So, when things are communicated clearly and consistently on a regular basis during a change management process, people feel less fear and there’s less rumors that go around. So that’s clear, consistent messaging that’s going out to people, so they don’t feel like that rumor sort of starts that’s not actually substantiated.

Right.

Um, if workers stop speaking up or raising concerns, that’s another red flag for leaders. So, um, often psychological safety is linked to a visibility issue. So, making sure that leaders are visible within the organization so that workers can go and approach them and talk to them.

Sure.

That sort of open-door policy, um, and be, you know, up opportunities for that communication and collaboration within their teams.

Mm-hmm.

And if leaders are feeling like they’re constantly firefighting and emotionally exhausted, um, that might reflect on things like poor systems. So having a look at their psychosocial systems and processes, the workplace health and safety systems and processes as well and have a look at what sort of control they can have over different aspects of that, or if they need additional support for themselves in that leadership role. And also have a look to see if complaints and conflict are actually increasing. So, look at what the workload pressure is, is, um, do we have any unclear expectations? And what kind of behaviors do we tolerate? Because that’s another one, like that, just, you know, that just sort of joking, I was just joking sort of, um, culture that we have. So, some things on a practical also point of view that, um, leaders could do, like those daily check-ins with the teams to see, you know, um, what’s making work difficult at the moment, what’s getting in the way of, you know, being able to do our job. Um, regular workload discussions, that really clear prioritization. So, I often take this with it when I’ve worked in organizations where there’s competing demands.

I’ll have a sit-down and discussion with my supervisor or manager and ask them, you know, what’s the focus for this week? What do you definitely need done this week? What can we slide till next week if we need to?

Sure.

And another one, particularly for those large organizations, is that bureaucracy. So that’s that red tape that, you know, we, you know, the hoops that you need to jump through to get things signed off. Um, trying to remove that unnecessary bureaucracy as much as possible for those leaders as well. Yeah. So, there’s some key things that leaders can actually do.

This episode of the Safety Guru Podcast is brought to you by Propulo Consulting, the leading safety and safety culture advisory firm. Whether you are looking to assess your safety culture, develop strategies to level up your safety performance, introduce human performance capabilities, reenergize your BBS program, enhance supervisory safety capabilities, or introduce unique safety leadership training and talent solutions, Propulo has you covered. Visit us at propolo.com.

And I think a lot of what you describe also seems to touch on the system, the system issues that are occurring. I know when we talked about this initially, you talked about leadership training as an example, which is often missing when somebody becomes a leader. The training doesn’t always follow.

Yeah, that’s correct. So often, um, leaders might wait like up to 7 years to actually get a leadership training in within an organization. So, they might be employed for that role based on their technical skills, but they don’t actually have any of that leadership training, um, in place. So, they’ve been managing things like conflict, or they’ve been managing workloads, or they’ve been managing complaints, but they don’t have any sort of formal systems and processes to get that leadership training and follow through what the practical things that they need to be doing. So, it’s often a missed opportunity. And then you’ve already got things ingrained in the way they’re doing things, systems and processes, and then they have to go back and rework that.

And I think sometimes even the frontline supervision is, is often, I find, one of the worst spots in terms of the availability of training. And these are the ones who are impacting the frontline team members typically the most and typically don’t have a lot of training, a lot of background. They were literally the best at the job before, and now they’re supervising a team.

Yeah, correct. So, you wouldn’t place someone in charge of like a high-risk machinery without training them. So why would you put someone in, you know, to lead a team if you weren’t going to give them that leadership development? So, um, and you know, they often work in those sorts of high-risk environments without, you know, little preparation or they don’t have any understanding of, you know, the people management skills as well. Because obviously it’s a practice that people need to, you know, be supported in because not everyone’s a natural leader.

And that’s, that’s an interesting point because in some cases I’ve seen over the years that the leader gets promoted and they see it as that’s what I need to do to get ahead in this organization. But not everybody’s meant to be a leader and sometimes there’s ways to get promoted in expert roles without necessarily having a team that you support.

Yes, completely agree and relate to that. And I am definitely not a person that likes to lead a team just because of all the, the things that are involved, the complexities of leading a team. So, I prefer to be an expert in the field that I’m working in. Yeah.

Right. And typically, how do organizations get started if they realize that they want to address psychosocial? You talked about some of the signs that organizations should be looking for? What would be some of the first steps, uh, and that you typically see?

So, for, from a, it’s mainly focused on a risk management, uh, framework. So, it’s around identifying the hazards, which we spoke about those hazards before. Yeah. Assessing, um, the hazards that you have within the workplace. So, identifying them on your risk matrix or prioritizing them within the business, where they sit, and then having a look at the controls, um, to see what kind of controls that you can put in place and then to manage those risks. So, prioritizing it, focusing on, you know, don’t focus on the low-level stuff like you do with physical hazards around PPE, which would be the policies and procedures. Look at that sort of engineer, you know, elimination and that sort of engineering sort of space about how we can rework what we’re actually doing, how can we design the work differently, what systems and processes do we need to put in place to manage that risk. And then going back and actually reviewing it as well. So, there’s some— the universities here are doing some work at the moment around, well, let’s have a look at where we’re sitting at the moment from a snapshot in terms of our compliance, but then let’s go through and do the work around the risk management perspective.

And then let’s come back in 6 to 12 months to see what, how, what impact we’ve had as a business, um, when we’ve introduced these new systems and processes to manage psychosocial risk. Um, that’s definitely not my specialty because there’s people that work in that space from there is some statistical analysis that they actually do to look at the change management process that businesses have actually been through to see what impact it’s actually had on them from a positive perspective.

Hmm. Absolutely. So why does the topic of psychosocial risk feel difficult for many leaders?

So many, um, leaders think that psychological safety means that it’s about mental illness management for their workers. Or it might be, they think it might be around therapy or managing personalities, particularly difficult personalities, or around avoiding those difficult conversations with their workers.

Yep.

It, it actually doesn’t, it’s not about that. It’s about psychological health that’s always sat within the workplace health and safety legislation.

Sure.

Um, but it’s just changed in terms of with the guidance for it around clarity around the guidance for managing psychosocial risks, but also now what’s enforceable under the legislation as well. So, the word psychological generally will create a fear within leadership and also individuals and teams. The term often triggers some discomfort amongst leaders. Leaders worry about things like, am I responsible for my employees outside of work?

Sure.

Can I still manage performance? That’s another one as well. They’re still concerned about performance managing people because of the implications of that. And particularly in the Australian space, there’s been a little bit of noise around that with large corporations, banking corporations, where someone has been performance managed and then they’ve gone down the line of self-harm. So, there’s been a bit, a little bit of noise in the media around that at the moment. So, you know, they’re concerned, can I still manage my people, um, you know, under this psycho— psychosocial legislation? And another thing is, will every difficult conversation that I have with my team, um, become a claim? You know, will they put a psychosocial claim in, um, against the organization? So, but in reality, its really around psychosocial safety is simply applying the traditional safety principles that we had to manage psycho— psychological harm.

Sure.

Just the same way as you would manage a physical injury, a, you know, physical incident or injury, we need to manage it the same way with a psychological harm as well.

And how does it differ from wellbeing programs?

So psychological safety isn’t really a wellbeing trend. So, it’s not looking at things like engagement surveys and culture surveys.

Sure.

And it’s not about diagnosing workers when you’re looking at wellbeing programs as well. It’s not that sort of quick fix that we need to be focusing on.

Sure.

And it’s not really around creating any new legal obligations as well. It’s really around moving away from wellbeing. It’s around looking at our workplace systems. Yep. How they influence that psychological health. Not just from a physical perspective, but also from that psychological perspective as well.

Sure. And I think to wrap up, what are some of the key takeaways you would have for leaders on this whole topic of psychosocial risk?

Really need to consider it as a core business risk management process. It’s not anything different than what you’ve already been doing. It’s not a new term or new trend that’s come around. And that leadership behavior is one of the strongest psychosocial controls in any organization.

Sure.

And your prevention really lives in amongst how you design your work, what your leadership capability is like within your organization, and we spoke about that in terms of that leadership development, what your communication style is with your workers, and that open-door policy and visibility within the organization. Is getting really clear about the role of the workers within each organization. And particularly, we didn’t touch on it, but around position descriptions, making sure they match what the workers are actually doing, um, and going back and having a look at those and really having a look around, is the workload manageable?

Right.

Um, and do we have respectful behavior that gone are the days of that sort of just joking kind of behavior, um, that we have had in workplaces. Because at the end of the day, when you focus on good psychosocial safety, it will create better performance within your business, a stronger culture. We spoke about the impacts, the negative impacts of psychosocial risk, safer workplaces and healthier workplaces, which ultimately lead to healthier organizations.

Right. And if somebody wants to get in touch with you, Kylie, to learn more about psychosocial risk or, or to explore how to drive improvements, how can they do that?

The best place to find me is actually on LinkedIn where I’ve got good visibility. So, if you just type in Kylie Long, um, and the other place is my website, which is, um, www.support supportandsafetysolutions.com.au. So, if you Google search, yes, Support and Safety Solutions, or LinkedIn for Kylie Long, you’ll find me on that platform as well.

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

Thanks, Eric.

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

Kylie Long is passionate about creating safe, healthy, and thriving workplaces where people feel valued, supported, and empowered to perform at their best.

As the Founder of Support & Safety Solutions, Kylie brings over 20 years of experience in work health and safety, psychosocial risk management, and workplace wellbeing across industries including resources, mining, construction, healthcare, rail, manufacturing, education, and government.

Her career began as a Registered Nurse, where she saw firsthand how health, leadership, and culture shape safety outcomes. That experience now underpins her consulting approach, helping organizations go beyond compliance to build workplaces where people genuinely feel safe, respected, and engaged.

Kylie is known for her calm, strategic, and people-centered approach, as well as her ability to translate complex work health, safety, and wellbeing requirements into clear, actionable steps that make sense in real workplaces.

For more information: www.supportsafetysolutions.com.au

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/kyliealongsafetysupportsolutions

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Ergonomics Meets Human Factors: Building Safer, Smarter Workplaces with Dr. Era Poddar

Aug 6, 2026

Ergonomics Meets Human Factors: Building Safer, Smarter Workplaces with Dr. Era Poddar

LISTEN TO THE EPISODE: 

ABOUT THE EPISODE

In this week’s episode of The Safety Guru, we’re joined by Dr. Era Poddar, who shares her extensive expertise in ergonomics and human factors to explore what these principles are, why they matter, and how organizations can proactively integrate them into workplace design to transform safety outcomes, boost productivity, and build safer, smarter workplaces. She discusses the wide-ranging benefits of integrating these principles, including better decision-making, reduced cognitive load for employees, fewer errors, a lower risk of serious injuries and fatalities, and measurable returns on investment (ROI) through improvements in quality, productivity, and overall safety performance. This insightful discussion also highlights how leaders can champion ergonomic improvements, leverage emerging technologies that are reshaping workplace design, and foster a culture of continuous learning and improvement. Tune in to discover how ergonomics and human factors work together to build safer, healthier, and more productive organizations. Don’t miss this episode!

