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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!

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

Hi and welcome to The Safety Guru. Today, I’m 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.

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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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Driving Safety Transformation Through Human-Centered Design with Paul Davison

May 28, 2026

Driving Safety Transformation Through Human-Centered Design with Paul Davison

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Join us on The Safety Guru for an informative conversation with Paul Davison, former Royal Air Force helicopter pilot and Founder & CEO of PPWD, as he shares what it truly means to drive safety transformation through human-centered design. In this episode, Paul explores the essence of coaching, raising awareness, and improving decision-making at every level. He discusses how psychologically safe learning environments empower people to take ownership of their own safety and that of those around them. He emphasizes that the true value within any company is its people and shares how connection and vulnerability through human-centered design can foster meaningful organizational change and strengthen safety culture. Through real-world examples, including rail and winter sports, Paul brings to life the powerful shift from “doing things to people” to “doing things with people,” unlocking trust, ownership, and meaningful engagement. Packed with practical insights and tangible takeaways, this episode is a must-listen for leaders looking to strengthen engagement, elevate safety culture, and drive lasting safety transformation within their organization. Tune in 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 Paul Davison. He’s the CEO and founder of PPWD Consulting, a human performance organization. Paul, welcome to the show. Excited to have you with me.

Absolutely, Eric, very excited to be with you. A transatlantic link up here.

Indeed. So maybe we should start out with a bit about your journey and your passion around safety. How did you get started in this?

Yeah, as often is the case with careers, one falls into accidentally. And I guess my journey all came out of what I would call the traditional conventional views around management and leadership. And that’s where my thinking around humans started, from a point of view of instructing and developing things. Prior to that, my frontline experience of safety was in the cockpits of Royal Air Force aircraft, helicopters in particular. So that’s where that tactical view comes from. Not necessarily that I understood how we were achieving it beyond following books and processes and procedures and the like.

And so, one of the things is quite interesting. We’ll get to your approach around human centered design. But maybe first we should start with what’s missing in a lot of the approaches that we have today around safety from your standpoint.

Yeah, and I think it’s really neatly summarized. And I have to say I’ve pinched this from Steve Shorrock’s. Some of the stuff he does I think is just wonderful because it’s just so simple and the language is very accessible. And I sat in on a workshop with him a few years ago and he was talking and again, you often hear these little things. It’s like when you hear Yoda’s talk, isn’t it? They say small things and you don’t quite appreciate the wisdom at the time. And then it, it kind of sinks in and you go, oh, okay. There’s lots behind this. And the thing that he said in the workshop was it was talking about this transition from if we really want to kind of create safety leaders of everyone, then we have to start shifting from doing things to people and for people, to doing things with people and getting them to do it by themselves. And he said it as simply as that. And it’s really resonated with me. And I use it more and more. And especially in workshops, you can see the transition when it happens. So, I think that is what we try and do.

We create these psychologically safe learning environments where you can really get people to be able to do things with them because you’re getting into the. You’ve got a level of honesty where you can really get to the meat of what’s happening. And if we get it right, they suddenly realize they have the permission, they have the empowerment and they actually start doing it for themselves. And they suddenly realize that maybe some of the learned helplessness that they drifted into within their organizations. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Sure. It gets also to the element of co-creation. In psychology, there’s this element of co creation is a tool of influence.

Absolutely. When you set up a company and you deliver training, there’s that classic thing, isn’t it? You have all your offers, and you go out and you sell your products and so on. And I’ve realized more and more that actually what this is about is, I think it’s termed kind of like action learning, where as a consultant, as a group of people, we, if you like, roll up our sleeves and get in there with people. We don’t go native, we’re not part of the company, so that we can always bring that third party perspective, but we get in there and really work with them to go, come on. If you’re wrestling with something like fatigue. Right. How are we going to work together? What’s the wisdom that’s out there in the rest of the world? You know, let’s get outside of your particular company, your particular sector and go. A lot of these problems have been solved elsewhere. So how can we take the best of that and then apply it to your environment? And that is enormously satisfying.

Right. So, tell me a little bit more about how you go about from a human centered design. What does it look like? How do you create that environment where people feel safe exploring?

Great. And that is in some respects it’s like that kind of magic source. If you could bottle it, put it in a spray, you’d be a billionaire, perhaps, or you change the world overnight. But so, for me, it is this multidisciplinary approach to facilitation. And that is the real value, if you like, just one, about PPWD as a company. Value in the company is the humans. There’s no two ways. The team that I have and the ability for them to go into these disparate workplaces and then create that connection and then be able to go right, how am I going to help you solve the problems that you’re dealing with right now, things that you can do tomorrow? So that, that’s the key part and that very much is around a connection, around I think, vulnerability that you are the experts of your world. We are not. What we can bring is expertise from outside to help you, different ideas and thoughts and frameworks and so on. And then there is this connection at a level which is around, you know, the material itself. You can go out there, you can watch YouTube videos, you can read the book and so on.

And it’s that how do we bring this to life? How do we connect theory to practice and practice to theory? And I think that’s where we really bring value to organizations.

And so, you talked about the scenario around fatigue and getting people to co create around looking outside, seeing how others have tackled it. One of the pieces that comes to mind when I think of fatigue is in some industries, fatigue is also linked to overtime pay, which is also an inverse incentive that encourages people to do things that are probably inherently unsafe. And so how do you get people to balance those elements? Because in some cases overtime can be significantly beneficial from a wallet standpoint.

Yeah. I’ll be honest, I don’t think I’ve found a magic solution to that one beyond chipping away. So, the first thing that we do in all that we do it is. It is that coaching. And the essence of coaching is to raise awareness.

Yeah.

So, the first thing that we do is raise people’s awareness to. If, if you are working six days a week and you’re getting two and three hours sleep a night and you’ve got a two-hour commute and you’re doing, I mean, I’ve heard some crazy. There’s, there’s a couple kind of like one I came across recently, you could do 24 hours on, 8 hours off and another 24 hours on.

My goodness.

That is perceived. Yes, exactly. So, you can imagine the money that they’re earning for something like that. It’s an emergency shift, but it’s still a permissive, permissible shift. Okay, so raise their awareness to. Do you realize the damage that you’re doing to yourself that might not manifest itself now, but almost certainly will later in life. So, it’s this, it’s this idea around human factors of this are not getting to your point, pension point, it’s getting through your pension point. You get to the Point where you actually have some health left. The cool, you know, and psychological that you can actually benefit from your pension. Because as I’m sure you’re aware, there are a lot of industries where people don’t live that long after they retire, they are exhausted. So that’s the first step. Raise awareness to what you’re doing to yourself, the quality of life. Also raising awareness then to the impact that this has on your ability to make good quality decisions. And of course, you know, from an incident point of view, an adverse event. If you’re not thinking straight, then you’re likely to do something which is not in line with the reality of the world.

And so, there are more than enough examples out there from all, all industries that you can share those examples. And therefore, what makes you different to them. So that, so that’s the starting point for the individuals at the front line. And you know, if I walk into a company, I would be very unwise to turn around and go, right, that’s it. We’re going to go to all these wonderful shifts and you’re going to have no more overtime. That is not going to, that’s not going to work land very well. So, once we’ve done that kind of frontline piece, okay, what is it you want in life, that work life integration. How do we then start to have conversations with the management and the organization more widely to look at? Right. How are we going to change some of these shift patterns? And what I often find is when you have conversations with companies, they’ve done things a very long way for a long period of time. And then you start to sit down with them and go ask them those just stupid questions, why you do it like that? Could you do it like this? And what we often find is a huge amount of capacity within the organization already for actually altering things without it costing more money.

Right.

And that, that’s the key. And again, it’s building that relationship where you can have those deeper, more honest or challenging conversations.

And obviously this is a very complex scenario, the one that I brought up around fatigue and the overtime, where there’s emotions that run against best practices. I’ve heard some, some people doing high risk tasks saying that they were so tired that we’re seeing double.

Yeah. 

And that they were laughing hysterically and didn’t understand why they were laughing. 

Yeah.

And you’re thinking that’s not a point where you’re going to make good judgments, especially at something that’s high risk. But the financial incentives can sometimes drive the wrong direction.

Yeah. As I often find when we’re talking of these topics, you start to butt up very quickly around societal pressures. You go well outside of individual or organizational. And that is a challenge, I think, for all individuals and organizations. Can you kind of see yourself and what you’re doing and separate yourself from the wider world and what is deemed as acceptable or is, okay?

And that’s tricky, but most cases are probably a lot simpler. When you’re thinking about designing of work practices, safeguards, then there isn’t that conflict. And I can definitely see, I’ve seen some incredible stories of change when people can craft their own stories and own way of solving a problem.

Great. And that I think is spot on. And it cycles back to what we were saying a little bit earlier, which is this idea of doing things with people and getting to do it by themselves. There’s a company I’m working with right now and I think I’ve got agreement. I’ve gently encouraged them to go, why don’t you just give the rosters to the front line and get them to manage it and solve it within the, within the dimensions you give them within the box to operate, you know, within the resourcing. Right. You go and work out how best to do this. And I’m going to be fascinated to work with them as we, as we come up with. I think it’s going to be a far more wholesome way of doing it. And of course you’ve then got the front line who own it. So, they can’t complain or they can’t push back at management, say, hey, you’ve given us this, this horrible deal. You know, it’s like, well, this is the best we can do right now.

Right. So. So let’s get into a few practical applications of how this human centered design comes to life. Sure. I think you had one example from the Royal Air Force one in the rail space. I’d love to hear some of those examples. And as well one from the British bobsled and skeleton team.

Yeah. So, I think the one which has the most recent kind of like the biggest impact because I can kind of plot it from beginning to end, I think for me would be Kural. And I’ve been very fortunate to work with an organization now for I think I’m going into my 10th year, which again just shows the challenge for cultural change. I mean, you know, last year the UK rail celebrated 200 years. So, you’ve got an awful lot of history, traditions, if you call them bad habits and so on. So, some of this takes time to move and you’ve got People who have the whole career within that industry. So again, you’ve got that corporate knowledge which you’re trying to work with. So, for this particular company, classic thing is brought in because, right, we’ve got too many operational incidents. Okay, Paul, can you help us? And 10 years ago, you know, non-technical skills in rail were relatively a new thing. So, it was like, great. Let’s look at designing a workshop for your frontline operators, train drivers initially. And we’ll cover a classic kind of non-technical skills categories and then the skills that go underneath that and design some tools, techniques and so on that go along with it.

So that, that’s how that project started. Initially. I said, well, let’s do a couple of pilot courses and bring in your toughest audience. Give me your, you know, your union reps, your kind of hardline individuals because if we can get it right for them, then for sure it will land well for the rest. And that’s what we did. We took a chance. We actually mixed in some senior managers as well, which is not my usual way of doing it because as you know, you get management involved with the front line that can close down conversations that landed really well. And it then rolled out into doing non-technical skills for all of the drivers within the organization. So, it’s about 1100 drivers in total. And as you know with the railway, you can’t switch it off, it’s 24, 7, 3, 6, 5. So they’re doing this, updating things as they go along. Then quickly, as you learn in industries, you realize the front line often aren’t the problems to be solved, they’re the problem solvers. So, you realize that there are other things within the system that would really benefit from some attention. And by then we built a good enough relationship we were able to then start to look at, right, well, how are you doing assessments?