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 Dr. Era Poddar. She has a PhD in industrial ergonomics, an MBA from UBC, does a lot of consulting work in the ergonomic space, and is also an adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia. Era, so happy to have you with me today on the show.

Thank you, Eric, for the introduction. And I would like to just— mini-MBA.

Mini MBA?

Yeah, it’s not the full MBA at length, but I will reflect on that a little bit. Okay. Why I mentioned that. Yeah, thank you. I’m really glad to be talking to you today.

Absolutely. So, tell me a little bit about how you got started in ergonomics and the passion you’ve gotten for safety and ergo.

Right, it’s a very interesting question, and I, I have been asked about this for so many times. I remember talking to in one of the platforms in my previous employer, some people were talking about different epiphany happened to them, and that’s what they came. To be very honest, I never had such, such incidents, or I would say positive incidents, but what I had in the— I first, to, to be very honest, I learned about the subject when I went to the university to do my master’s program. And so, it’s a human physiology master’s from University of Calcutta. They had a specialization in ergonomics and human factors. So that’s where first I came across the subject. No one knew about this. I was pretty intrigued about the subject because it has direct implications on human life. Like, of course, industry to design and everything. So eventually, I got to love the subject, and I became passionate about it.

And it’s taking you all around the world. And so that gives you fairly unique perspectives as well in terms of how you’ve applied ergonomics in that space. Maybe let’s start with what is ergonomics and why is it so important?

Right. I should go back to a little bit because I had to also touch base on things which, which intrigued me to be part of this subject. One was like, I started my career in a design project, a mining scenario, and I thought that would be pretty interesting for the audience. So, this project ran for 1.5 years, and then we, we redeveloped or redesigned, uh, certain equipment’s, over 10 of them. And during that time, I realized this subject has a different application and we need to pursue more. That’s where I started doing PhD and all that, all the things. Uh, but as you know, life happens, things change, and I, I started my career in a university setting teaching after completing, uh, my PhD. So, while teaching, there are different design applications from physical product design to interaction design and all that. Stuff. So then, as usual, things change, uh, and I followed my husband to Middle East, and that’s where, uh, it’s a different, uh, scenario of ergonomics kind of came into my understanding because it’s a business side of it. That’s when I started my business because there was less scope of applying in the education domain.

Sure.

And before that, I lived a little, uh, time teaching in Nepal, one of the universities, medical school. So, all these things and, uh, kind of intrigued me to apply different domains of this area as well as leaving my comfort zone, I guess. So, in Dubai, we kind of, uh, what we did was, as I said, there’s less education apply— like application or courses. However, there was a scope, uh, to represent companies who had multiple offices across Middle East to help them in their ergonomics initiatives. So, you could call it a beginning of a mini-MBA for me, hands-on practice, and which I wouldn’t have done otherwise if I wouldn’t be leaving my secured career path. And that’s where it’s a different approach which, which is taken from there. And then onwards, I lived in the US and practiced, and then it came back to Canada at one point. So, through all this journey, which why I, I wanted to mention that I— it gathered to me, one is I understood the local practices, standards, and all that.

Sure.

It also did an interesting thing to me. I became more and more open and like it grew empathy to me more. And that is one of the key factors we practitioners in ergonomics do. And it’s really one of the key important factors to be successful in this field. Right. And coming back to your question, what is human factors and ergonomics? Is essentially reducing the mismatch between product or system and the user. So, in one word, however, there are several, um, definitions you could find. That is, it’s a science of work design, science of workplace design, and so on and so forth. But we always emphasize on one important aspect aspects of ergonomics and human factors, two different words. Yeah, coined together, they actually mean the same according to International Ergonomic Association. Uh, the overall— I mean, uh, the definition is, is like human factors or ergonomics is concerned with the understanding of interactions among humans and other elements of a and this profession applies theory, principle, data, and methods to design and optimize human well-being and overall system performance. So, we always focus into the system level, uh, changes so that it affects in an effective way for long term.

So yeah, in one word, it helps, uh, I think, reduce any mismatch between any system and product. And improve productivity.

And so why is it so important for businesses to look at that combination of ergonomics and human factors? And what’s the ROI that comes from it? 

It is a very interesting question. And we still, I mean, it’s proven, understood that it’s a business-friendly concept.

Sure.

Why? As I said, it reduces mismatch in very different ways. From building design to the product design, even for software design. So, there is a coin word called usability. That’s actually how you reduce the mismatch between human and the software or any interface design. So, over the years, it has been shown to be kind of helpful for the business. And why it is helpful? It reduces error, less time, and sometimes the processes are improved in, like we call them, ineffective time. How you reduce them? All this together, as well as a different reachability and use— usability, or ease of usage of any, any such product. Or given— I will just give you some examples.

Yeah, that would be good.

Yeah. Like for, uh, suppose a company who has a production line who produces certain products. Now if the workstations are higher compared to who are operating and there are a lot of reaches, like you move your hands pretty quickly and there’s long reaches. Now if we do it once or twice, that’s fine, right? And if you do it throughout 8-hour shift, sometime industry have 12-hour shift. To. Sure. So, these are the different aspects. One is size-wise, one, one is process-wise. And suppose you have kept certain products or so stored certain products in a different section. Now the employee has to go bring them. So, there are different touch points and different level of postures which is happening, which could have avoided with a better design.

Sure.

When the industry is built or when the workstation— yes, when the workstation was designed. So that’s where if we incorporate these issues, like how this whole process works, where, where people has to interact, and who will be the person who will be interacting. It is a range of people, not every— like, for even given, uh, different genders, there are sizes. And suppose, giving example, 95% percentile stature, people may not be having 95th percentile hand length or arm length, right?

Right.

So, all these challenges kind of available, or it is there within any workstation workplace setup. So, the more we kind of accommodate these requirements since the beginning, you definitely kind of benefit. And end of the day, product quality also improved. So, this whole span of activities, if we consider it effectively, we will save on time, we will reduce injuries, and the injuries will be less fatal, as well as there will be less error. As a result, you will get a product which is quality-wise better and more product. So, it’s an overall win-win for both employees and the employers in a way. I hope I understood.

No, no, absolutely. Yeah. So, and it’s something, as you talked about, it can mean how I design a plant for how the workers are going to work in. But I could also retroactively drive some improvements. So, there is less movement that’s unnecessary, less lifting, bending, stretching, overreach occurring throughout the day.

Also, less decision-making.

Sure.

Because more and more workplaces becoming automated.

Yeah.

And people are even in regular manufacturing settings; we see employees has to interact with machines where they have to put input and given that the cycle number and what is the output number and all that. So, these— all these interactions are happening at like simultaneously.

Sure.

So, there are cognitive demand as well as physical demand. I, I just gave you a very simple industrial scenario. So, there are complex scenarios like pilots interacting with machines, or we are driving a car. There are so many distractions these days, from external to internal to phone and displays and stuff. So yeah, it makes more sense to incorporate through the design at the beginning. However, it could be applied in every stage.

Sure. Yeah, to drive improvements, to improve the work practices, but also the cognitive load that you mentioned before in terms of the decision-making. I like your example of the car as well. So very, very beneficial. As you said, there’s a The ROI is really because it’s helping, one, the workers, but it’s also helping productivity directly. If you have less distractions, you have less complexity in your decision-making and less movement to complete the task. Is that fair?

It is fair. And I should also add where it is, most of the time, the ergonomics or human factors concepts are applied towards later phase, like when you have an injury, right? And this is not that proactive, more reactive approach. Unfortunately, in— especially not even only in Canada, I have seen in the US or even in the Middle East, that’s where we are called as a practitioner. So, when everything is all set, you have a process set, you have a design set, and there are also different teams working together, not including one of, like, human factors or ergonomics professionals within. So, what it does is there’s always a gap remaining. So, end of the day, which we see, there is an incident, and most popular incident which relates to ergonomics, human factors, that’s musculoskeletal injuries.

Yep. 

And that’s where people think that’s what ergonomics is, which is not at all, uh, right directions. But that’s where most of the time we are called in. So as there also huge number of dollars are lost every year, if we see the recent statistics even through WorkSafe BC locally. It’s over $2 billion of cost. 

Sure.

And over the year, like recent years. So that is something has to be definitely seen as one of the ROI where we could control this cost.

And ideally done proactively, right? So, as you mentioned in the plant design, or even at a later stage to drive improvement.

Yeah, true. Unfortunately, that is not always done that way. 

Yeah, unfortunately not. Yes. Yeah, unfortunately, sometimes you need an event to realize it wasn’t designed the right way. So, one of the things I know when we first connected that you touched on, which I thought was very interesting, is around changing workplaces. And there’s a lot of changes in the current workplace. How does that impact the space of ergonomics and human factors.

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Few things we have to understand. Since World War II, when the subject evolved, many organizing factors, there’s very less understanding across other disciplines about the breadth an application of the subject. So, when, uh, the workplace changes considerations came into play, especially in Canada with the Inclusive Act and all that thing, uh, the concept remained pretty old. Like, it’s not that new, right? Uh, so the changing workplace has been— we see, just giving you an example, if we visit, even you come to any public place or any workplace, you will see different variations of populations coming from different cultures, background. So how does it affect the workplaces? Uh, one is size, like your anthropometric measurements. You have a different language spoken throughout like when growing up. So, you are learning a different language, you are getting instructions through different languages. As the same— at the same time, we have different, uh, equipment’s incorporated into the workplace, more like recent AI. And over the years, we have seen a lot of more automation happen. So, employees are interacting with various different as I mentioned earlier as well, the physical, like manual material handling to giving input to the machine to do a proper setup speed.

Sure. And the production. At the same time, you are getting information through your handle devices.

Yep.

And you are also interacting with some of those displays. And there’s a workplace changes happen through the age. We have older work curse, who has limited ability to interact with digital devices, right? So, these are a complex scenario where you have different, different genders, you have different background, you have different language, culturally different thinking. We don’t have enough time to talk about that stereotype things, but it is there. We think differently, we perform, understand differently. So, these vast and different sizes, as I mentioned, we incorporate this whole group of population within a particular workplace. Right. So, definitely there will be repercussion on that. Yeah. Unless it is really designed well or it is accommodating all this requirement. And at the same time, you have differently abled people who have limitation like moving or different level of cognitive abilities. So, there are so many different challenges within that place. So, when we say the accessible or universal design concept, so we, we talk about all of these people is welcome in that workplace or any space, and they can easily interact with all these different things. And how we make those things user-friendly for them. So that’s when we talk about different level of accessibility or universal design.

Which really means a lot more flexibility in terms of how you would interface with equipment, the technology, potentially very different sitting position, if in that scenario, you’re talking about, where there’s flexibility of adjusting depending on what’s right for that particular individual.

Yeah, I can provide you another simple example. Suppose you are accessing, uh, like an ATM machine, right? Right. So now, for people like you and me, I will go walk, park the car, go walk and access. It’s not a big deal. We know these are bigger buttons and everything. Now consider this person who cannot move, who is on the wheelchair.

Yeah.

Now there are different level of accessibility they need. So, he has to access the building first. There has to be certain ramp where they can access. And then there has to be certain reach so that they can see it, still see it, and interact with the machine, right? Not only physical buttons, but there are also digital buttons. 

Sure.

So, then there are all these requirements. So, you have a person who will operate this machine standing, there’s a person who may come on the wheelchair, there’s a person who may come in differently, other way of different, and there is person who cannot see. And also, the language-wise, so people may read English well, some may not, some may come from suppose Mandarin They speak Mandarin, reads Mandarin or Japanese.

Sure.

So, consider a world where all these people live together and interact with the machine. So that’s where the usable or universal design or accessibility come.

And bringing that to workplaces as well, because the same example, it’s how do I design a work environment, whatever that work environment might be, to have that flexibility in terms of interaction.

That’s right.

Excellent. And I know one of the themes we also touched on is around now that we’re hearing more and more about exoskeletons. How does that play into these human factors and ergonomics space?

That is another interesting area of time. Anytime we talk to colleagues, they come up with this question. So, I was recently listening to one of the webinars done by— I don’t remember the organization, but the person who was presenting, Dr. Christopher Reed from Boeing, he was reflecting on many such research and applied within the Boeing scenario. I will refer some of her— some of his topics. So, exoskeleton is, of course, related to ergonomics. It’s not like insects and others. So, it’s an external structure which helps us to support while working. 

Sure.

So, we call them industrial exoskeleton. And there are different types. Some are automated. I mean, they are more advanced these days. But essentially, it is built to support while working.

Right, sure.

So, few, a few different types. I’m very broadly, I’m touching this. One is made for postural assist system, like when someone is working within an environment or very concise space where you cannot do any engineering changes, where you cannot implement those changes. So that person has to work in a certain position, suppose electrician, in that space. You cannot bring in any other equipment. So continuous working within that space and having those shoulder and arm muscles in the, like, over above shoulder level. So that’s when this type of exoskeleton helps. Like, it’s a postural support where hands and shoulders and— sure, other, other part is supported. There is other type of where you have full body support, like especially doing manual material handling where any other engineering changes or equipment could be provided in such certain scenario. It seems that quite a few other companies, including Boeing, is using them while making the airplanes, not— I mean, after it is done, so before that part. So since employees are using them, I had also interacted with few local clients Sometimes, uh, some of the workers like it, some don’t.

Of course.

So, some of them— I, I was amazed to hear this— the— my contact person who was saying that 2 or 3 of them didn’t like it, so they never would wear them.

Sure.

So, there are 1 or 2, it happened that they wouldn’t open it. Without that, they cannot perform. So, there are different varied level of acceptance. Sure, there’s definitely different types of acceptance level as well as, uh, I mean, the type of work people does. Depending on that, this is effective. So, it’s always the first thing we as a professional suggest. If there is option, engineering changes is better options. In any day. However, there is no, I mean, opening to incorporate such changes, then explore this. Still, there’s a lot to— yeah, there is a lot of research has to go in. It’s still developing.

Yeah, absolutely. I think for me, the first example I saw of this was, I’m going to say it’s almost a decade ago, and it was in Japan with baggage handlers, and it was around how do we reduce the lifting and switching that’s happening when they’re moving bags, which sounded very interesting if you think about the repetitive motions and the— you don’t even know how heavy a particular bag is going to be, which adds a lot more risk as well to that equation.

Yeah, you’re right. And also, I remember mentioning I think 6, 7 years back, uh, still the COVID at the beginning of COVID or before that, there were, uh, we ordered some furniture’s and people came to deliver. Some of the company who was contracted to do that, so the employees, their employees were using those exoskeletons to move those furniture’s. Yeah, so I have seen, it’s interesting, few companies adopted them pretty well. And then sometimes, as I said, it’s, yeah, not always accepted.

And as you talk about change, I think one of the things that makes good sense to transition to is what’s the role of a leader in driving that change, right? So, they can— we talked about your role coming in and assessing, but how can a leader support change?

It’s a Very important and interesting topic, and that’s one of my other passion area these days— how to incorporate human factors ergonomic concept within the strategy, right? So, we all know this concept is old enough. However, it’s less accepted amongst the senior leadership.

Sure.

One main reason is the language we speak. So, language has to be such so it is acceptable to the senior leadership. And senior leadership, one and important part which I realized over the years is, of course, they have to be trained in certain aspects. So, we as a professional has to be able to speak that language which caters to that group. At the same time, leadership has to be a little bit open towards these new concepts coming in, right, which is beyond the conventional, okay, they have— there are standards, engineering standards, and we— sure, we have it, then it is all done. It is not always the case because at the end of the day, users are human, right, right. And or whoever is using it, they are the one who is manipulating with the system.

Right. 

So, the leadership’s main, I think, the initiative would be understanding, like keeping a little open mind, one. Second is putting a human factor economics concept as a strategy goal, which is actually part of their business decisions. Then if you have a budget, allocated already, then it’s much easier to implement at the design stage than at the level when an injury already happened.

It really touches the whole space of safety by design, even in terms of if you, if you do things right at the front end, and you’re putting in the time and the effort, you’ll be much better off later.

Exactly. And also, we always say this, you have as a company, every company has their standard operating procedure or SOPs. So, it is always smart to align the programs, including safety, ergonomics, and other programs, to that, right? It’s, it’s much— it makes a lot more sense. And if you remember, I touched upon briefly on a certain point that we have various departments within a company. Unfortunately, some of them, they don’t always interact, or there’s less, less scope, or whatever may be the reason, that interaction is very important. And leadership can bring in that interaction so that same things are simultaneously done but not applied effectively. I have seen that in my practice. That quality team had come up with an idea which is not fully applicable because of the other challenges, However, there was another department have developed a newer idea and applying them within the team which others didn’t know. So again, the communication, communication, and allowing this communication to happen free flowing among different departments without a bias. So that is another leadership role I, I think would be very helpful in such initiatives.

Sure, absolutely. And so, if somebody wants to get in touch with you, what’s the best way to do so? And maybe share a little bit about the type of work that you do to help organizations in this space. 

Right. So best way to reach me through LinkedIn. Also, we have our website, www.argoera.com. You can and definitely click to that website and see our services.

Yep. 

We do offer different types of services. We do offer the program support where the corporations can— an ergonomist like us or others can work together to come up with a plan or aligning their SOPs, which is more long-term. And I think we focus more into that. However, as I— excuse me— as I said, there are a lot more focus into risk assessment or management. So that’s where a lot of business come through that area. So, we do, of course, cover that risk assessment. It could be your industrial risk assessment to corporate. At the same time, we also do worker compensation. Kind of support. I mean, you do need that kind of risk assessment as well, and all, uh, different types of workshops, being it the executive workshops to strategy level workshops, and also participatory ergonomics.

Makes sense. Excellent. So, Era, thank you so much for joining me today. Appreciate your time.

Thank you so much.

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. Era Poddar is a Canadian Certified Professional Ergonomist (CCPE) and safety specialist, with broad international experience across North America, the Middle East, and Asia. Her expertise covers industry, academia, corporate, and government sectors. She holds a Ph.D. in Industrial Ergonomics, a NEBOSH International General Certificate in Occupational Health and Safety (practical applications), and a mini-executive MBA from the Sauder School of Business, UBC.

With more than twenty years in consulting, coaching, training, and research related to ergonomics, human factors, workplace accommodation, and safety, Dr. Poddar helps organizations meet goals in health and safety, ergonomics, and MSI control. She currently sits on the Board of Directors for the Canadian College for the Certification of Professional Ergonomists (CCCPE) and actively contributes to the International Ergonomics Association (IEA) Health and Safety Technical Committee, where she leads a group advising on ISO 45001: Guidelines for Ergonomic Processes. Additionally, she is part of the Canadian Mirror Committee (CMC) to the ISO Ergonomics TC 159.

Era is the founder director of Ergoera Services Inc. (https://ergoera.com), which provides customized ergonomics and occupational health and safety services and training. She also serves as an Adjunct Professor at the University of British Columbia, guiding master’s students and professionals in industrial ergonomics, injury prevention, design ergonomics, human-centered design, and user research.

Known as an innovative entrepreneur, leader, and public speaker, Era balances her roles as consultant, educator, researcher, and mentor. She has successfully managed multicultural teams globally, including in North America, Asia, the Middle East, and India. Her work involves leading excellence initiatives, promoting accessibility and universal design, developing safety and ergonomics strategies, and implementing quality improvement programs. Throughout her career, Era has spearheaded ergonomics programs, risk assessments, participatory projects, gap analyses, and process improvements in sectors like manufacturing, mining, food processing, government, corporate environments, and healthcare. Her evidence-based, user-centered approach supports healthier, safer, more functional, and productive workplaces, reflecting her commitment to “Design for All.”

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

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The Power of Coaching: Building Safety Habits That Create Lasting Impact with Dr. Nicholas Weatherly

Jul 23, 2026

The Power of Coaching: Building Safety Habits That Create Lasting Impact with Dr. Nicholas Weatherly

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ABOUT THE EPISODE

Join us for a compelling conversation with Dr. Nicholas Weatherly, CEO of Deliberate Coaching International and a seasoned expert in applying the science of behavior to safety, leadership, and performance systems. In this episode, Dr. Nic explores the power of coaching, how to bring it into your organization, and how leaders can use it to drive meaningful and lasting change. He explains how small, consistent coaching interactions build safer habits, strengthen teams, and create a culture where people are set up for success. Discover why the safer path is the best path, how intentional coaching conversations drive meaningful behavior change, and why habit formation is essential to improving safety culture across an organization. Dr. Nic also shares practical coaching strategies leaders can apply immediately, including the power of asking open-ended questions, having brief but purposeful conversations, and consistently reinforcing positive behaviors. Tune in to discover how intentional, consistent coaching can transform safety culture one behavior at a time!