How do you do any coaching for people? Or is it all just tick box compliance type things? We then started to look at, okay, what it is to be a safety leader, investigations. Maybe there’s something here that we could do differently. Maybe we could even just call them learning reviews, for example. And all of that started to move the metrics both on statistics and also on saving money. And that got the attention of the board. We hadn’t really dealt with the board at that level. And we were able then to get the whole exec away for a day. We went to a wildlife park which was fantastic, completely different setting and we just ran a workshop where I just took them through. Hey, look, if you want to create a fairer culture. These are kind of the key elements that are required in order to do that based on other industries and the best thinkers at that time. Time. And they went for it. And in doing that, you then start to get people looking across the fence and going, well, what are they doing, you know, for train drivers, can we do that for conductors?

Can we do it for platform staff, station staff? And we brought in even HR and some of the commercial and financial teams as well to get an understanding of the impact they were having. And so that whole program just kept rolling. And through that, I think the two things for me that stand out, that make me go, okay, we’ve achieved something, was a fair culture charter. And it wasn’t called a fair safety culture. It was a fair culture charter because it was for all the employees, which was a binding set of principles of how they would be handled post adverse event. And they don’t do investigations anymore. Everything is a learn proof review. And they do pre accident investigations. So pre learning reviews, we do group learning reviews now. So, there is this, this ongoing cycle of. Right, we know what these factors are. You know, there’s nothing new. There’s just, just new people. So, let’s go out there and see what’s, what’s currently getting the way. What’s the interference in our business? The front line? No, let’s ask them and let’s start dealing with it before we have the accident. And then that wonderful position of people will talk to you because there’s no blame, there’s no.

No thanks.

Exactly. Nothing’s gone wrong. We know it has gone wrong, as in the past and elsewhere, but for these people, it hasn’t. So, they just tell you what’s going on. And, and it’s just opened the company up enormously. And again, how many incidents and adverse events have been stopped, we’ll. We’ll never know. But it’s got to be countless numbers now.

And so how, if I may, in that scenario, how did you identify which areas to focus on first? Right, because these are things that haven’t happened. I mean, they’ve happened, but nobody’s officially reported them. How did you get started getting people to start solving one thing after the other?

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 propolo.com.

So, to start with, I mean, now, I really don’t. I don’t hold their hands at all in this. It’s absolutely been shifted to them doing it by themselves. There’s no two ways. I have the odd conversation. But ultimately, the safety team there, the operational standard, they’re just fantastic in how they do this, very proactive. So, to start with, it was just that kind of gentle encouragement to go. So, I’ll give you an example, because this is the big one that stood out for me. And it’s so empty coaching stock. You have a train comes into a terminal station; the passengers get off. That train now is going to get moved somewhere else. It could be a depot; it could be moved to another part of the line in order to maybe build the service for the evening peak service. So, it’s not scheduled, it has no passengers on and they kind of get in the way, they’re easy, inconvenient, they’re in the wrong place and they need moved. There’s often a lot of incidents with them because people may be, relax, they are not scheduled, they have to be accommodated within what else is going on?

And so I suggested to them, well, why don’t you just get all the stakeholders, anyone you can think of that deals with empty coaching stuff, get them in a room, you know, give them coffee and biscuits and tea and stuff, and just go through what are all the factors that trip them up and how could you then start to manage these differently? So that’s what they did. So, they brought in Network Rail from the station, the signaling point of view, both the train operators at this terminal station, we had platform staff, management, safety, everybody’s involved around the table, then to start going, how is it that we get tripped up over this time and time again? And that created just this incredible action plan, which became little kind of business plans for different part, to then just identify how we could better handle these empty coaching stock. And I wouldn’t say it’s been solved, but certainly it’s reduced massively, you know, the incidents and has improved the understanding of how you accommodate them within. Within the network. Yeah. So that’s. That will be one of the first ones. I’m going back probably, gosh, six or seven years when we first did that.

Interesting. And in a scenario like this, would you then, because it sounds like this was done at a station level, do you replicate it to other stations, other large stations, or did you essentially sell that this was something that was created in the station that works well implemented elsewhere.

Right now, that is the wonderful thing, isn’t it, about human beings. You think you have demonstrated something fantastic. And for the outsider, you think you know what, you could just not quite photocopy, but you know, you can run this scenario again with all these other places getting people to do that is, that’s really tough, Eric and I, you know, I’m a consultant. There’s only so much, you know, resource and time in the budget and other things come along. And so yeah, that didn’t happen initially. There are things I know which have happened afterwards. But it was kind of a one off in that case.

Yeah, and that’s the tricky part in my experience is it’s not as straightforward to copy and paste. And then you also don’t want to have 20 different ways of doing the same thing across the enterprise.

Yeah, yeah. And, and I can. So, I can think of, you know, and it’s again, you, you kind of go right, oh wow, how could you have done this differently? And it’s that maybe up front I should have said, should have had something in place. Okay, so this is going to work here. Where else might it work? How are you going to build a schedule then to roll this further? So that would be my takeaway.

Sure. Is there another example you want to take us through? I know you talked about the bobsled skeleton team or on the Royal Air Force.

Yeah. So, I can do the bobsleigh because directly we’ve just had Winter Olympics, Milan Cortina, which has been fantastic. And again, it’s something which I think is a real nice contrast to rail and a safety critical industry, albeit safety. Yeah, absolutely, there is that. And what I would say here is when I talk about safety, I am going and we had a discussion earlier around, it’s well beyond the physical, you know, I’m talking here around the psychological safety that one needs, the emotional safety and even the spiritual safety. And I generally always have to qualify that because it’s not about necessarily a religion or a faith. This is around people understanding their value, their worth, their position and purpose within an organization. That sense of real value internally. And for me that has played out really well within bobsleigh and skeleton. I first got involved with them back in back end of 2020. So, we had the Beijing Olympics which was February 22nd. I was, they wanted someone who would volunteer and do it for nothing. I was available and I could meet their fee aspiration. So, I was asked to support the Olympic team leader who was a High performing athlete.

I had very limited experience of management and leadership. With my background in the Air Force and what I’d done there, this was appropriate. And I thought, great, what have I got to lose? And what a great different environment to get into? So, I supported him then in putting that together. And that, as often is the case, you get involved with an organization and you realize, oh, okay, I have a choice here. I either kind of walk away now or that kind of rolling up your sleeves and getting stuck in. And because there was a lot of what, what I thought was dysfunction, there’s a lot of humans who were really not working together to achieve the ultimate output. And so, it wasn’t easy. I wasn’t in charge; I was just part of this team. But I said, I will, I will get stuck in, I will join you on this as we rebuild this organization. And what has perhaps unusual about the organization, if you have two sports, so bobsleigh and skeleton, yes, they’re on frozen water, yes, they’re a gravity sport, but they are different. They’re different physically. The, the strength and conditioning that individuals need is different.

I think the mindset is, is similar, but the way you go about it is, is subtly different. And so that created some tensions and perhaps skeleton had perhaps been traditionally the better funded out of the two sports. So, there was a real element here of, right, how do we raise the profile of bobsleigh to get kind of equivalent funding. So that was a real challenge. UK sport, you’ve got to have money to do something. And then how do we create this fantastic environment around the athletes and the coaches, so the front line, the tactical staff, how do we get them in an environment where, where they can thrive, so it really accommodates them for all of their needs. And that was for us to kind of really get our act together and take away all of that kind of bureaucratic elements, the process, the procedures, take all that on board so that they could absolutely focus all their time and energy on the coaching and then on delivering on tracks. And, and that takes time. There’s no two ways with humans. There’s a lot of conversations in there. There’s a lot of restructuring. Yes, there is capturing that in documentation, but most of it is around building a relationship of trust.

You know, you do that bit, we do this bit.

True.

I often think here of the, forgive me, the Alice Cooper analogy where he, the only contract he ever had with his manager was a handshake. And when they first started together, they looked at each other and Alice Cooper said, well, I’ll do all the onstage stuff, if you do all the off-stage stuff. And that’s it. That’s the only agreement that they have ever had and that’s how they divide it. So, we kind of came up to a very much a similar thinking. I said, you know, you’ve got the on-ice track team, let them do what they need to do. We’re the office track team, so we do our bit. But how can we set them mark for success? And that’s where we got to. You know, it’s fantastic when you, when you see an individual who’s come through the program, they win two gold medals. You know, in the mix, the men’s, you get three women in the top 10, which for BBSA, we’ve never done that before. And we also had representation in the women’s moonbow as well, which is a first time for us, you know, a really successful set of results which sets us up for the next quad, the next Olympic cycle for 2030.

And fingers crossed, if UK Sport are listening, they will reflect that in the financing of that program. And anyone that wants to sponsor us as well, you’re very welcome. We take; we take all comers.

Excellent. Well, thank you very much, Paul. If there’s somebody wants to continue the conversation, what’s the best way for them to reach out to you?

Yeah, so I think the, the easiest way is through my LinkedIn page.

Yep.

So, you can absolutely find me there and give me a message there. I generally write about things that pop into my head. I no doubt the. This podcast will. And equally you can get me through our website, so. Ppwd.co.uk and there’s a link there for an information tab and that comes. That email will come directly to me, and I think we’re either number one or number two. Sometimes we’re beaten by the European Packaging and Processing Waste Directive. But competing against something.

Thank you so much for joining me, Paul.

Been a real pleasure. Thank you, 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

Paul Davison is the CEO and founder of PPWD. Across a diverse range of safety-critical industries through to elite sport, he advocates a compassionate approach to safety. The PPWD team creates environments that accommodate humans for being human and enable cultures of learning, adaptation, and sustainable high performance. 

For more information: www.ppwd.co.uk

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Everyone Deserves to Come Home Safe with Jacqueline Quinlivan

Aug 7, 2025

Everyone Deserves to Come Home Safe with Jacqueline Quinlivan

LISTEN TO THE EPISODE: 

ABOUT THE EPISODE

Join us for a deeply moving episode of The Safety Guru as we welcome Jacqueline Quinlivan, who courageously shares her story of unimaginable loss and the lasting ripple effects that followed. In 2018, Jacqueline’s husband, Lyndon, lost his life in a completely preventable workplace incident. Since that tragic day, Jacqueline has transformed her grief into a powerful mission—advocating for safer workplaces so that no one else has to endure the same devastating loss. In this heartfelt conversation, she recounts the heartbreak of that day and highlights the profound impact it had on her family, coworkers, and the broader community. Her story is a sobering and urgent reminder of what’s truly at stake when safety is compromised. Tune in as Jacqueline calls for a culture where safety is lived every day, where workers are empowered to speak up for safety, and leaders actively influence safety for their teams because everyone deserves to come home safe.

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, Jacqueline Quinlivan. She’s a lived experience speaker in the safety space. Happy to have you on the show with me.

Thanks, Eric. Very happy to be here.