READ THE EPISODE

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

Hi and welcome to The Safety Guru. Today, I’m very excited to have with me Dr. Nicholas Weatherly. He’s a CEO of Deliberate Coaching International. He’s also a professor at Endicott College. And let’s get started. Really happy to have you with me on the show today. Tell me a little bit about your background and how you started in the safety space.

Yeah, really appreciate you having me on. Big fan of your, of your show. So yeah, appreciate the opportunity. So, my background in safety, so I’m a behavior analyst by training. I got my undergraduate through PhD in applied behavior analysis applied to organizations. So, for the past about 20 years or so, I’ve been focused on researching behavior patterns, understanding why people do what they do. Especially in high-risk environments. You know, we work with organizations all over the world to set up cultures and safe practices. So, my father worked in injection molding, and that was the kind of the— so when I was an undergraduate, so I always saw his work and the evolution of safety practices in his work and lack thereof. So that was my first kind of dabble into industrial safety. He’d always bring me with him to his shop. And then I did some assessments in injection molding when I was in college, uh, just to kind of get my feet wet there. Cause I was comfortable with the industry, really liked safety work, started doing some work in hospitals and, uh, clinical settings in government and kind of moved into you know, a lot of energy spaces, everything from nuclear to oil sands and natural gas, you know, and then some construction spaces.

Sure.

So, so yeah, that’s kind of been my safety, safety journey. You know, working with other fields, you know, I’m, you know, I’m there just to help kind of identify and build patterns of behavior to help build safety culture. So, so yeah, that’s why I love so much about it. I could be at a different industry any, any given day, and I love working in safety and safety leadership. So yeah, that’s a little bit about how I, how I got here.

Sounds excellent. And a lot of the work you do is in the coaching space, same as the name of the organization you work with. I’d love to explore the topic of importance of coaching, and maybe we start around what is coaching, because too often you hear the words, I’m going to coach you, but it’s a negative because it’s performance management. But this is not the context we’re talking about, right?

Yeah, great question. So, there’s a bunch of different types of coaching that are out there. And I just want to preface that our version of coaching is specifically behavioral coaching. And I, I get a lot of value out of different coaching models and not all of them have the same, what we kind of talk about as form and function, you know, what coaching looks like and then the purpose of coaching. And the purpose of our coaching model— and, uh, Dr. Paul Gavoni and I developed, uh, deliberate coaching approach. We have a few books out on deliberate coaching. We use the science of behavior, behavior analysis, as the foundation of our behavior-based coaching model. And the purpose of our coaching is to build habits, to essentially to help people become good observers of their behavior. And their impact so that way they’re engaging in the safe path, the ethical path, the mission-aligned, safety-aligned path, not just because they have to, but because it works for them. Sure. Uh, and so that’s why we focus on coaching interactions. We focus on very person-centered. It is, uh, very driven on what is important to the individual worker. What, uh, uh, supporting, setting them up for success, supporting progress along the way, making sure that they’re not in this kind of fear-based environment, that they’re seeing what’s working for them.

So that’s the purpose of our coaching is really kind of a hands-on field coaching. We do remote coaching work as well, but, uh, really, you know, getting out there with them and helping them see what’s working, what’s not working. And, you know, from an organizational perspective, it’s, if we can, if we can make the individual worker’s life better, it’s going to ultimately trickle to the organization. It’s going to make their life better as well. So, it’s not just about, you know, doing this because the boss says this or because it’s good for the organization. It is, but, uh, we want to make sure that we can make their lives easier to show them that, you know, you don’t have to kind of. Cut corners and do all these other things in order to kind of get the outcomes that you want. So that’s what coaching means for us, setting up people for success, not spending all of our time on training and retraining and signage and more signage, right? But setting them up for success and then making sure that they get the support on the job when they need it. So that’s the critical piece for us.

So, so I like one of the things you were talking about in terms of— I think those are actually your words— um, the safer path can be the best path. So how do I bring those two together? Because often when it comes to shortcuts or drift is we start thinking that a more convenient path is the better path.

Yes, yes, 100%. And that’s, that’s why, uh, you know, one of the, the, the center pieces of what I do is really just acknowledging that, you know, people do what they do because it works for them. You know, we don’t have to blame them. We look at the systems, and it might not work for the organization. It might not work for their peers or clients or whomever, but it’s working for them. If not, they wouldn’t be doing it. So that’s why we want to, you know, show them that, you know, there’s a number of different ways of getting results. What I always talk about with my clients is, you know, there’s a number of different ways of getting results. We get results by focusing on the most valuable part of any organization, which are the people, right? And really supporting the people and showing them that, all right, this, you know, change is hard. Change results in a lot of error. And I want to be able to help them find some quick wins, help them find an easy path, help them, give them the resources to make them more fluent in what they need to do.

So that way it’s, you know what? I can actually get my job done, get my job done better, and still be safe. You know, help me get to that point. And that’s why it’s such a— I enjoyed, you know, this individualized, you know, tiered coaching system that works from frontline leaders all the way through as high as I can get.

So, yeah, it’s not— it’s not like we said before, it’s not coaching as performance management. It’s coaching to get better at what we do.

Yes. Yes. Though when I do coach action plans with people, we help them identify things they want, things that are working for them that they want to enhance, things that aren’t working for them that are barriers in their environment. What do they need from their boss? What do they need from colleagues and their direct reports? And just, you know, and I always tell them, you know, what, what will make your life better? You know, and let’s just start there. They pick the goals, we work down the barriers, and then we track progress along the way, you know, really making sure that we’re reinforcing there, their progress, not waiting for them just to be perfect at the end, and just kind of helping them get the tools they need to be successful. And, uh, you know, very, very, uh, proactive and, and, and positive approach. So that way, you know, as you know better than anybody, you know, people freeze up in, in environments of fear, you know, when they’re just on their tips. And you don’t want people doing that in safety. So, I want them feeling comfortable talking about barriers and, and what’s working.

So that’s why I love coaching so much. It’s, it’s, uh, it, it really helps. You can, you know, meet people where they are, and I love that.

So, so tell me a little bit about how you develop that coaching skill set, because that’s the key. It’s, it’s not about Nick showing up and coaching thousands of people. How do you get leaders to become really good coaches? Um, just like any sports team, you’ve never seen a sports team without a coach.

The starting point, you know, again, you can attest to this, you know, often when I come in, I’m, you know, the 8th consultant that they’ve seen. I’m just the different flavor of the month. And, uh, and I completely, you know, I completely get that. You know, the people who hire me are significant levels above the people where I want to be working, you know? So, they’re, they didn’t hire me, their boss’s boss hired me. So, they have no idea. They’re just meeting with me because they have to. Uh, so one of the first things that I want to do is just really identify, as I mentioned, just things that will help them, and then let’s just start there. Focus on getting some quick wins, things that get some momentum going, so they can just see value in the process, and so they’re meeting with me again, practicing what I preach, not just because they have to, but because they’re actually seeing some value in it. Sure. You know, that’s my ultimate goal. And so, we start from there, and we really kind of build it up systematically. The, the first thing that I’ll start with is, you know, as the behavior person, my focus is on none of my stuff works if leaders aren’t interacting with folks.

Of course, you know, there are barriers. You know, sometimes if you’re in a big mine, it could take 2 hours to get from one direct report to another. So, one of the first things that we work on is we have to find ways for you to interact with your direct reports. You know, that’s the first barrier, because if not, I can preach to them and train them on all these other things.

No impact.

No impact. There’s going to— they’re just going to think That’s adorable, Nick. I really appreciate you thinking that’s going to work. And then they’ll leave and ignore me, wait for the other consultant to come in. And so, I really focus on that, breaking down barriers for the interactions. Once they start, you know, being able to interact in any way they can, then we start fostering the quality of those interactions and really trying to get them to see the value of the interactions that they’re having, helping their direct reports see the value of the interactions. And just meet with them a few times a month. I meet with their leaders also that are in the coaching program a few times a month. We have about quarterly meetings where, where if I’m coaching a frontline leader, we’re meeting with the frontline leader and their boss at least quarterly just to kind of check in to see how things are going, make sure everybody’s seeing what’s working. Because they need to be supporting each other. And yeah, we just kind of work from there. You know, it’s really just about individualizing it and helping them see that, you know, is this working for you?

And to be like, I’m on, I’ll be honest, dude, like this is not working for me at all. Like, all right, well, we got to tweak some stuff. We got to break down some of these walls. So.

Sure. And can you walk me through an example or a couple of examples of how this comes to life in an organization? And starts shifting culture ultimately?

Yeah, that’s a great, it’s a great question. I have an example and it’s, it’s, I was, I was working for a, a larger mine that brought, that had a bunch of external consultants, and they got some senior leadership, new senior leadership. And they said, I’ll be honest, I have no idea what any of you do. How you work together. We’re wasting a lot of money on you. So, they flew us all up to talk about, to give presentations on what you do. And, uh, the, there were, you know, the process safety people, there were the people focusing on training. There were people who were doing kind of what they called like group coaching or something like that, which is more like, was more like classroom-based coaching. Or, uh, there were people, there were the auditors, you know, people working on new, uh, new tech and things like that. And, and then I went up there and then I talked about, uh, I talked about the field coaching and the, the behavior-based aspect of working with individual leaders. And there’s this consultant in the back, this very nice, very nice lady. And, and she raised her hand and in the most condescending consulting voice you can think of, she said, so you like help people wear their seatbelts?

And they all laughed and laughed. And, and I said, I said, well, yeah, you know, if that’s part of it. I said, you know, as we’re talking 3 levels ahead of these people spending months talking without them being involved, and even when they are involved, they’re just being talked at. Sure. They still have to show up at 6 o’clock in the morning and work in a very at-risk situation. And they’re all being ignored. You know, they’re there. They don’t know how they’re being evaluated. So, they don’t know how they’re being judged for promotion and for, for raises. They’re being evaluated by people who have probably rarely seen them work, you know, and then while they’re waiting for all these things to trickle down, nothing’s getting done. They’re taking survey after survey and all these types of things. So, while all this stuff is happening, they need help. You know, somebody needs to go to them and say like, hey, you know, what can we do to help you tomorrow?

Sure. 