Jacci, maybe let’s start with Lindon’s story, because you speak to people all over Australia, around the world, around Lindon’s story, and obviously, some of the ripple effects that come from it. So maybe why don’t we start with Lindon’s story? It’s a very tragic story.

Yeah, sure. I guess, so the May, fourth of May 2018, started off as any other day would. My husband, he got up to go to a typical day shift. He got up quite early, snuck around because we were all still asleep, and gave us a kiss goodbye, and off he went to work. Unbeknownst to us at the time, that would be the last time that he would ever come home, and he would ever be conscious again. After he left, I woke up, I got ready for work. I got the two kids ready for school. Chris, at that time, was 10, and our daughter Mia was eight, so they were still quite young. I got them ready at school, dropped them off, and went to work. When I was at work, it was ramping up, obviously, because it was end of financial year here in Australia. So, working in the finance and accounting field, we were definitely ramping up. And I was working as a self-managed superannuation fund manager. Just after lunch, we’re in a meeting and the phone rang. One of my colleagues got it and interrupted the meeting and I said, Jackie, there’s a call.

And at first, I thought, that’s weird because they’d always take a message. And so, I just said, can you take a message? And they said, No, It’s Mick. You need to take it. So, I knew straight away my gut just dropped. So, Mick was or is my father-in-law, and he was so working at the same company. He was working and associated with that company for a very long time. When I took that call, he just asked me to carefully get to the work site, and he’ll be waiting for me. So, at that stage, I just asked him if Lyndon was okay. And the only thing, and you could obviously hear it in his voice, but he just said, we’ll see. So, I lost it, and I knew that something drastically had gone wrong. Sure. Obviously, one of my colleagues at the time knew that I wasn’t in a state to drive, so she drove me. It was only a 10 drive from my work to the site. When we were ending route, we had to pull over because of all the ambulances, firetrucks, whatnot. So again, poor Trish, she was trying to just say, it’ll all be okay, and trying to make it feel somewhat good.

And then Obviously, all this happened. So, it was just… It was an outer body experience, that’s for sure. When we got to the work site, my father-in-law was waiting for me in the car park. And I just remember him opening the door. And as I got out, he grabbed my arm, and he whisked me upstairs into a boardroom. I don’t even remember my feet touching the ground. Like, he just took me straight up. At that stage, all I knew is there had been some incident potentially involving hydrogen sulfide, H2S, or Rotundones, as it’s very commonly known. Once I got up into that boardroom, we were both just obviously just pacing, waiting for some answer. And somebody came in and asked me for a cup of tea, and I said, no. I said, I just want to know how my husband is. And they just said, the ambulance is trying to work to get his heart started. So again, it was just indescribable. A short while later, they came in again and they said, they’ve got his heart started and he’s in an ambulance going to the local hospital. So immediately, I felt that rush of relief come over me.

His heart started; he’s going be okay. Whatever happens, we deal with it, but he’s not working. So that feeling, again, was indescribable, but I felt relief. Sure. At that stage, my mother-in-law had just come to the site as well. So, we saw her coming through a window. So, my father-in-law grabbed me by the arm, rushed me down, opened the door of her car, put me in and just said, Follow the ambulance, we’re going to the hospital. As we were on route to the hospital, I had to ring my girlfriend at the time and ask about the kids because I didn’t know what was happening. I tried to phone her and there was no answer. So, I phoned her husband, and he answered, and I just basically said, look, I just need you to pick up the kids today and take them home to your place. So, he obviously didn’t know anything at this stage. So, he was probably thinking, what’s going on. But I knew the kids were… They were safe. And then they went to their place. Once we got to the hospital, we went into the emergency department And I said my husband had been brought in, and they were immediately…

They were waiting for us, and we were taken straight away into this very small room. So, at this stage, there was me, my mother-in-law, father-in-law, and my sister-in-law. Again, we didn’t really know what was going on, but we just knew something terrible had happened. About 10, 15 minutes later, I think from memory, someone came in and said to my father-in-law, you have to go out and get checked because he was also at the site this day and he had been exposed to the gas. When he went, I believe there were about a dozen employees as well from the mill, all in emergency. It didn’t take him long once he was all checked over. He came back, had his head down, and he just said, Ben is gone. So, in the incident, there was three people involved. Ben went up first, then my husband, Lyndon, and then another employee, or sorry, another contractor, I believe Tom. Sure. So, he just came in and said, Benny’s gone. And that just obviously changed the dynamics for everything once again. I just thought, wow, this can’t be happening. The doctors came in a few times to see how we were.

Again, we’re in this tiny room. And every time they’d come in, we’d ask, how’s Lyndon? And they’d just say, we don’t know. We’re still working on him. So, we had nothing. From around about 2: 00 till about 6: 00, no information. And at that stage, I had my mother, who lived about 13 hours away. And I just said to her, look, there’s been an incident. Lyndon’s in hospital. Don’t know anything else than that. And I’ll let you know. Once I hung up from her, it all became a blur. They came in at about six o’clock, I think it was. And they just said, the doctor sat down, and he said, look, Lyndon’s very sick. And at that stage, I guess looking back, you could call it a part of the denial stage. I was just sitting there going, okay, he’s sick, but it’s Lyndon. He’ll be right. He’ll be fine.

He’ll be fine.

He’ll be fine. And they’re like, no, he’s really sick. I know. He’ll be fine. It’s Lyndon. Nothing happens to Lyndon. So, I it was a bit of the denial stage, but it was also me trying to stay positive. I don’t know. I don’t really know what- Yeah, sure. They said, we’re just getting him settled and then you’ll be able to see him. So obviously he was in ICU. Just as they left the room, all the sirens, the codes, He went off. That was Lyndon. He was having another cardiac arrest. Again, it was some time before they came in. At around about seven o’clock, I believe we got to see him at night. And all I remember was going in and just seeing, obviously him in ICU with all the apparatus on. Very, very confronting. He wasn’t conscious, obviously. And they just said they were trying everything. I think they were on the phone to different countries, just trying to find out what to do. At about in the very early hours of the next morning, they pulled us aside and They basically had said, it’s only a matter of time before Lyndon arrests again, and we need, obviously, your approval to turn off the life support.

I remember my mother-in-law, she was beside me, and she was nodding her head as if that was her approval. So, I thought that’s what I needed to do. He’d I thought so hard, so long. I never thought that as a 32-year-old with two young kids having to make that decision, I would I don’t ever have to do that, but I obviously found myself doing that. So essentially early hours of the morning, he had lost his fight.

So sorry. 

Thank you. At that stage, again, it was all a blur. By the time we left the hospital, which wasn’t long after, the radio had already gotten hold that he’d passed. So, I remember feeling so blindsided by that. My kids didn’t No, like knew. And now it was just plastered all over the radio. Once we got back to my in-law’s place. They wouldn’t let me go home on my own, obviously. I remember my mother ringing me. She was at Sydney Airport. She was on her way down to see us. I remember my mom ringing me to see how Lyndon was. And obviously, I had to break the news to her then that he’d passed. And I think she thought I was joking. It was just…

Sure.

Mom then had to board the flight from Sydney to Aubrey while she was trying to process what she just heard. By about nine o’clock the next morning on the 25th of May, I had my girlfriend bring over my children. I said to her, you can’t take them to school.

Just throw it over.

And around about the same time, my mother turned up, my kids turned up. So, we were all together. And then, obviously, I had to break that news to my young children that their father wasn’t coming home and why he wasn’t coming home, which as a parent, that’s not something you could ever imagine having to do. I will never forget that experience. Basically, after that, the pieces of the story started coming together. So, my husband, also Ben, had gone up onto a tank. It was a scheduled three day shut at the work site, which I read. But everyone probably knows what a shut is in terms of mill operations, its maintenance, cleaning, all that That stuff for certain things. At this particular shot, the tank in question wasn’t being touched. The only reason something came up was because someone saw a crack in the tank, I believe, and then liquid running down the tank. So, Ben was sent up to investigate. As he got up, he was very, very soon after rendered unconscious. And then another colleague, Davin, who was extremely good friends with Lyndon and Ben, he had gone up, started, excuse me, started Excuse me.

Started to feel light-headed and then came down. He didn’t actually think anything of it because that was his first shift back from kidney surgery.

Right. So, he assumed it was a different reason, right?

Yeah. So, as he came back down, he radioed to Lyndon. So, Lyndon and Tom, I believe, were in the control room. And Lyndon was actually a trained first responder. Sure. Didn’t obviously help in this particular incident. But him He went up first, and then Tom followed him behind. Lyndon was rendered unconscious, and then Tom followed as well. At this stage, there was a lot of scrambling going around, trying to get bands up there to disperse, ventilation, all that thing. And Lyndon’s father had to be held back because he wanted to obviously go up.

Of course. Yeah.

To save his son, so they were holding him back. And then that’s when they worked out it was hydrogen sulfide. So, yeah, that’s basically the story of that. And then obviously the investigation had to start.

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.

In a case like this, there’s a lot, if we think back from a leadership standpoint, there’s a lot that can come up in terms of even understanding the risks that are present. What surprises me in the story is Hydrogen’s H2S is very dangerous as a chemical. Then my hope is it would be adequate training, there’d be adequate preparation. But it sounds multiple people went up, not necessarily fully realizing the risk in front of them. The other piece is if you have chemicals like this, normally you’d have detectors monitoring equipment. So that you have an early warning that something’s wrong before you actually go in, as opposed to observing a crack and something, a liquid falling or not dropping.

I think you’re exactly right in that once the investigation was completed, they obviously, as a company, they had multiple failings. We’re not talking about just two or three. We’re talking about- Sure. Multiple. One of those failings was the absence of the monitors. Another failing was where they actually went up was later deemed a confined space, but it wasn’t at the time.  

Right.

Yes, because apparently, I believe that their confined spaces were tanks, But, this area was above a tank. You had a ladder up on the side of the tank, and then up on the tank, I don’t believe they could stand fully, and then you had a concrete floor and equipment above that.

So insufficient ventilation.

No, it wasn’t sufficient ventilation. And that was obviously one of the things as well, which they didn’t have the ventilation there. So again, you look at that and see all of these filings. If they had those things in place, if they had had had the gas monitors, gas detectors, no one would have been up there or even training around the risks associated with a leak of… Because the first thing I remember you saying was, they spotted a crack but if you know that crack is on a tank that has a sizable risk associated with it, then you think there’d be a different process to follow.

Well, that’s exactly right. And not to mention as well that hydrogen sulfide is a byproduct of so many things, including pulp and paper manufacturing. So, it’s a known risk. They weren’t, I believe, they weren’t aware of those risks in this particular tank. They were aware that it could form in other areas of the mill. Sorry, of the company. But I don’t believe they actually knew that it could form where it did.

I think this is the part of my assumption is there were no prior events. I think there’s a It’s a misconception that safety is an absence of events, but safety is really the presence of safety, of controls, and proactively looking at what could go wrong. This is the type of thing where you may have no event around it, but it doesn’t mean until something happens that there wasn’t a risk.

Yes, exactly.

Now, is there anything else? There are quite a few things that were missed. Is there anything else from a leadership standpoint that we can take away? Because obviously for the audience, a lot of it is, how do I influence safety? One of the pieces that comes to me is really this element of how I proactively look out for risks that I may not be aware because nothing’s happened necessarily there. How do I build in that competency within my business? Anything else that came up from the investigation that you can share?

Look, obviously, the consequences of H2S where It wasn’t made clear. So, the training was inadequate. Sure. So, most workers were unaware of the fatal effects of the rotten egg gas on human life. And I believe in the incidents where H2 West is present or even has the potential to be present, it needs to be made there. The confined spaces. Everyone needs to have a look at their confined space and deem appropriate the confined space. The lack of risk assessments or conducting risk assessments in the plant, that was a huge failing. And also, another one was when somebody went to raise the alarm that an incident had happened, it was found that a siren wasn’t working. So, again, all of these things, if they were in place, and its maintenance, its training, it’s the crack in the tank had been there since about 2015, I believe. Why was it not maintained?

Oh, wow. So, it was just notice on that day, but it didn’t happen just then.

No, the crack in the tank had apparently been there. As I’ve heard, yes, had been there since 2015. So, it was an incident waiting to happen, and unfortunately, it was on this day that it happened. Yeah, I just… If they have all of their training and safety requirements in place, it wouldn’t have happened. Part of the investigation found that, obviously, they didn’t have the monitors, so they had to put those there. Sure. And then a second incident happened shortly after, where the levels of H2S, again, were extremely high. But thankfully, the monitors picked it up, so nobody was hurt. But again, it was still the presence was still there. If they had have had that simple gas monitor, whether it be an attached fitting or even a personal monitor, they wouldn’t have gone into that environment.

Ideally, both. They have redundancy. I think the redundancy is ideally where you’re trying to move to something on the person if you know there’s a presence and then something in the environment. So, you have a backup because the monitor could also fail.

Yeah, correct. Yes. And then they also had, we’re talking about extremely high levels of H2S, not just your regular. It can cause a little bit of confusion with your smell and everything else in a four-hour window at however many PPMs. We’re talking about upwards of 700 PPM into the thousands, I believe.

Oh, wow. When you speak to audiences around Lindam’s story, what are some of the messages that you help as well convey?

I suppose for me, it is about the real-life ramifications of a tragedy and a workplace incident, whether it be a fatality or a serious injury. To prioritize safety, to ensure that those workers can go home to their loved ones at the end of a shift and ensure that they feel safe in their working environment, that’s basically what I do. So, if you go to work as a worker, you have a right to come home. Absolutely. You have a right to a safety or a safe and healthy workplace.

Absolutely. 

I give the real-life consequences of what happens if you don’t take safety seriously.

And the ripple effects as well in terms of the people that are left behind, right?

Absolutely. Yes. And those ripple effects are gigantic. Not only on those particular days. So, Ben obviously passed on the 24th of May, Linda passed on the 25th of May. Tom had made a full recovery. But the other thing is the workers, they were a family at that work site because they work together so often. They work 12 hours shift. One particular employee took his life two weeks later as a result of feeling guilty. And let me tell you, it wasn’t his fault. It was all of those failings leading up to an event like that. So, we have We have three lives here that have been lost and one life that has been changed forever by an injury of that size. But all of the repercussions on the employees, the families, and the wider community, it’s huge. Absolutely.

Is there any message as well that you convey as part of those conversations, particularly around frontline team members and their role around safety as well?

Look, I think it’s not only the frontline team members. All of them, they have an obligation to make sure that their people are safe and every Everyone has an obligation. Even the employees have an obligation. I suppose for me, in our incident, Lyndon and Ben weren’t aware of what he was about to transpire.

No, it doesn’t sound like it.

Lyndon was one of the most safety-conscious people I know. He took safety so seriously. If he knew that he would have actually put on the appropriate PPE or anything like that.

But- He was the first responder. He was trying to go and help somebody. So, he’s trying to do the right thing.

Yeah. So really, again, for the frontline people, it’s the training and the risk assessments that need to be conducted for the employees. If something doesn’t work properly, be it a PowerPoint, well, report that and get it fixed because that PowerPoint may, in the future, be something that could save someone’s life, like sticking a fan.

But you also have to create the environment for that to occur. I agree with you. Absolutely. We’ve got to speak up, stop work, bring those pieces. But there’s also a leadership responsibility in terms of how I create and foster an environment where people feel safe to do that because it’s not straightforward to stop work to challenge. Also to talk about risk, to introduce those regular conversations. To me, that’s a very key part of leading for safety.

Correct. Yes. I believe you have to be aware of your risk. As a leader, you are You’re basically the guide for everybody else. Everyone’s looking to you for that experience. So, you need to prove that you’re able to do that job. As a leader, talk to your people, your employees, your team about the safety. Have you seen safety risks, or have you seen something that you may think it’s unsafe? Give them the opportunity to speak up without the fear of consequences.

A hundred percent, right. And to be looking up for things. So, if this tank had a problem for years, or at least for a period of time, you want to make sure that people raise those issues, that you’re surfacing them so that you become aware of those risks so you can then drive the proactive maintenance. So, all of these pieces require a high level of engagement across the plant.

Absolutely, yes.

Jacqueline, I really appreciate you sharing Lindon’s story. I appreciate that you’re continuing to invest in trying to make a difference in the safety space through the sharing of his tragic event. I’m very sorry for your loss. If somebody wants to get in touch with you, what’s the best way for them to do that?

They can go to my website, which is Jacquelinequinlivan.com.au. They can also find me on LinkedIn, Jacqueline or Jacci, J-A-C-C-I, Quinlivan.

Excellent. Thank you so much for joining me today on the show.

Thank you so much, Eric. I really enjoyed it.

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

ABOUT THE GUEST

In the aftermath of a heartbreaking loss, Jacci Quinlivan, a young widow with two children, embarked on a journey fuelled by a promise to her late husband. Her unwavering commitment to pursue justice, ensuring accountability, and championing transformation reforms is rooted in a personal vow to prevent others from enduring similar pain. 

Jacci’s moving story strikes a chord whilst reshaping perspectives on workplace safety. Through her poignant narrative, she aims to spark essential conversations with organisations and individuals alike. Her goal is to promote a proactive stance on safety whilst acknowledging the lasting repercussions of such tragedy on individuals and communities. 

For more information: https://jacquelinequinlivan.com.au/

LinkedIn: Jacqueline (Jacci) Quinlivan 

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Game Plan for Safety: Leadership Lessons from the Football Field with Dan Comiskey

Jun 26, 2025

Game Plan for Safety: Leadership Lessons from the Football Field with Dan Comiskey

LISTEN TO THE EPISODE: 

ABOUT THE EPISODE

What can safety leaders learn from the football field? In this high-energy and captivating episode of The Safety Guru, we’re joined by Dan Comiskey, a former Canadian Football League star turned safety leadership expert. Dan shares powerful leadership lessons learned under the stadium lights to inspire a winning safety culture. He brings to life what it means to lead by example and foster a culture grounded in accountability and care. Discover how building mindful habits and empowering team members to take ownership can strengthen a resilient and high-performing team. Don’t miss this episode! It’s packed with game-changing takeaways to help you develop a Champion Mindset and put your game plan for safety into action.

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 Dan Comiskey. Dan, welcome to the show. Really excited to have you with me. Tell me a little bit about your impressive background from sports to what you do today in safety.

Oh, gosh. Thank you so much for the warm welcome, Eric. I’m happy to be here. Always like getting involved in safety messaging. It is my business now is really safety messaging. You know what? I started speaking way back in the CFL in the mid ’90s. I started in 1997. I guess that’d be late ’90s. They started sending me around to schools to talk to kids about bullying when I was playing for the Rough Riders. I played in the CFL for 13 years and had a great time. Really loved it. It was obviously a passion of mine. You don’t get there without being passionate. But it really also, through the different the teams I was on, I was able to cut my teeth, so to speak, in a professional speaking capacity. So, I started at schools, and then it turned into leadership programming and different breakfasts. And then by the time I was retired, this is really all I wanted to do, was get out and talk to people about important things.

That’s cool. So, let’s get into your story, how you got into football.

Wow. Okay. Well, I was a troubled kid. It’s the bad sports kid story. You’ve heard it before. I was a troubled kid. I had a brother who was sick. He had cancer, and he died. I got really angry about it. And my parents were divorced, and I was angry about that. I started getting in trouble. My dad figured out that I was in trouble, and we had a bunch of tough conversations, and one time, a very serious conversation. And finally, he said, you got to find something better to do with your life. And if you do, I’m going to help you, and made a promise that if I found something that was productive, that he would go as far as he could possibly go to make it work for me. And I found this picture of Tony Mandarich, who was an old offensive lineman back in the ’80s, who was from Toronto, and he was 6’6, he was 315 pounds, and he could bench press two and a quarter 37 times and run a 4. 65, 40. And all this stuff matters to me now, and it mattered to me then. And I just saw this guy that was indestructible, and I really thought that I wanted to be indestructible.

So, I told my dad I wanted to play football. And he just started moving mountains, man. I was living in a small town with him. There was no football team. He bought a car for my brother, turned the garage into a gymnasium, and just started buying milk and cheese, put it in the fridge, and I started gaining weight. And I spent time living with my mom and my dad, and lucky enough to play for a bunch of years and eventually ran into some people that said I was talented enough to go to the CFL, and that became a dream. And I was drafted back to Saskatchewan in ’97. So, it was probably the one thing that changed my life when I was on the wrong path that my dad gave me.  

So, Saskatchewan Roughriders, because back then, I think there was still the Ottawa Roughriders, wasn’t there?

There was not. The Ottawa Roughriders had folded. That was right after the CFL expansion. So, the CFL expansion had just folded. In 1996, the teams were in such financial peril that, and I’ve heard stories, I won’t talk about which teams, but the owners of the teams were telling players on check day because you always get paid the day after the game, right? You get handed a check back in the day. I don’t know how they do it now. And they said, go to the bank. Wow. Take this to the bank. And so, they would say, so they’d give them the check at the beginning of practice, and they’d say, take this to the bank before we go to practice. And it’s because they just were worried about checks clearing. That’s It was scary it was in the league back then. It’s a different place now. You see the stadiums and everything else, right? So ’97, I’m brought in. I’m making about four bucks an hour for the whole year. It’s not a whole bunch of money in playing football in Canada back then. And yeah, it was wonderful. I had great leaders around me. I had on winning teams and losing teams and made some amazing friends that are still great friends today and lucky enough to win a couple of Great Cups.

Yeah, it was a great career.

Excellent. And so how did you pivot from football into safety?

Well, I had some things happen in my life that were making me think about safety. The biggest one would be It was two people very close to me. One was my stepbrother. We lost him in an accident at work. He was working for St. Catherine’s Hydro, and he was electrocuted. He just grabbed the wrong wire at the wrong time with the wrong gloves. And that it was back in 2001. I was halfway through my career. My father-in-law at the time, who since passed, had a serious head injury. He was a minor. My wife and I, at the time, my ex-wife, we had kids, and we had twins, and there were some complications. Serge was her dad, and he moved his family, his wife and him, from Northwest Territories to Alberta to go back into mining after being retired so that she could be close to us because there were some health complications with my daughters. Then his first shift back as a miner. I’m 52 right now, so he was 52. I always thought he was an old fart when I met him. But he was this tough Frenchman, 6’3 or something and 190 pounds.