It’s like, like, let’s do this tomorrow. And, um, and that’s what I love about what I do is that, is you, you know, I’m not an expert in any of these areas. My, I’m just the behavior person. That’s what I’m here for. They’re the expert in what they do. I just help them get alignment with behavior and results, break down barriers, get momentum, build habits. And the— and what I told them was, you know, at the time we had worked with about, uh, you know, and colleagues of mine, we had worked with about 500 or so individual leaders. And so, what I said is that, you know, we have about 500 or so individual leaders that we’ve worked with so far. Each of those leaders had to identify at least 3 priorities in terms of, uh, you know, behaviors and impact that they want to focus on, right? Uh, things that are important to them. Each of those behaviors often had sub behaviors that we had to build up as part of it. And then they take those and then working with the leaders, they’re doing the same thing with their direct reports. So, they’re working on those own, their own behaviors, building those habits and those sub behaviors and then moving along.

So, if you take that, if you take 500+ leaders with 3+ behaviors, each one trickling down to their direct reports, like that is what demonstrable culture change looks like. You know, we’re changing culture one behavior at a time, you know, impacting these patterns of behavior. And it’s like, you know, so you could talk about culture change from an abstract level, but that is, you know, that is mathematically how you can really get demonstrable culture change while yes, helping people just be safe on a day-to-day basis. You know, so that I like that example because it started out very condescending, but it was a good teachable moment. It was a good opportunity to talk about, you know, sometimes we forget the human in these safety conversations.

We often forget there’s a human. In that, in the context, right? And so, I like what you’re saying in terms of one behavior at a time. I often use the analogy of the movie Any Given Sunday, inch by inch, right? In terms of that’s how you win is every inch, and it takes, you win inch by inch. And so very much aligned in that standpoint. The other piece that struck me from what you were talking about before is You talked briefly about habit development, um, with, with those leaders. Tell me more about how you’re building habits.

This episode of The Safety Guru Podcast is brought to you by Propulo Consulting, the leading safety and safety culture advisory firm. Whether you are looking to assess your safety culture, develop strategies to level up your safety performance, introduce human performance capabilities, re-energize your BBS program, enhance supervisory safety capabilities, or introduce unique safety leadership training and talent solutions, Propulo has you covered. Visit us at propulo.com.

Uh, yes. So, the main foundation of the habit development process is the, the coaching interaction, and we focus on brief frequent, consistent coaching interactions using open-ended questions.

Sure.

And the idea of this is that, as you, as you talked about, kind of inch by inch, everybody’s very busy as, as, as it is. And there, as I mentioned, being the different flavor of the month, they’re rolling out, they’re still rolling out old consultant strategies and they’re waiting for me to leave so they can roll out new ones. So, so my big thing is they’re always busy as it is. So, but, you know, from a scientific standpoint, the research shows that if you’re going to shape behavior and accelerate learning, you need to follow up with them. You need to show that, help them see what’s working. You need positive reinforcement to support their progress along the way. And that’s how you can keep going. So that can’t be done randomly, and it can’t just be done, oh, I’m just going to check in once a month, sit down and go over 15 things. So, we need, we need those interactions and we need frequent interactions and follow-through if we are going to, you know, shape performance.

Sure.

If you want to have frequent interactions in a very busy day, they must be brief because they don’t have a whole lot of time.

Yeah. 

And then if those brief interactions are going to be effective, they have to be concise. So that’s kind of the foundation of let’s just maximize. You’ve got like 1, 2, 3 minutes to have a conversation with somebody. And we want to kind of not give them a fish, help them, you know, learn how to fish, you know? So, we might go up and just in passing, or maybe this is something that we worked with them on the day before and they’re having a hard time avoiding stepping into the line of fire. And we walk by and we’re like, hey, quick, I saw you step into the line of fire while you were adjusting that valve.

Sure.

And they’re like, hey, I was just trying to, you know, fix it quickly. I get that. Let’s walk through, you know, what are some of the risks, you know, that you, you know, put yourself in danger and other people around you, you know, and they, you know, talk a little bit about, and then we just have a quick conversation, you know, what’s the safe expectations that we can, we can work on here. If they don’t know that, help them find the safe expectations. If they don’t understand the reason for that rule, help them see the reason for that rule. Uh, what can I do to help you to break down this barrier? And just get them talking about, you know, I didn’t notice that, or I didn’t see this, or I didn’t notice that this is what, uh, this is what’s working and this is what’s not working. You know, just having a quick interaction so that way by the end of it they’re like, I see what I did, I see how to notice if I’m doing this well or not, and I see why this is important. And if you can get that done with some good open-ended questions, then after a while they’re doing this not just to avoid you, they’re like, I’m actually This is working for me.

Like, I’m not only like, I feel less nervous on the job because I’m safe. You know, I have fewer near misses, you know, going on right now and I’m getting the job done. I’m getting the job done quickly. So, you’re just using those good open-ended questions so that way over time they’re not, you know, just waiting for your feedback. The feedback is good. It’s in your praise is good. But they’re doing it because they see the value in it. And that’s what we talk about as, you know, building habits. It’s just like if you’re doing it, if you’re going to the gym, you start going to the gym, you’re not seeing any results. But after a while, you know, you’re going to go to the gym because like, I actually feel better and I’m fitting into my clothes better. And they’re doing it because they— it actually works for them. And that’s what we’re kind of shooting for.

Absolutely. I really like what you’re saying is really, it’s about the conversation. It’s about the coaching interaction. And I think what sometimes on the behavior side people miss is they became obsessed with a form and a tick list. And then, they automated tick lists with like 180 different things to go look for. But it actually has nothing to do with that. It has everything to do with the conversation, which could be a coaching conversation like you illustrated, or like you alluded to before, could be a reinforcement recognition. Hey, I noticed you’ve changed. This seems to be working well for you. So that recognition piece or the coaching to me is really the crux of this.

Yeah, that’s well said. And that’s exactly it. It’s that conversation, it can be fast. It can, you know, one of the, you know, I view it like this where an individual got promoted to management because ideally, they’re really good at what they’re doing.

Sure.

You know, and they’re really good at that frontline job. And so, they get promoted and, you know, and I encourage my clients to do this, and I encourage your listeners to do this. If one of your direct reports has a really crappy Tuesday and then they have a really good Wednesday, you know, things aren’t going wrong and, you know, they’re happy and there, you know, I was like, just go up and ask them what, what’s the difference between Tuesday and Wednesday? And if they can’t tell you the difference and the, and the critical things that they did differently, then you can’t expect them to replicate that. But that’s the, that’s one of the jobs of a leader. Like the leader might know that, you know, through their observations that I know the specific thing that you did differently from Tuesday to Wednesday was what you did pre-shift. And how you talk to so-and-so pre-shift. And that was the critical thing that I saw. And then, but you don’t tell them that, you know, you go up to them and say, hey, today’s going well. Like, what’s, what’s going on, man? What’s going differently? And they say, well, you know, you know, we got fewer trucks down.

Well, that’s true, but like, what specifically are you doing so well today? And help them see that. And they’re like, huh, that’s right. I’m going to keep doing that more. But it can be a quick, you know, just a quick pass-by conversation. And just get them chatting a little bit, help them see it, and move on.

Yeah, absolutely. And so, I want to end with one last topic. It’s this element of behavior in the context of HOP, right? So, HOP we hear about a lot lately. A lot of value from a systems thinking, from a broader view of what’s the impact. Tell me how the two fit together, because I believe that they should be linked. And I think some purists on the HOP side would say no. But tell me a little bit about your perspective on how behavior and HOP connect.

Yeah, of course. This is something that I’ve admired about the work that you do, because I do think you have a good collaborative perspective in how— and which is what we need in safety. We don’t have we don’t have the luxury of focusing too much on competing safety approaches. And my cop-out, the luxury of me as that condescending consultant, made it very clear is I’m just the behavior person, just the behavior guy. I just help people implement stuff. Right. You know, and that’s the same thing with things like HOP where it’s, you know, they— HOP has a as a strong philosophical foundation. Good principles, principles that are shared with both in behavior analysis and other areas in terms of systems drive behavior and, you know, blame doesn’t fix anything and you have to, you know, seek to understand. You know, you see that, you know, you see that a lot and, and people like it, you know, and anytime I see anything that people like, I always want to reverse engineer it and figure out what they like about it. And HOP has, you know, good components there. The, uh, so in the end of the day, whether it’s to me, it’s, it’s, it’s the exact same thing as an organization has their set of values, right?

They need somebody to help them implement their values.

Sure.

Uh, that’s where the behavior piece comes in. You know, Pete, you know, you’re going to implement HOP, you’re going to implement operational discipline. Those strategies need people to implement that strategy.

Sure.

Uh, so that’s where the behavior piece comes in, you know, where my job is simply to use our science. Our science tells us replicable how to build performance, how to understand systems, and if you, uh, you know, how to positively reinforce things, how to shape things, how to provide good positive and constructive feedback. And that’s just based on, you know, our science and the, to play devil’s advocate, the one thing that I will say with Hop arguments is behavior-based safety is a, is a term that gets thrown around a lot. And, uh, so you can have company A that has their IP labeled behavior-based safety. Company B has a different IP labeled behavior-based safety, but I always equate it to You know, when, you know, Ford has a certain way they build cars. Sure. GM has a certain way they build cars. They use the exact same science to build those cars, but then they build their own IP around that science.

Sure.

And that’s, that’s my thing is that my, my goal is just, I just focus on the science of behavior and implementing the science of behavior. I have my own IP that I’ve built based on the science of behavior, and people can critique my IP, but you only critique science with more science. So that’s why I was like to separate. If you don’t like somebody’s behavior-based safety approach and you think it conflicts with HOP, then that’s a valid argument. What I try to get people to pump the brakes on is, you know, the— that we, we can still collaborate because if you need to get performance improvement in your organization and you want people to implement HOP, you’re using the same science as everybody else is using. You know, you’re using shaping and pinpointing and reinforcement and all these types of things. You’re using the exact same science that’s out there. Uh, you’re just, uh, helping to implement this HOP strategy. So, I understand where some people, you know, I don’t like this behavior-based approach, but that’s where I see people fitting in, if you will.

Yeah, and I think you, you said it at the, at the onset as well, it’s about people. There are people doing process that are— that can get into harm’s way. And forgetting that the human can get into harm’s way and whether or not it matters, I think, is, is very dangerous. And I think that when you forget about that element, and I would say every executive I know in a high-performing organization has a coach, an executive coach. Either it’s been assigned to them by the organization, or they sought their own coach because they recognize that, hey, if I can get better at what I do, it improves my performance. And unfortunately, I think you’re right on the behavior-based safety side. Some people have created the art of the checklist, and I would say it’s even probably worse now with, um, technology because technology has enabled that I can now create lots of dashboards and have 180, 250 different tick boxes, and then people are measured on how many tick boxes they’ve done. But what you’re talking about is a coaching conversation, and you would coach your kids. You wouldn’t just say— don’t coach your kids.