And you’d see him work and he just… The guy wouldn’t take breaks. He just worked. If you’re unloading a van with that guy, the van is unloaded before he stops. He’s head breathing heavy and stinking, and moving, and great guy. Just work his butt off, right? And then he goes out for his first shift, and he gets hit in the head with a piece of rock and changes his whole life. He survived it, but it changed who he was. And those things affected me, right? So that when I got into looking at my retirement, I knew I wanted to speak. I didn’t know how I was going to become a safety guy. I didn’t even think about it. But I knew that as a speaker and a lead, I realized there’s a bunch of skill sets that I had from football that were leadership skill sets that I’d learned over 13 years, from being a rookie that didn’t know anything to being a vet that at 38 thought he knew everything. How about we just say that? And I mean, since then, now I’m 52, I’m hoping I know a little bit more. You know what I’m saying?

I’m growing as you go, right? So how was I going to transition? I got my NCSO out of Alberta, and I was approaching Shell about selling them a leadership training program, and along with a whole bunch of other people, just looking to sell my wares. And they just said, why don’t you actually come work for us and learn our leadership program? We’ll teach you, and you can learn it. And so, I actually learned how to deliver theirs, and I started delivering theirs and all sorts of different onsite stuff. And I became not only a safety adviser, but I became a cultural adviser for bigger projects. I became somebody that was really responsible for trying to affect how the How the idea of safety was going to permeate through the crews. So, all of the onboarding, all we had pause training and stop work programs and even permit to work. I got involved in all of that stuff so that I could actually understand it. But to me, it was always, how do we bring it to the point where people actually are so concerned about… They understand that safety is the number one thing while we have to get work done, obviously.

But they understand that safety is the number one thing, and that we have to make sure that they’re going to go home safe. And that’s got to be a major value to them while they’re getting the work done. And so that was really what I learned at Shell. It’s not just about stopping work. It’s about how do you keep work going, safely. It was really a… Maybe that’s a long answer to a short question, man. But that’s what happened. Is it just a transition? And then after we had an election and government changed and the oil fields got hammered pretty hard by somebody who I don’t mention very often. And opportunities left, but I started just getting on this keynote roll in both 2015, and I started doing that as part of my work. And it’s been a mainstay for me. And then I had to adapt through COVID like everybody else and took on some other roles. But last year, again, went full-time. And this year, there’s some really amazing things happening because of it. Really excited about some opportunities that happening. Really, given the safety career has been something that’s been very educational and meaningful.

But on top of that, it’s given me all sorts of opportunities.

Now you bring a lot of your lessons in leadership from your days in football all. Walk me through some of the big lessons in leadership that you use in your presentations.

Well, thank you. Great question. There’s a bunch of stuff that you learn that That’s fundamental, right? You learn about leading by example. And people say lead by example, and it’s like you wrap everything in leading by example, and that’s just an easy thing to say. Sure. But what you learn is that when somebody is actually leading by example, they know that they’re leading and misleading by example. They know that people are going to watch them for not only what they’re doing right, but especially for what they’re doing wrong. And they’re going to watch them when not only things are going really well, but they’re going to watch them when things go sideways. How do you react when things aren’t working the way you want them to work? That’s when you find out what leader you are.

Absolutely.

Right. I had some great examples of this in football. Tom Higgins, Jeremy O’Dade was another one who’s GM for Saskatchewan now, who’s just great. Just as a player, I knew him, and now he’s a GM. He’s been involved for so long because, man, he’s the same guy. He brings the weather every day. And he’s always the same guy. And people don’t catch him making those huge mistakes and finding out that he’s actually a hypocrite to what he says, which is what the problem is with trying to lead, right? If you go against what you say, you’re in trouble. So, it’s stuff like that. Leading by example, knowing who your audience is, who you’re working with, knowing how to actually reach people, knowing what their goals are, getting out of the truck and talking to people on site. I mean, that’s really about understanding who your players are. And so, a lot of this stuff, it started, I understood it in football, but then working with Shell and with so many different people at different businesses, you start understanding that there’s experts everywhere. There are people that actually really… And so, I’ve learned from everybody that I’ve ever worked with.

Good and bad, I’m sure.

Oh, certainly. Listen, man, I worked with some guys that were from the Jean Jack and Days on Pipelines, and I work with some guys that were from the Drinking Days back in the CFL and Drinking and More. Everything’s evolving, right? Everything’s evolving.

So, leading by example, I think it’s a very powerful lesson because I think it’s exactly what you said, is how do I respond to bad news when something goes wrong? What’s my initial response? So key because it’s easy on a good day to show up the right way.

It is. Eric, the interesting thing is I can say that, but that still doesn’t tell you how. How do you make a bad day seem acceptable? How do you do it? And what I’ve learned, and this is through new coaching and mentorship, like I say, I continually learn. I have new partnerships all the time. The mental side of habit creation is a big football thing. It’s a habit creation machine. It grinds out habits because you’re videoed You’ve done everything you do, and your body position has to be perfect, and your hand placement has to be perfect, and your foot position, and your knowledge of the game and the playbook has to be perfect. If everybody isn’t perfect every play of the game, you lose. That’s how you lose by somebody stepping three inches too far in one play, you lose a whole game. People don’t understand how technical it is, but it’s sick. And so those habits have to happen. But not only that, the mental habits. How do you actually… And this is something that you learn in Physically in a game like that is how do you… So, let’s say you’re playing in a very important game.

I was playing in the Great Cup. I was playing against a guy named Robert Brown. Robert was my nightmare. I mean, there’s guys I liked playing because they would come right to me and just give me their chest. That’s as an offensive lineman, let me beat you up. I love that. I respected everybody I played, but Robert was one of those guys. Scott Schultz was another guy that was tough for me. There are certain guys that were just tough, right? And going into the Great Cup, I had a torn meniscus, so my knee was locking up. And I wasn’t going to sit the game because I knew I was… Well, I wasn’t going to sit the great cup. I wasn’t going to do that. And then going to the second half, first or second play of the second half, he beats me and gets a hit on the quarterback. And it’s like, how do you… So now you’re playing in front of 3 million people. You’ve just made yourself look like an idiot because you look foolish. When you get beat as an alignment, all they have to do is beat you once or twice, and you’ve had a bad game.

You got to be good every play. So how do you get that mindset get back. It’s the chatter in your head is like, Oh, you’re a loser. Oh, he’s going to get you again. Oh, you’re doing everything wrong. And it goes against everything you’ve trained with over the last however many years you’ve played and however many weeks you’ve played that’s saying, I know exactly I’m doing. I’ve watched this guy on film. I know exactly what he’s going to do next. I understand his keys. I know. So, you’ve got this internal battle that goes all the time, right? And so, the voice is in your head. We call them chatter. It’s like this chatter. But do you know how many thoughts you have in a minute? How many words-No idea.

I have a feeling it’s a lot. 300. In a minute. Scientifically proven. 300 thoughts and pictures a minute. And so, all of those pictures. So, if you get a haywire a minute where you’re getting hijacked, all of those pictures are going against you, and all those thoughts are going against you. And now you’ve got to come back, and you got to focus, and you got to get back to calm and peace, right? Sure. So that’s great for football. What does that have to do with life? Well, I think about the guy working a power linesman working in an ice storm who went to work that day, and his dog died.

That’s top of mind. That’s a distraction is using a unit of attention for you.

Exactly. How do I focus? When my wife’s angry at me, how do I focus? When my kid is sick, how do I focus? And so a lot of the training that I now do, both with teams and individually, is really about getting that chatter under control by learning to focus and figure out where it’s hitting you and where it’s hijacking you and creating tools to calm that and give you peace so that you can actually zone in and focus on the things that are important.

So, tell me a little bit more on the habit creation part, because it’s a key component. There’s lots of books written on habit creation. Tell me about a little bit from a sports standpoint, how you got to building those 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.

Well, like I said, for me, it was like I didn’t have to think about it because they were grinding me out of the machine. It was changing your habits or lose your job.

Right.

So, you just start realizing that number one, you realize that you can. Anytime I tell somebody, I’ve got a friend who Let’s just see. I got a friend who has too much… They like going to bed late at night. Let’s use this one. They have to stay up till 2: 00. They have to stay up till 1: 00, and then they get tired, and then they wake up like it’s an accident. I don’t know, wake up like… It’s The conversation is always the same thing with anybody like this. You say, well, and I’ve been this person, so I’m not trying to be judgmental. Say, well, you should just start getting up at 6: 00 in the morning. Well, I can’t do that. Well, you just set an alarm, and you get up. That’s literally all you do. It’s one little thing. You just set an alarm, and you get up and you have a coffee. And as soon as you have a coffee, you start your day. And now, okay, well, I don’t start work till 8: 00. Well, that gives you an hour before you start to think to maybe pray, maybe read, maybe meditate, maybe listen to some music, maybe get some exercise.

And then all of a sudden, those hours that you put in at the end of the day between 10: 00 and midnight are 6: 00 to 8: 00 hours. And so, it’s a tiny little change. And it seems, well, that’s a huge change. Well, no, it’s actually it’s like setting an alarm. And as soon as you do that, your body says, well, I need sleep. So, guess what? By nine o’clock, you’re saying, I’m going to bed. Listen, I’m not enjoying watching TV anymore. You’re falling asleep, right? It’s the same with… It’s really the fundamental, I think the biggest thing people do is they try to do too much. So, let’s call that a big shift, right? Let’s call that a big shift. How about we do something like, there was a guy I was coaching, and he was late for every meeting, and he was executive, right? And he’s like, I’m just late. He was on site, and on site, you’ve been on site. Things are crazy on site. Things are Everybody’s always late. This guy’s an executive. He’s high up there, and he’s not just a little bit late. He’s like 45 minutes, an hour late for everything.

Guys are waiting for him, and he’s slow and work down, right? And so, we’re talking, and he says, Yeah, this is my biggest weakness. That’s a process. Getting too that’s his biggest weakness is a process. But let’s just start there because it’s easier for this conversation. I said, well, what is the reason for you being late? He says, well, I get in these other meetings and why do they go longer than it’s supposed to? Why do they go longer than they’re supposed to? Well, because I feel like when I leave a meeting and somebody is still trying to talk to me, I’m being disrespectful.

Sure. 

I get it. It’s human, I feel, I often feel that way. Can’t get off the phone with somebody. You know people like that, right? There are certain people in your life that you just can’t get them off the phone. I can’t say goodbye, right? And so, what do you think we can do to change that so that there’s no disrespect Because the disrespect is the key. It’s the key. The key to that whole thing is he doesn’t want to disrespect, but he doesn’t realize he’s disrespecting the people he’s making later, right? And so, we came up with a system, and I can’t remember him or I. I’d like to claim it, but it was probably him. He walked into every meeting, and every meeting had a deadline that he was walking out. When he walked in, he said, can you come see me today, Tony? Yeah, I can come see you. But I can get there at 10: 00. When he gets there, he says, I’m leaving here at 10: 30. I’m walking out the door at 10: 30 because I’ve got another commitment. He doesn’t have to tell him what the commitment is.

I’ve just got. Within three months, he started getting promoted because all of a sudden, he’s on time for every meeting, and he was a very exceptional executive. He’s a great guy, and he’s a hard worker, and he knew what he was doing, and he’s smart, and all of those things. That tiny little habit changes your life.

Sure.

How many of those do we have that we can work on? And then it’s like, well, you should probably just try one at a time. Because until you get the one- small steps. Yeah, small steps. How do you eat an elephant? One step at a time. So, to me, that was all from football. The interesting stuff for me is getting into the mental, the gymnastics of creating habits that calm the storm, that calm the hijacking. What is your reaction to, I just got bad news? What is your reaction? How do you bring peace in? You ever see the old Seinfeld episode where I think it was Jerry’s dad, Serenity now. Do you remember?

I don’t, but- Yeah.

He had a… I don’t know. Anyway, I guess it doesn’t matter.

So that’s what you do now, Serenity now. 

Well, no, there’s visualization, but everybody’s going to have their own method, right? But you have to figure out what brings you peace. Is it pictures in your mind of… I have one friend who he pictures Jesus holding him as a child, and that’s what brings him peace. And he just goes to that. And he’ll take five minutes. People used to go for a smoke break when they’re upset. Well, people don’t smoke anymore as much, right? So, go for a breath break and take a breath and then what is it? What questions do you ask yourself? Where do you put yourself? Some people it’s music. Some people have a book, right? Just get yourself back out of that hijacking and into life. And then obviously, if you’re working on the line or if you’re working like a micro break is part of the job. If you feel like there’s a risk that you’re bringing to the work site and you’re actually working the shovel, working the tools, working the trades, then you have to be able to pause. Say, I’m the danger because I’m hijacked right now. So, let’s have a conversation about what’s going on around us so we’re safe.

So, to me, it’s like that’s the… In Shell, we used to call it the pause moment. I’ve seen stop work. Stop work, pause, just recenter on what we’re doing, what’s the task in front of us, what are the risks, so forth. A hundred percent. And so now can we do that because the risk is actually an emotional hijack decking. And that’s the training to see that as the key that gets you to pause, right? 

Because the distractions are a big part of what happens immediately prior to a serious event in many cases. And distractions are units of information that are distracting you from what you have to do in front of you. It could be, how are you doing that day?

Absolutely. Absolutely. Like I said, I’ve never seen a guy in a good mood when his wife yells at him on the way out the door. It doesn’t work. Well, I have, but maybe those guys are.

It’s a different story, different problem.

Maybe I’ve never been in a mood when I’ve been yelled at on the way out the door.

Any other lessons in leadership that you bring to some of the speaking engagements, the training programs that you do?

Well, there’s lots, right? I mean; to get into them, I have a website. You can go to www.dancomiskey.com. And there’s all sorts of stuff on there. The reality is it’s… I mean, there’s so many, right? I can get into… Well, I’ll give you a couple more. So, a lot of what we have to really acknowledge is how powerful we are. And that really comes with understanding how powerful your decisions are, because we can’t do anything without a team around us, but everybody affects the team, right? Sure. One of the things I talk about in some of my presentations is the butterfly effect. And I’ll bring my brother into this. So, my brother was a linesman, and he was up in the bucket. And the common practice of the day was to change out of his double-insulated gloves into leather gloves at the end of the day to clean. And that’s what they would do. When they’re tidying up at the end of the day, that’s just one of the common practices of the day. Okay. And on this particular day, it was really hot. It was Saint Catherine summer, and it was, whatever, let’s call it 100 degrees.

But it was the area swim through. Essentially, he lost his balance. He grabbed the wrong wire, and he died. And so, the question to me was, how did he have those gloves on? At first, you’re angry that he had the gloves on. The guy was a hard work. He was a great brother. He was a great son to his father. He was a great son to my mother. He’s a really good man. But you ask that question, right? Why did he have those gloves on? And so, something’s missing. So then how many people knew that that was a common practice? Because if you work in electricity, you know that’s a risk.

Yes.

Right? And so, if I said it’s 100 people a day, like 100 times a day, somebody thinks we shouldn’t do this, or 100 people that are in that business know that that’s a risk, and they know it’s a risk that’s happening every day, right? That means every day there’s a decision for people to not do anything about it. And so, if you go 300 days in a year, you got 30,000 opportunities where somebody could have stepped in, and they could have done something. That’s a lot of opportunities. That’s the domino effect in reverse. How many things had to go wrong for Augie to die. How many people had to not talk for Augie to die? We’ve got these opportunities to intervene all the time. I’ll tell you another personal story here. I had a daughter who was very sick, and she was born with multi-organ failure. She was in the NSEU. We were 94 days in the hospital with her. In those 94 days, she had 72 procedures. She had heart surgery that put her in a coma. She’s there, and she’s there and she’s in a coma. And the doctors kept on saying to my ex-wife and I that we’re going to have to unplug her.

So that’s awful. It was an awful time. When you’re looking at this kid, she’s in a coma. Well, but she’s like, what’s the right thing to do? After a few to four times, we started thinking, okay, it’s time to unplug her. And we’re doing last rights. We’re praying on her. And the nurse practitioner, Cathy, comes running in. She says, what are you doing? Well, we’re going to unplug her because this is what we’re told, right? She says, No, you’re not. We have to have a meeting to make sure that all of the doctors are going to agree with this because she’s for every organ. She’s got brain damage, heart damage, liver damage, kidney damage, stomach damage, every organ. She had eight organs that were… We get this meeting together, and all the doctors agreed that the organs were working within reasonable amount, but they weren’t communicating, and they didn’t know why she wouldn’t wake up. So, the conversation went from, do we unplug her, or do we give her time? We gave her time, and now she’s a creative writing student in university. She So you say, well, who helped that? Who saved her?

And so, did Cathy save her? If you ask Cathy, she was given that procedure by the doctor who wanted us to unplug her as a safety net. She had the power to call that meeting. So, she called that meeting. So, was it her or was it the doctor that created the procedure? And then you go to him, and he says, well, you played in the CFL, you’re broke, right? You want to thank somebody for saving your daughter. Thank Tommy Douglas. Because Tommy Douglas is… So, was it Tommy Douglas or was it the doctor? Because I’ve got this is a $3 million baby. How do you How do you rectify that? Well, Tommy Douglas was an immigrant from Scotland. Do you know Tommy Douglas’s story?

Yeah, I do.

So, he’s an immigrant from Scotland, right? He’s brought into Canada. He’s just outside of Winnipeg. And He has an injury to his leg that turns into an infection. They’re going to have to amputate his leg, and they don’t have anybody to do… They don’t have any money to pay for a surgery. There’s a doctor coming through town who’s going to start a school of medicine in Winnipeg. He’s got students with him, and he says, I’ll do the surgery and save the leg if I can, if I can let my students watch. Parents agree. Leg gets saved. Tommy becomes a boxer. Tommy becomes passionate about medical assistance for everybody in Canada and creates the system. So you go, well, how far back does it go? Because is it the doctor? Or was it his parents? Or was it… How far? And you just realize, well, number one, it’s a miracle. I’ve said it a couple of times already. I’m a thank God guy, and I don’t know how you wouldn’t if you were me. That’s first. But I think also God created this procedure, where all these people are involved in saving my daughter. And then you look at it and you say, well, so now what’s she going to do with her life? 

Who’s she going to help? Who’s she going to save? And who am I going to save? And Eric, who are you going to save? What are you going to do? Is it the kid next door? Is it somebody that’s broken down on the way to the cottage and they’ve got no gas in the car, or they’ve got a flat tire? And maybe it’s cold enough that if things go just wrong, they die because I know what it’s like up north. Or is it saying the right thing? Or is it saving a guy from wearing the wrong gloves 10 years from now? Because you don’t have to change the whole world with everything you do, but everything you do can change the world.

Everything you can. Yeah.

Right. Right. So, to me, people forget how powerful they are. So, when I go out and I speak, what I try to do is I try to empower the audience. I do safety presentations. I do leadership presentations. I try not to get into the sad stuff. There is sad stuff. People have sad stuff. Everybody’s been punched in the stomach by life, and that’s part of life. But I try to leave them with that understanding of that it’s not just It’s power, but it’s responsibility to actually take part in taking care of people, whether that’s interventions, helping somebody that’s working with you, whatever it is, that’s the empowerment part of it. When I talk about the butterfly effect, that’s really where it hits for me.

I think that’s a really powerful one because when you’re thinking about your brother as an example, there’s a brother sister’s keeper, which people keep talking about, but often don’t interpret it this way, which is each moment opportunity. But you’ve got leaders who are seeing something, not saying something. And so, everybody has an opportunity to step in. And you may choose not to, but there’s an entire poem that was written on that.

Yeah, you choose not to, but it’s still a choice.

It is a choice, right.

And that’s a domino.

Correct. That’s a domino. Or you can say something and the power of that can be substantial.

Yeah, exactly. Thank you for listening and understanding.

So, you’ve got a podcast. You mentioned your website. If somebody is interested in reaching out to you, what’s the best way to do it? And also, how do they get to your podcast?

So, you can find my podcast on YouTube. But I do have to say that some things are changing in my business, and there’s some amazing… I’m involved with an amazing new partnership that I’m really excited about, and it’s going to change the direction of my podcast, too. One of the things that happened the last year since I started the podcast is I’ve spoken to a lot of men about mental health and women about mental health, leaders about mental health. And I’ve realized how much of a… There’s such a connection between safety and mental health. 100 %. Most of what we talked about today, resonates on that line. So, I’ve gotten together with a fellow named Ian France. He approached me about doing an across Canada tour. We’re calling it Breakfast with Champions. We’re going to bring experts in, leaders in the field of mental health, as well as people who have just persevered. We’re going to be talking. We’re going to be putting breakfast together in every city that we can. We’re starting in Edmonton and Regina. It appears that July will be the start date.

Good time to do that, not December, January.

That’s right. You read my mail now. Those are going to be the Florida trips. What we’re trying to do is we’re trying to not only give people motivation and someone that understands that there are mental health issues, but we’re trying to give them tools. What can we do with these mental health situations? We’ll have keynotes at every event. It won’t be me necessarily, likely won’t be me. It’ll be somebody that’s local that’s prevalent who’s in that arena of mental health. Like I said, we leave people with resources, and we’re looking to change the country because we know that right Well, I’ll just say it. I’ve seen too many of my friends from the CFL die, not only on the streets, to addiction, to depression, and that’s just a game. In Canada, it’s a huge deal right now. There are so many things going on. Eric, you see in Toronto, but in small towns, the homeless situation is insane. It all starts with people getting lost. We got to make a change. We’re trying to make some big domino effects with that.

Excellent. Excellent. And on your website, again, if somebody wants to get in touch with you or would like you to come talk or present to them.

Thank you. https://www.dancomiskey.com/. I’ll throw in the description on anything I do, but yeah, https://www.dancomiskey.com/. So, if you think Comiskey Ball Park, same spelling.