The context will drive whatever shows up. There’s still behavior, and you’re still trying to drive them down a path. And so, to me, they’re, they’re very compatible. Obviously, there are programs that incompatible with, I would argue, even science. There are programs that have just become checklists with no tomorrow and goals and metrics that drive the opposite.

Yeah, that’s, you know, well said. And that’s, you know, you— I, I think you hit the nail on the head where it’s, you’ll see one example where people will use goal setting poorly, and then so you’ll have a faction that’ll say So I’m against all goal setting. You have one people that— another somebody comes in and says, I use checklists poorly. So, then I’m against all checklists. And then the same thing, you have one, you know, say I used, I used behavior-based safety, use behavior-based safety poorly. So, I’m against all behavior-based safety. But then when you do that, the danger in that— and I’ve had this conversation with clients. I actually had a HOP team that I was working with and won’t get into all the details, but they kind of led the meeting and said, I’ll be honest, they said, I’m just against the behavioral approach. Just, they just were very honest with it. And I said, okay, well, let’s walk through like, what, what do you, what’s your problem with my implementation plan versus their implementation plan? And we, after we had a conversation, they, they finally realized that, uh, you know, they were, they were throwing out all the, the basics of science, you know, and they, they, you know, they, they don’t want to reinforce.

They don’t want to shape performance. They don’t want to track. They don’t want to provide feedback. All these types of things, anything that they lumped to do with, quote, behavior-based safety. Sure. And then the conclusion they had at the end was, can we— how about, how about our compromise be we roll out a company-wide initiative that we can, we can do a behavioral approach, but we don’t want managers using the word behavior. And she’s like, you know, it was whatever, you know, just like the fact that you get down to such minutia where it’s like, I’ll, I’ll give you this, but I want the B word to be out of this. Like, okay, if you don’t want managers to talk about behavior, managing behavior, okay, like call it whatever you want, but let’s just again focus on the human. Like we’re all here to help the same, the same people. So, but yeah, that I think everything fits together. It’s just a matter of there’s so much different IP out there and, uh, and you get a bad taste in your mouth with something. And my wife always hates when I bring up this example because I work from home and she hears me talk about this all the time, but it’s, you know, I, I implement strategy just like I would implement hop. And I tell my clients this because again, I’m flavor of the month. You know, you, you see, you throw a ball in the air, and it comes down because of gravity. Like, that’s just the science. How you choose to use that in your business is up to you.

You see behavior occurring, there’s a science behind why behavior occurs. How you choose to use that science is up to you, but you don’t throw away gravity because you don’t like how Ford builds a car. You don’t throw away behavior science because you don’t like how somebody is implementing behavior-based safety. So that’s where I feel like there’s detriment in the argument, if you will.

Makes sense. Uh, you’ve written a great article on this, uh, in terms of how behavior and HOP can work together. Um, and then, um, tell me a little bit about the books you’ve written because you’ve authored, co-authored some books, and also, uh, your website if somebody wants to get in touch with you to continue the conversation and explore how they can create good coaching within the organization to improve safety and ultimately their safety culture.

Yeah, thank you. I appreciate it. So, my company is Deliberate Coaching International, and so you can go to deliberatecoaching.org and access, you know, resources and anything that you need there. I’ve got videos. You can see the services that we provide. We have 3 books on deliberate coaching. The first 2 were written for education, uh, for, uh, and then the third book we released last year that is written for broader business and industry. It’s because the co-author of the book was a former client of mine and he worked in education, working in, in discipline. So that’s where the idea kind of started, where we need, uh, we need a way to support the educators in a way that fits within the constraints of an educational model. So, we built the first coaching model around that. And then, but I do most of my work or all of my work in industry.

Sure.

And so, we built the last version of the book to apply to kind of a general business and industry standpoint. So, but yeah, I’d love to have, continue the conversation with anybody who would like to. And I just appreciate you starting this conversation.

So excellent. Well, thank you so much for joining the show, Nic.

Thank you for having me.

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. Nicholas Weatherly is an internationally recognized leader in the application of the science of behavior to safety, leadership, and performance systems and serves as CEO of Deliberate Coaching International, where he and his team use behavioral strategies to drive culture change and improve organizational and safety performance. With over 25 years of experience in behavior-analytic safety, leadership, and coaching, he has led and advised organizations across industries worldwide, including manufacturing, energy, construction, and healthcare, helping transform safety cultures, align performance systems, and improve critical business and safety outcomes.

Dr. Weatherly holds a Ph.D. in Applied Behavior Analysis from Western Michigan University, is a Board Certified Behavior Analyst-Doctoral®, and is the co-author of three books on Deliberate Coaching®. He maintains an active line of research in leadership, safety, and coaching at Endicott College’s Institute for Applied Behavioral Science, with publications appearing across a range of peer-reviewed journals. Dr. Weatherly also serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Organizational Behavior Management. He has previously served as Head of the School of Behavior Analysis at the Florida Institute of Technology and as a consultant with Aubrey Daniels International.

A former president of multiple state and national behavior-analytic organizations, Dr. Weatherly has also worked extensively with the Behavior Analyst Certification Board® on ethics and professional standards and served as the inaugural chair of the first stand-alone licensing board for behavior analysis in the United States.

For more Information: http://www.deliberatecoaching.org/

Contact Dr. Weatherly

Email: [email protected]

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Making Systems More Resilient: Elevating Situational Awareness and Critical Thinking with Craig Clapper

Jul 9, 2026

Making Systems More Resilient: Elevating Situational Awareness and Critical Thinking with Craig Clapper

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ABOUT THE EPISODE

Join us for this thought-provoking conversation with Craig Clapper, a seasoned systems engineer and founder of Reliability 4 Life, as he explores what it truly means to make systems more resilient. Craig explains why human error is an inevitable part of complex work and shares how organizations can strengthen situational awareness by helping people recognize where to focus their attention, identify the signals that matter most, and apply critical thinking in complex and safety-critical environments. Drawing on real-world examples from a variety of industries, including healthcare, Craig shares practical strategies for managing risk, improving recovery processes, and building organizational resilience. He also highlights the importance of fostering a culture of continuous learning to create safer, stronger workplaces. Don’t miss this insightful conversation and dive into how to build robust systems and elevate situational awareness and critical thinking within your organization. Tune in to learn more!

READ THE EPISODE

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

Hi and welcome to The Safety Guru. Today I’m very excited to have with me Craig Clapper. He’s a systems engineer, founder of Reliability for Life, or R4L, and we’re going to have a really interesting conversation today around systems, healthcare. It will be fascinating. So, Craig, welcome to the show. Very excited to have you with me.

Good. Thanks for having me with you today.

So, let’s get started with your background and how you got passionate about safety, because it was quite an interesting journey.

Excellent. Yeah, I got into this business as an engineer, and I was doing failure analysis work in nuclear power. And I noticed an interesting effect. We had a lot of repeat events, sometimes the same equipment failing for the same reasons.

Right. 

So, in an effort to improve reliability of nuclear power, is I got into this business, which is more about human reliability and systems. I didn’t know at the time, but it kind of took over my professional career. So, I worked in nuclear power, then power in general, transportation, manufacturing, and then for the last 25 years in healthcare.

And so, one of the things you’re looking at is, is essentially why would smart people repeat the same problems, right?

Yes, and repeat other people’s problems as well. I think both are important, us learning over time, but then the shared learning of learning from each other.

And so, tell me a little bit more about this theme around smart people making the same mistakes, or as you said, making some— the same mistake that somebody else did.

Excellent. Yeah, is that we know that, you know, people when they go to work or when they’re at home or at play, for that matter, is that their intent is always to do well.

Right.

Human error is a natural byproduct of people, and when we work in complex systems, that byproduct shows up even more frequently. Right. I think Jeff Raskin said it better than I. He said that everybody is human first and then either an expert or a novice second, but there is no such person that never experiences a mistake, or more accurately, an error.

Yes, an error, right? I think I only met one person who admitted in their mind they had never made a mistake. He was a tax accountant, but he was corrected by his CFO who questioned his assertion.

Yeah, so maybe even saying that was a mistake on his part.

That would be one of them for sure. And so, you talk about systems. Phil, so first, what are systems? We’ve talked about this topic quite a few times on this podcast. And why are they becoming so complex?

You bet. I think the fastest way to kind of smooth over the controversy is that when some people say process, they’re probably talking more about a work system. Sure. Systems are made up of everything, you know. So, when you talk about systems thinking, we say they’re made up of things. And together those things provide functions.

Right.

So, everything that we point to is a work system.

Mm-hmm.

So, we say aviation is a work system, nuclear power is a work system, a power plant is a work system, and then it gets even a little smaller and more granular.

Sure.

But I think what’s different is that it takes us away from processes, which makes us think everything’s linear, right, to thinking more about the nonlinear effect of real work. And over time, you know, technology becomes more complex. The needs of the system to perform become more complex. So, complexity is always increasing around us. And that makes it difficult for us as individuals because we can’t see everything that we’re doing. So, we’re reliant on other people and trying to grasp that situational awareness in the moment to see where we’ve been and where we’re headed.

Yeah, and I think your point is— so definitely there’s a sense that systems are getting more complex. You talk about technology. I remember I had an MIT professor join the podcast a little while back, and his analogy was talking— you might have heard about this one about Ford Mustang from the 1960s versus a Ford Mustang today, and how many engineers does it take because of the complexity of everything that’s engaged and involved. But even when you think about healthcare in terms of way back when, we didn’t have the fields of expertise to the degree we have now. And something like cancer treatment is no longer the domain of one doctor. It’s a domain of multiple different doctors that are essentially speaking different languages.

Oh yeah, that’s an excellent point, both on the car and the healthcare analogy. And everybody becomes hyper-specialized to deal with all that complexity. And then there’s creases, the number of handoffs and the number of people involved. I really relate to the auto example. My first car was a 1970 Chevy Impala, and my dad taught me how to do a lot of the work on it. And now when I open the hood, it’s just— I might be looking for a UL code so I can call somebody that actually knows how to fix it. Right.

It’s impossible to— tweak it like you could way back when.

Yeah.

And so, you talk about the complexity that comes in, um, that brings— I like the expression you use, that, that systems become very brittle. Um, so tell me, what are some of those things that we can do to make systems more resilient?