Excellent. Well, Dan, thank you so much for joining me today and sharing your stories from football into safety. I think it’s been a Really good overview of themes, ideas, and quite motivating. So, thank you.

Thank you very much for your time, Eric. I appreciate you having me on.

Excellent. 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

Dan Comiskey is a dynamic and inspirational speaker renowned for his ability to deliver impactful keynote presentations to audiences across diverse industries. Drawing on over 20 years of professional football experience and more than a decade in industrial safety leadership, Dan has honed his expertise in leadership, accountability, resilience, and the power of creating mindful habits.

Dan’s journey, marked by overcoming adversity and achieving excellence in high-pressure environments, forms the foundation of his motivational presentations. He skillfully tailors his messages to resonate with a variety of audiences, whether addressing frontline workers, corporate leadership teams, or attendees at sports, business, or industry conferences. His versatility and ability to connect make him a sought-after choice for organizations aiming to inspire and engage their teams.

From cultivating a culture of safety to fostering resilience and teamwork, Dan’s keynote presentations go beyond inspiration—they provide actionable insights that empower his audience to create huge changes over time. His approachable style and deep understanding of diverse challenges ensure his message resonates with every audience.

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

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Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Breaking Down Psychological Distance to Improve Safety with Dr. David Hofmann

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We’re thrilled to welcome back Dr. David Hofmann for another compelling and thought-provoking episode of The Safety Guru! In this episode, Dave dives into his latest groundbreaking research: “Out of Sight, Out of Mind: How High-Level Construals Can Decrease the Ethical Framing of Risk-Mitigating Behavior.” He explores how psychological distance, an often-overlooked barrier, can influence perceptions, increase risk, and lead to unsafe behaviors and decisions. Grounded in solid research and real-world organizational examples, Dave highlights what leaders can do to bridge that gap, bringing risks back into focus and reducing them effectively to improve safety. Learn how organizations can keep risk-mitigating considerations front and center, ensuring that every safety decision reflects a deep commitment to protecting frontline team members and maintaining safety as a clear and consistent value and priority. Don’t miss this must-listen episode filled with practical insights to elevate safety so that it’s never out of sight, out of mind!

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

Hi, and welcome to the Safety Guru. Today, I’m very excited to have back with me Dr. David Hoffmann. He’s a Distinguished Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior at UNC Kenan Flagler. He was previously on our show. We had an excellent conversation around psychological distance, brought a lot of conversation. Really key topic. He’s just writing a new article, our new piece of research, “Out of Sight, Out of Mind”. David, welcome to the show. Very excited to have you back.

Thanks, Eric. It’s great to be back, and I’m excited for our conversation today.

Absolutely. So maybe tell me a little bit about the research you did on construal theory and psychological distance. What was some of the motivation behind that research?

Okay, great. We’ll get into the details of the research, I’m sure. But let me tell you just a little bit about where it came because it started actually a number of years ago. As this research process works, sometimes you get an initial idea, and then it just builds over time. The first nugget of this idea was I served on the National Academy of Science Commission that investigated the BP Deepwater Horizon accident. We visited as part of that investigation an onshore monitoring location of one of the major oil companies. Sure. And so that is onshore, sitting in an office in Houston, watching offshore drilling operations several hundred miles away. And I was just struck by the person being that far away from the real-time operations and the equipment and the sound and all of that thing that you’re divorced from in that location. And at the same time, one of our doctoral students was getting into this research on construal level theory and psychological distance, which we can define later. Sure. It was just the marrying of those two things. I started talking with a student about this idea. To further research the idea, we sat down with some folks that worked in an onshore command Center but had all worked offshore.

They had navigated from offshore drilling operations, et cetera, to onshore. We just got about four or five of these folks together, and we just said, you know that transition from Offshore to onshore, how did that affect how you think about your job? Super open-ended question. It was really interesting. They just started talking about, well, you just don’t feel the time pressure or the urgency. You can step back and take a little bit more of a systems view of how things are unfolding. If you see something, you can get up and you can go to the window and get a cup of coffee and you can think about it, versus being onshore where you have the equipment and the sound and this a perceived pressure to make a fast decision. They said, it just really changes your perspective. I asked, well, is it helpful having worked offshore being onshore? They said, oh, yeah, super helpful because you can imagine what it’s like being, what safety people would call the sharp end being on the rig. But then one of their other colleagues said something interesting, and they said, Yeah, but it’s amazing how quickly you go native, and you forget.

I thought that was an interesting observation. We continued to noodle on the idea after that, and we just thought there’s something to this notion of being far removed from the work environment that we think could have some interesting implications for safety. That’s where it started.

Tell me a little bit about the research. We talked about previously with psychological distance. Obviously, this comes up in this research as well as the control theory part. Tell me a little bit about what you uncovered.

Yeah, we were in the midst of this research, I think, last time we talked. I alluded to it, but I didn’t want to get into details because it hadn’t been published yet. We were still in the process of trying to get it through the journal. But okay, so let me step back for a minute and just high-level define this thing called psychological distance or construe-level theory, and hopefully, your listeners have not gone to sleep just hearing those two terms, but I’ll try to keep it high level. So can true-level theory and psychological distance, the same thing. They talk about how we can conceptualize goals and other things at certain levels of abstraction. We could think about things way off in the distance. We typically conceptualize at an abstract level, and we think about the why, why we might want to do something. Then as it gets closer in time, the details become a lot more concrete, and we think about the how. Sure. Let me give you an example. You have this amazing opportunity. Somebody reaches out and says, Eric, we would I love for you to come be a keynote speaker at this conference in Singapore, and it’s going to be all these amazing people.

You’re going to meet all these amazing people, and it’s a year from now. You say, oh, wow, that sounds amazing. I can meet all these amazing people, and I can be this keynote. It makes me feel good to get this keynote opportunity. You commit to it because of the why, because it’s way off in the distance. You’re not really thinking much about the how. Then as you get closer, close, and you think, oh, it’s going to be a 12-hour time inversion. I’m like, Bio-rhymes are going to be totally off, and it’s expensive to get there and then get back. I’ve got these other demands popping up right into this thing. What was I thinking? That’s a little bit of, we can commit to things way off in the distance because we think about the why, we don’t think about the how. As it becomes more concrete, the how becomes a lot more salient. That’s a little bit about how this control level theory works.

Sure.

It’s very, very well-researched in social psychology. Decades of research on this, and it’s a very powerful effect. What we thought with respect to safety is that moral and ethical values, religious values, typically in the literature, are construed at a pretty abstract level. That I have a certain value or religious commitment that says, I want to treat the others the way I want to be treated, the way I’d like to be treated. That’s an abstract principle. Because it’s an abstract principle, I can apply it in multiple situations. That’s why we abstract that principle so we can apply it consistently across different scenarios and situations. Ethical values and moral morality, moral ethics, typically have been found to be these abstract principles. But we thought that this notion of distance in some situations could actually work the opposite way, in that something far off in the distance might actually create less of an ethical and moral imperative. That was really what we sought out to research in this paper.

Something like safety would fall, likely in this category, where I I don’t want to harm anybody, but in a corporate head office, it’s abstract as a concept. I want to be a good person. I want to make the right decision that doesn’t harm people. I feel bad when somebody gets injured, but it’s pretty abstract if you’re a CFO or CEO or COO. Yeah. 

That’s exactly where we went with the study. Because there is a lot of research that what makes something an ethical or moral imperative is the potential to harm someone else. That when there’s a potential harming of another human, that puts an ethical moral lens on it. What we thought in the research was that, if we go back to that example to make it more concrete, pun intended, to take it out of the abstract conversation, make it more concrete, if we go back to that remote operating person. They’re sitting in front of six or seven computer screens. They’re watching operations that are happening 4,000 or 5,000 miles, or 4,000 or 5,000 miles, if it’s another part of the world. Our thought was that it’s going to be hard for them to conceptualize the harm that can construe, even if they had worked offshore and navigated onshore because of that one colleague that says, Yeah, you get acclimated quickly to this environment. We set out to look at that. I’ll just give you a couple One of the examples. One of the… What I thought was the coolest study we did is that we took offshore drillers, and we showed offshore.

We randomly assigned the offshore drillers into two conditions. In one condition, they saw abstract aerial views of drilling rigs from their company. Then the other half of the participants saw photos of a rig floor, like You’re on the offshore drilling rig. We made sure there were no people in any of the images. We didn’t have people in the close-up images and not people in the distance images. Just images, no people.

Sure.

Then we asked them just, what do you observe? They typed in some things. Then we had 10 safety behaviors, like ensuring people are wearing PPE and other types of just safety behaviors. We said, To what extent safety behaviors ethical or moral obligations? Just on a five point, seven-point scale, it’s not an ethical moral obligation at all, or it’s an ethical moral narrative. Sure. It’s a pretty simple study and what we found is that when the people saw the distant images, so the aerial views of the helicopter view of the drilling rate, they viewed these safety behaviors as less of an ethical moral obligation, in part because of the perception of harm, which we also coded in the study. Interesting. And so, what you saw is that as I get more removed from the work environment, I no longer perceive the harm. I view safety as less of an ethical moral obligation and duty. And then we did a few other studies we can talk about, but that was a what I thought was the coolest study, because I don’t know of a study that had been done. I don’t know of a study just like, hey, let’s show us some photographs.

It’s a different perspective on the work environment and see how it affects their moral and ethical judgments around safety, and we found that a pretty nice effect.

Interesting. I know my aha after last conversation was really a realization that corporate America, any country, corporate Canada, corporate Australia, United Kingdom, is very far removed from the day-to-day operation. Even if you think about Houston or Denver that have a big oil and gas presence, there’s no drilling occurring in that immediate vicinity. Even utilities have a very large service territory. Even manufacturing, they may have started with the corporate office close to the manufacturing plant, but they’re typically quite far away from the day-to-day. In some cases, we’ll probably get to that very soon, companies’ corporate offices move away from it. Boeing was a very key case study where their operations were out in Seattle, and then they moved to Chicago.

Yeah, in the flying blind, that’s one of the levers that the author talks about as a reduction of the safety culture is that it was really a double removal or a double distance because one, they moved corporate headquarters from Seattle to Chicago. And then also the senior leaders, they started putting in place senior leaders that didn’t have an engineering aviation background. And so now there’s professional distances as well, which is professional training to really understand that. Related to what you just mentioned, the Houston and Seattle, and Chicago, we actually did two studies, but one of them with nurses, which we took a sample of nurses, and we actually manipulated this distance of the work environment in two ways. So, one way, we repeated the photographs. So, we showed them an outdoor picture of a hospital from outside the hospital. And then we showed them a picture of a hospital floor, nursing station, and hospital rooms and whatever. No people in either photo. So, we tried to eliminate that compound. But then we also said, we asked the nurses what the closest major city is to where they work. And so, you can imagine a nurse says, the major city that I work close to is your hometown, Toronto.