You bet. Yeah, because, uh, resilient means they’re tough and can bounce back. And sometimes we use the word resilient to mean like after an event. But you can also talk about resiliency in the middle of event or even at the very beginning to prevent events outright. Sure. So, in complex systems, safety comes from resiliency. And I think the best thing to do when you start on this aspect of your safety journey is to think, you know, systems can be simple. Where the knowledge and skill and the tools kind of rule the reliability.

Sure.

But then they can be complicated, like assembling a jet aircraft.

Sure.

You know, a plane is a very complicated machine, yet we want it to be the same. So putting it together just requires standard work. So standard work is our best friend. 

Yep.

But when we get to complexity, is that things aren’t always the same and they’re not predictable, and some things that are unknown are unknowable. So, what makes reliability in complex systems work is our ability to think as an individual, but think together as our team, as a team. 

Sure. 

And then to extend that to resiliency is that you have to think, I believe situational awareness is the root of all resiliencies.

Sure.

Somebody realizes that something is different, and they can think together and then they have an adjustment that they could make. So, they make the adjustment and then they get back on track. In fact, David Woods, you know, from Ohio State, the cognitive psychologist, he had observed that we really don’t have safety events because people make mistakes. We have safety events because they don’t perceive the need to make an adjustment. So, they don’t adjust.

Sure.

And I paraphrase that. I’m sure his quote is better than that.

And so that makes a very interesting perspective as well, because it’s what you talk about, the situational awareness. You see it very regularly in terms of something changes in the environment, the conditions, but we’ve done the same routine work many, many times and we don’t notice. We may have a blind spot to changing conditions. We may not realize that a new risk is introduced or that new risk could be a small change that’s happening in the system. And so, when you talk about resilience, you also talk about this element of learning and bouncing back. And then there’s also this element of a better recovery. Tell me a little bit more about what that entails.

Sure. Yeah, it’s in Eric Hollnagel’s work in resiliency engineering. He includes learning as one aspect of resiliency. And I think that was very insightful. Is that, you know, we learn from our past experiences. So now we know what to look for. And when we perceive that, then the sensemaking is both faster and more accurate. Plus, we have ideas on what adjustment that we’ll want to make. Sure. So, I think that learning aspect, you know, is very important. And earlier when we touched on shared learning, I think it becomes even more important because I’ve also come to realize in doing this work is that we don’t have a lot of foresight. Usually what we call foresight is actually somebody else’s hindsight.

Yeah.

And we recognize that because we heard it from a colleague or we read about it in a report or we heard it on your podcast. Right. So suddenly why it’s novel, it hasn’t happened to us, is that we have some insight because we’ve learned from you, perhaps.

Right. And the element of better recovery. So, there’s the element of how we learn, but what about better recovery?

Yeah, I think the recovery aspect is both like traditional and well understood and still at the same time poorly understood. Remember that television show MacGyver? I think there’s even a reboot on MacGyver.

Yes. 

Yeah, so each generation can relate to MacGyver. And his recoveries were all improvisation, which is nothing what safe systems look like. Right. In safe systems, recovery is more preset. So, we’ve anticipated to this, we’ve written some instructions, we may be trained in simulators. So at least we have a plan B in place. So now when we perceive the need, we can invoke the plan, and we can perform reasonably well. But to kind of add to that is I’d worked with a physician. He was the chief medical officer. He was the ED physician who received the patients who came from the hotel, the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Kansas City, when their walkway collapsed. 

Oh, right. Yeah.

That was a very well-known event in the engineering world. And what Bill told me was none of our pre-planned stuff worked. You know, we had all of these things in place, and we had done the drills, but really what worked, what gave us that resiliency was getting people to the ED that knew both about the patients as well as the ED as well as how the hospital worked. There, the thinking together with the people, that’s what made the resiliency work in his mind. I believe that as well, because I’ve not been in the Technical Support Center on many real nuclear events. I was in one alert, but I’ve also been in many, many drills. The thing I remember most about the drills is the NRC people controlling the drills Nothing that we had ready to go ever worked because they wanted to test us. They wanted to test and see how resilient we were when our plan B didn’t work and what was our plan C as in Charlie and D as in Delta.

Interesting.

So, I’ve become a big believer in both is, you know, get prepped, be ready, have things to go, but then also be prepared to be there and make adjustments so that your adjustments work.

It’s very similar to pilot training. What you’re describing in terms of putting different scenarios where we know things have not go per plan and then having that complexities go into different additional scenarios to see how you respond to those events.

Yeah, that’s an excellent example. And, you know, not being a pilot is, you know, we get to see a lot more about aviation safety than I think other people get to see of things like nuclear safety or patient safety.

Sure.

But, you know, to your example, Eric, I think Al Haynes, who was the captain of that United flight that lost all their hydraulics and was able to land in Sioux City, a good example of with all the preparation work in air transportation, that was still something that was outside of their experience and training.

Correct.

Yeah. To circle back to our earlier point though, is after that event, you know, changes were made, both in procedures as well as training. And I think even there was some hardware changes that were made to give them additional capabilities when they lose hydraulics.

Yeah. The sad part on that particular one is from a system design standpoint, there was the engineer, one of the engineers that designed the hydraulic system for it, for the DC-10, allegedly. So he wrote a book afterwards, allegedly had Escalade raised the concern that there wasn’t a failover if the hydraulic line was cut, but it was ignored as a very low probability risk at the time, and struggled living with himself afterwards and trying to deal with the aftermath, knowing that he saw something, but whether he pushed far enough to drive the change.

Well, my, my hope is he came out okay. Yes, in the long run after that.

Exactly.

I think to touch on another aviation event, there was a large airliner for one of the Japanese carriers that they had a structural failure and lost their tail.

Oh yeah, yep, Japan Airlines.

And remember, the engineer who designed the repair actually took his own life, so he did not work through that.

He didn’t. It helped. Exactly. Yeah. So, so this element you touched on as well in terms of situational awareness. Is that something you can train, and how do you do it in a context like healthcare?

Yeah, that’s an excellent question. I follow the work of Micah Ensley quite closely on situational awareness. So oftentimes when I speak, I’m talking directly from the Ensley model. Remember that she was the chief scientist for the United States Air Force. When she developed that. If I was the chief scientist for the United States Air Force, I’d tell everybody. In fact, I would lead the podcast with that. But as 3 elements, there’s the perception first, and then there’s the sensemaking, and then there’s the projection part. And I think we really have to talk as we go and as we train and as we educate the new folks on what do we look for and why and what’s good and bad look like. And that’s part of that learning aspect. That you were touching on is that you can teach people what to look for. In fact, back to Hall Nagel, his first step of the 4 is knowing what to look for. So, I think that’s one of the overlooked parts of situational awareness is getting people to understand where they should be looking and what they should be looking for and what the good and bad look like.

But if you can get that first step, the perception, then you have a good chance to do that second step, which is that cognition, and think about, okay, what does that mean for us in the moment?

And so, in a scenario like this, because it assumes that the scenario is knowable, or is there ways of even sensing if you don’t know that the particular scenario could occur?

Yeah, yeah, a good point is that, you know, things that have happened before, we tend to have a little more collective insight into, but then we want to be prepared for things that we haven’t seen before. And I think to touch on another book, the Wyckoff and Sutcliffe book about high reliability organizing, they call it managing the unexpected. Sure. So, we have managing the expected Hey, this is a known event. But then we also need to be prepared for what happens when things look like they’re not known events, or maybe even it’s an event that’s unknown to everybody.

Sure.

So, in James Reason’s work, he talks about situational surprise. Hey, this happens. I just didn’t think it was going to happen today. Yep. But then there’s fundamental surprise where we never thought this would ever happen. And maybe in that United flight with the loss of hydraulics, they viewed that as a fundamental surprise. That one engineer mentioned that maybe we should prepare for this. And they said, oh, that hasn’t happened and will never happen because we have 3 independent and redundant hydraulic systems. You know, the probability that we would lose all of the hydraulics. Even though on that United flight, Their American Flight 191 had lost all hydraulics takeoff at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport.

Right.

So, they had a chance to realize that one assumption was poor and maybe even make some adjustments in those few years they had between the American flight and the United flight. Keep in mind, I’m not an aviation safety expert, but when you’re into the safety business like yourself, is you tend to look at aviation events and power events and bridge failures and dam failures. And here’s a traffic, you know, situation. And there’s a lot of commonalities in how and why we experience these safety events.

Yep. And I know when we spoke, you had some very powerful examples from healthcare, from some of the work from healthcare that illustrate systems, how they can be brittle, but also how you can increase resiliency. I’d love if you could share some of those stories and examples.

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Sure. Yeah, you know, so the system that’s brittle fails suddenly without warning. So, brittleness is the opposite of resiliency.

Sure.

So resilient systems are a little tougher. And if you like trees, you can say oak is a little more brilliant or brittle.

Yep.

And the palm tree is a little more resilient. It bends over in the wind.

Sure.

I actually prefer the candy analogy a little better. So, there’s the toffee, which snaps. It’s brittle, but the caramel, you know, is a little more resilient.

Yes.

And in healthcare, we need to be a lot more like the caramel.

Right.

And the idea is that They’re both made of the same basic ingredients, but the caramel is prepared at a different temperature. So, the sugar molecules are a lot longer and they’re more connected.

Sure.

And in healthcare, when we’re more connected with each other is that we team better and it makes us more resilient. And you know, that’s a good lesson. So, in healthcare, there’s many medication errors where it happens all at once and it’s over.

Right.

But then there’s also examples of where we have good second chances. If we monitor well after the patient receives the med, we realize they’re in distress and maybe there’s a reversal agent or maybe there’s some longer-term treatment. I think the best healthcare event to know in terms of resiliency happened in the Pacific Northwest. There’s actually an equipment failure a catheter malfunctioned in an open-heart procedure and burned a hole through this patient’s heart.

Oh wow.

And they realized, hey, this is trouble. How do we bounce back from this? So they, they kept him alive on a mechanical heart, an assistive device.

Sure.

And then they looked for a transplant, and they found a donor, and he received a heart transplant. And he wakes up weeks later at another medical center to hear quite a story about how they saved his life.

My goodness.

So that, that in my mind is like the Apollo 13 resiliency story showing up with our healthcare providers. 

And also, a failure that is likely not on the radar of the average surgeon that’s performing. You’re not expecting the equipment maybe to malfunction, but also then to burn, to cause a burn.

Definitely. So, so we don’t know if that was situational or fundamental surprise, but I’m positive that when they were doing their procedure, they weren’t thinking that, hey, this Swan-Ganz catheter is going to get hot as a firecracker and burn a hole right through this man’s heart. And then what would we do?

Right. 

And as far as I know, that, that was the first time that healthcare ever encountered something like that. So that was them managing the unexpected.

No kidding. Any other examples of the work that you do in terms of healthcare space to make the system more resilient?

Yeah, yeah. Our thinking is that, you know, if we practice good safety science, we should be able to reduce those harm events in healthcare by 80% every improvement cycle. So for big hospitals, that’s about every 2 years. Sure. In practice, most people see more of a 50% reduction.

Still substantial.

Still, still good enough. And we look for that both in patient safety as well as workforce safety. Mm-hmm. I think the difficulty in resilience engineering is that it’s not something that you can buy. It’s an emergent property of the work system.

Sure.

So, for systems to become more resilient, you have to get healthcare leaders to understand what makes us brittle, what makes us resilient, so they can jealously guard the things that they have while they work on adding more. So, you know, people who can think, like strong critical thinking skills, including questioning attitude.

Yep.

Getting response teams together. In healthcare, almost everybody has like a rapid response team or a medical response team.

Sure.

But then also, I think the untapped part is with technology and information systems. Can we use what we know in the electronic healthcare records to create more situational awareness among the caregivers and providers?

Sure.

Remember that show House? Another TV show. I have a kind of a TV show theme today. House seems to be the most opposite of all the healthcare television shows. Because they have one patient with a group of doctors that has nothing better to do but sit around and talk about their one patient. And in my experience is that it’s, there’s many patients and everybody has to split their time among many patients, but they’re never sitting around with their other doctors talking about one patient. Sure. But then the healthcare record, if we can use, uh, AI perhaps, or, or other, uh, more straightforward technologies to tell us what’s going on with our patients. So, I hold out a lot of hope for things like automated global trigger tools.

Sure.

And how the triggers can set situational awareness and maybe even create a central nervous system for a hospital where instead of having safety huddle for 15 minutes in the morning, we have more of a control room for the hospital, where we have people that can watch over populations of patients and do that perception in the Ensley model.

Interesting. When you were touching on that, you started out by talking about people becoming critical thinkers. How do you help people improve their critical thinking skills? Because it’s so important in the system view, right? 

Yeah, so important. I don’t think it matters which industry you look at, that the thinking errors are the single largest contribution to the severe loss events. In healthcare, it’s 40%. 40% of the acts leading to serious patient harm are critical thinking breakdowns. And then as you go to other industries, you know, the numbers can come up and come down, but it’s the single largest bit.

Sure.

The experts in talking about thinking are split. Some of them say that it’s a talent and others say, no, it’s a skill. And I’m firmly in the skill family. Is that not everybody can be great as a thinker, but everybody can become a little better. Sure. I think the best way to teach thinking is to create a vocabulary so you can talk about it. And then through the context of job experiences, share how you think and think differently. The nuclear power operators and the physicians I work with both say the same thing. In our training, there are a lot of technical details. We have to learn the right answers, but we also learn how to think differently. They’re a little more structured in their thinking. They have more discipline. They use logic more like the physician’s differential diagnosis. 

Sure.

In fact, if you want to get started, I’d recommend two well-known books, especially for your healthcare listeners. How Doctors Think by Jerome Groopman. He uses case study method and it’s an easy read. Better by a nurse, Gay Rubenfeld. Critical Thinking Tactics for Nurses. Now, she’s a nurse and a nurse educator and researcher, so she wrote it from a nursing perspective. She could have easily entitled her book Critical Thinking Tactics for Everybody on the Planet. She does a good job in saying, here’s what we mean when we say critical thinking, and here’s how to get started with some skills. But that might be the best answer, you know, to your question is that You know, human performance in general and culture and even the bigger picture, 3-step approach. Define a behavior as an expectation, something like questioning attitude.

Sure.

Then enable them with the knowledge and skills so they can do that if they choose. So now I have somebody that knows what to do and knows how to do it if they choose. And then step 3, that habit, that accountability is that big step where they actually practice that skill that they know as a habit. And that’ll give you that human reliability and to a large degree, that resiliency that you’re looking for.

And you touched on this element of questioning attitude and that struck me in any nuclear operation I’ve worked with. Is how embedded that mindset, or even the terminology around questioning attitude, is in everyone. And it turns into habits, rituals that occur daily. You would think that that’s something you can easily transpose in any environment as well.

Yeah, I think transpose, yes. And then when you said easily, that one didn’t strike me as strong, but that might be that questioning attitude that you talked about is that, you know, growing up in that environment, I was, I was 22 and right out of college when I worked in a nuclear power plant. So, I grew up in that environment, and it’s surprising how much, how sharply they think and then think with each other.

Yes.

So, in a nuclear power plant, you don’t make any bold assertions because now you have the entire room, you know, kind of picking apart your thinking, right? You get out into the rest of the, the world especially like on social media, is that the critical thinking not nearly as sharp. And people don’t question assumptions and they don’t really look for the logical fallacies. But I think you’re exactly right with those reactor operators, pilots on the flight deck, is those operators that are at the sharp end tend to have a very keen questioning attitude. Cause it might be, you know, the saying, which I heard it from a reactor operator, but maybe it was also a pilot saying, is that there’s old pilots and there’s bold pilots, but you don’t see too many old, bold pilots.

They haven’t made it. I think there’s an element as well to get to that questioning attitude. I’ve observed definitely within pilots, there’s a sense of once you’re in the air, it’s an unforgiving environment. So, you don’t want to be in that scenario, that situation. There’s also this, I call it a healthy paranoia. Others have created other terminology that’s probably more eloquent around it, but there’s a healthy degree of expecting something could go wrong. And I see very similar characteristics in nuclear because the consequence is huge, you know, it’s unforgiving. And so, there’s this paranoia, healthy paranoia, which supports questioning attitude. You expect things to not go necessarily per the plan.

Yeah, yeah, excellent point. I would probably frame that around the preoccupation with failure, which is one of those 5 Wyckoff and Sutcliffe HRO principles, is, you know, that to have a preoccupation with failure is you have a very healthy skepticism and you attend to all of the little things that you need to go right in an effort to have nothing go wrong. Maybe what James Reason called the dynamic non-event. So, I think preoccupation with failure is very misunderstood, especially in healthcare. They make it sound like we just sit around with this anxiety that things are going to go horribly, horribly wrong. But no, no, it’s that you know that you have to be focused on a lot of important details to give yourself some assurance that it’s okay. So, it can add up to success.

Correct.

And, and so the way you had framed that, I think, is, is very accurate and very helpful in advancing that in the positive about what we should be doing.

Yeah, because if you assume, if you have an overconfidence bias, assume a positive outcome, you’re more likely to miss some of those early warning signs that something is happening in the system.

Exactly. Yeah, now to add to that point is, you know, in a nuclear power plant, the one that I worked in most recently was worth $4.5 billion. And if we made a mistake, we could turn a $4.5 billion asset into a $500 million liability.

Right.

Plus, we all would lose our jobs and maybe we would spread radioactive contamination apart. Across the eastern United States. That, that could all happen, right? But I thought in healthcare, where there was a living person in your hand and you had the ability to either make them better or to harm them and maybe take their life away, that seemed to be even a closer link to safety in my mind.

You think so? Yeah.

So, I’ve talked to some of my clinician colleagues about this, and they said, “No, I still think that the airline pilot and the nuclear power operator have a bigger responsibility.” But having worked in those industries, I wonder if it’s back maybe into the caregivers and providers in healthcare. I think like a perfusionist who is running a machine that has the blood from their patients circulating and becoming oxygenated. Right. They are literally controlling the life of that patient. Absolutely. And it’s not like being on the flight deck of a 787 to say like, well, if this happens, then this might happen. And then if this goes bad and we don’t recover here and you go through like 8 things, is then we can have an event. I mean, I think it’s a more direct linkage. Sure. I would maintain that everybody’s job and safety is important. Absolutely. And I think it’s an element of how you see your role and the ownership you take in that direct call. Yeah, yeah.

Especially that idea of that risk sensitivity, that what you’re doing at the moment is, is very important. And if it goes wrong, here’s what happens. And then how do we know that it’s go wrong? Because there’s usually a story behind it. Sure. Where here’s what happens.

And Craig, you’ve authored books, um, and you help organizations improve the resilience of their system. Um, tell me about your books and tell me a little bit about how somebody can reach out to you if they want, um, your to carry this conversation forward, or also think about how I could make my system more resilient.

Exactly. Well, thanks. Yeah, I think the best way to read about our work in healthcare is through Zero Harm. Sure. So, it talks about safety management systems in healthcare and improving both patient safety and workforce safety. If you wanted a more compact form, I wrote a chapter with our chief executive officer, who’s a nurse, Tammy Strong. And that shows up in the Healthcare Quality book. It’s Chapter 5 on safety science and high reliability organizing. So given the opportunity, read a whole book or read a chapter. I think a lot of people go for the chapter. And I admire that, you know. But I like to talk to leaders, especially who are safety minded. And the easiest way to get a hold of us at Reliability for Life is through our website. Or we have a strong LinkedIn presence, and you could either look for the company Reliability for Life, or you can look for me, Craig Clapper, PE.

Excellent. Well, thank you so much, Craig, for joining me today and sharing your thoughts around systems, uh, how we can make them more resilient, how individuals can become better critical thinkers and, and surface, uh, potential brittle systems. Or items within a brittle system. Excellent.

Thank you for having me. Excellent.

Thank you so much. Take care.

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

Craig Clapper is a founder and the chief knowledge officer of Reliability 4 Life, a consulting group specializing in improving human performance in complex systems using evidence-based methods derived from high-reliability organizations. Craig has more than 30 years of experience improving reliability in power, transportation, manufacturing, and healthcare. His expertise includes failure analysis, event analysis, systems thinking, system reliability improvement, and safety culture transformation. Craig has led safety culture and high-reliability organizing (HRO) transformations for Duke Energy, the US Department of Energy, ABB, Westinghouse, Framatome ANP, Sentara Healthcare, Sharp Healthcare, Banner Health, and many others. Prior to Reliability 4 Life, Craig was the Chief Knowledge Officer of Healthcare Performance Improvement (HPI), the Chief Operating Officer of HPI, the Chief Operating Officer of Performance Improvement International, Vice President of Failure Prevention Inc (FPI), Systems Engineering Manager for Hope Creek Nuclear Generating Station, and Systems Engineering Manager for Palo Verde Nuclear Generation Station.

For more Information: https://reliability4life.com/

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