And so, the nurse types in Toronto, and then we randomly assign people. And so, what we did is we said, the people who saw the outside view of the hospital, and they’re working in Toronto, we actually say, imagine that This is a hospital in Miami, Florida. And then the other nurse, say two nurses do our study from Toronto. The other nurse says that they work in Toronto, and they see the inside view of the hospital. And we say, imagine that hospital is in Toronto. So, we gave outside views in a city far, far away. It was Miami for everybody because Miami is pretty far away from most everywhere. And then we did control, actually. If we had somebody from Fort Lauderdale in a sample, we controlled for that. We had outside view of the hospital, Miami, inside view of the hospital, in your hometown. Then we repeated, to what extent is there likely to be a nurse harmed or a patient harmed in this environment in the next 30 days? And then to what extent is safety an ethical moral obligation? And then we also had them look at safety behaviors. And then in one of the studies, we actually had them invest money into productivity or safety.

And again, we repeated the finding in the sense that people who were viewing a work environment that was way off in the distance via photos, a faraway city, they perceived less harm was going to happen, perceived safety is less of an ethical moral obligation. Then when they were given the opportunity to spend $10,000 on increasing productivity or ensuring safety, those folks were more likely to put the money towards productivity if you perceived less harm and you were far away. We went all the way through a behavioral investment decision, at least in one of the studies. This notion of it can be perceived distance, just the photos. It can be physical distance, the cities. They found levels of the hierarchy in an organization. The higher you are up in an organization, the more abstractly you can strew the goals and objectives of the organization. We went through. That notion of city differences, we investigated in a couple of the studies.

Phenomenal research. Scary in some ways in terms of implications. Let’s get into some of the implications.

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I know one of the things that comes to mind when you bring this up is often when I speak to executives, they say, I have a 34,000-foot view or 38,000-foot view of the operation, which is very I could, based on what you’re sharing.

Yeah, that’s the good news and the bad news. Right. I mean, they need that 38,000-foot view of the organization to think about long-term strategy, to think about industry dynamics, industry changes, how to stay in front of those industry changes from an innovation standpoint, from a product standpoint, from a profitability standpoint. But simultaneously, the opposite side of that same coin, is that they do have a 38,000-foot view. They lose sight of some of the harm that can accrue in some of the perhaps financial decisions, investment decisions that they’re making, investments in safety research, or if we go back to the California wildfires, tree trimming budget. Can we just cut that 10% a little bit and then get a little bit more money for innovation for these changes that are happening in the industry. And so, they just cut that budget 10 %, nothing happens. And they’re like, okay, I guess we didn’t need to spend that much money on that. And they just keep going. And so, yeah, you need those executives to have that 38,000-foot view for a lot of different reasons. But the flip side of that is that they lose the 10-foot view, which is some of the harm that can accrue to some of the downstream implications of some of the decisions that they’re making.

Those really are key implications. Tell me about some of the ways an executive can fix that, or a senior leader in an organization How can you fix this distance?

Yeah, that’s a $64 million dollar question, right? So, we don’t have a lot of data on this, but we have other people’s research and our own thoughts on what are the implications for this and how do you fix it? And I think one of the things that you have… So, part of it is the harm is they no longer perceive the harm. Okay, so that’s one problem to solve, is that we have to make sure that they continue to have some accurate perception of the harm. Fairly frequent visits to the job site to really understanding the work that’s being done, what you’re asking there of people. This whole notion of what undercover boss, I think is actually… It’s a little bit predictable. Yes. Just as the show, they always meet an amazing person and a not amazing person and so on. But that notion of the CEO showing up to do the work when they don’t know it’s the CEO. It’s so powerful for that person to realize like, oh, wow, this is hard work. The fact that in some of those shows, it’s like, Yeah, we don’t have fall protection, and so we’re all taking risk.

They’re like, so you’re just climbing up there without fall protection. It’s like, Yeah, the company won’t invest in it. The CEO What do you mean? Oftentimes, the CEO is like, how come I didn’t know about this? There’s a filtering mechanism. But I think there’s… So, one solution is you have to make sure that people, in an ongoing way, have real exposure to keeping that perception of harm as salient as you can. That might monthly or quarterly visits from a senior executive to a job site. But I think it can’t be what we would call a performative visit, which is you show up and you take the tour and nobody’s really working, or people are working at half speed and you’re chatting with somebody and cracking a joke and moving on. But when do you really see the operations? That’s why I like the undercover boss is because Nobody’s performative. It’s like, this is the real work because we don’t know who this person is. I think that notion of we have to somehow keep the perception of harm salient. That could be visits. I think when you’re looking at onshore operations, often those communications are via chat.

That further, that coarseness of that communication channel further removes people. We We’ve thought of, would it be helpful for the onshore command center to have photos of the people on the rig, perhaps photos of the people on the rig with their family? I interact with Eric, who’s on the offshore rig, but all of a sudden, Eric is… Here’s Eric with his wife and two kids in my queue. I need to make sure like, oh, that’s who I’m interacting with. That’s who this decision is going to affect. Somehow bringing the work environment closer in so that perception of harm remains real or as real as it can be one big implication. I think it’s also a lot for senior leaders, too. But I think those middle managers often get pretty removed. I think it’s important for them to… Because they’re the ones making a lot of the day-to-day trade-off decisions across competing priorities. Absolutely. To have those middle managers really attuned to that perception of harm as well. There’s an interesting study that we signed in the paper from, I think it’s a radiologist. Radiologist reading scan. It’s just a scan. Is it really a person after I’ve seen 5,000 in a day?

But they ran an experiment where they put a picture of the patient along with the radiology scan. What they found is that if the picture of the patient was connected to the radiology, the X-ray or the scan, they improved the reading of the scan and the accuracy because the patient’s photo. That notion of bringing the work environment closer into those people that are far away, I think, is one big implication. How do we exactly I think there’s all kinds of different ways you could do that. You could visit them, you could use photos, you could have all kinds of things. But I think the problem we’re trying to solve is for it not to be just an abstract thing 400 miles in the ocean somewhere, where I forget about the people, and the people aren’t real. They’re just part of a system that’s working. Just thinking about, as a senior executive, how do we make sure that those onshore command centers, those middle managers that haven’t worked at a production facility or offshore, wherever, in six or seven or eight years, how do we just make sure those people are staying connected to for harm?

Sure. I think there’s There are all kinds of different ways you can do it, but I think that’s ultimately the goal is to make sure that harm remains salient.

I think one of the pieces that struck me from our last conversation, but I think it’s coming even more front of mind with our conversation today, is it’s not just the CEO, COO. You’ve got to do it across because you talked about middle management. It’s not just in operations. It’s the finance folks that are making decisions. When you talked about the 10% budget, they’re making abstract decisions based on a balance sheet or a spreadsheet. That is, you can’t get more removed from the day-to-day than a spreadsheet, not understanding how it translates. If I cut training as an example, the implication could be down the road skills training for a frontline team member, somebody’s not as well equipped than is in harm’s way. But that risk could be 10 years down the road, especially when you’re thinking that most of these crafts are learned through an apprenticeship type of environment.

Yeah, that’s the rub, right? I interviewed the head of cyber security and international company. Sure. I said, okay, so how do you get capital investment for essentially a cost, right? Preventing cyber security is… I mean, maybe there’s a way that generates revenue, but I mean, if you’re not a cyber security company.

It generates a lot of revenue if you’re that.

But I was like, It’s a cost. So how do you not get it slowly eaten away over time with just tweaks to the budget. The person said an interesting thing. He said, well, you only want to build the wall one brick higher than the enemy is willing to climb. My first My first take was that I wrote down that quote really quickly because I was like, oh, I’m going to use this down the road. But it actually made me quite nervous if I was a senior executive in that company, because there’s a lot of assumptions behind that, which is- No kidding. You know who the enemy is. You know that they’re climbing as opposed to digging a tunnel, and you have some perception of how high they’re willing to climb. His point was that you don’t want to gold plate everything, because you can absolutely gold plate every single system in your company, but then you’re just not competitive, and you’ll be out of business because your cost structure gets too high. Sure. There’s this tension point between you want to invest in safety training and tree trimming and those sorts of things. But at the same time, you don’t want to spend $200 million when actually $175 million is sufficient to prevent harm.

But it’s really hard to figure out where that line should be drawn. Correct. Exactly because of your point, because the feedback cycle is really, really, really long. You cut the budget and nothing happens, but nothing really is going to materialize from that in terms of a learning standpoint. Point for maybe five, six, seven, eight, nine years. Then when it does materialize, nobody tracks it back to, oh, well, it was often paid to cut the training budgets nine years ago. That’s been a major contributor to this accident. There’s just no connection back to those types of decisions. There is this tension point between you want to keep the harm salient, you want to invest. You need to make sure you’re predicting harm. But at the same time, you’re running a business, and you have to compete in the marketplace from a price and cost schedule. There is this tension point, I think, for middle managers of navigating that allocation of scarce resources across competing goals. I think the tendency is, I think what we show is that when that perception of harm goes down, it just becomes a little bit too easy to cut some of these budgets without really thinking too hard about the long-term consequences of that.

I think that’s how this operational drift and risk starts to accumulate over time.

Yeah, and you’re introducing risk across the system. Like you said, it’s not one decision that causes a fatality or a serious event. It’s accumulation of these events that are introducing risk.

And many of those decisions are not made in proximity to the event. They’re made months, weeks, or years ahead upstream from that event. It’s an ongoing challenge to how do you keep harm really salient? How do you make sure you’re not making decisions that are increasing risk and harm? But at the same time, how do you be responsible to shareholders and other investors and compete in the marketplace in terms of price and cost and schedule and everything else. It’s a complicated set of decisions that have to be made. I think our research just provides one lens into that to say, hey, there’s a tendency when you get into middle senior managers and you’re not on the sharp end anymore, there’s a psychological natural tendency to no longer perceive the harm. That has implications. We need to just remind people that there’s harm, real harm could happen, get them exposed to that in a fairly frequent, not the harm, but where harm can happen in a fairly frequent way. That just becomes a criterion or a lens through which they start to see these decisions that they’re making every day.

There’s a cost to that, but it’s also a huge investment to spend that time. But I’ve seen the rewards on a regular basis. It’s an easy fix. What you’re describing is putting pictures, getting people to go out on a regular basis. Very achievable.

Yeah, I think so. I agree.

Thank you again for joining me. Great research, great insights. What I love is how easy it is for an executive to say; I can make a difference in this area. It reminds me of the concept of Gemba Walks that comes out very much on lean manufacturing side of the equation in safety. People talk about listening tours, but it’s really saying, how do I get this across the organization as a repetitive pattern to really understand what goes on, including in the remote parts of my service territory or my business.

Yeah, 100% agree.

Thank you so much for joining me. Again, a pleasure to have you on the show.

It’s great to be back on the show, Eric, and great to see you again.

Excellent. 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. Dave Hofmann’s research focuses on organizational climate, leadership, organizational change, organizational design, and decision-making. He teaches courses in organizational behavior, leadership, and the complexities of middle management.

Dr. Hofmann served as associate dean for the full-time MBA Program, area chair of organizational behavior, and senior associate dean of academic affairs. A specific focus of his research is the impact of leadership and organizational culture on safety and errors in organizations that operate in high-risk environments. He has edited two scholarly books on these topics, including “Errors in Organizations” with Michael Frese.

In recognition of his work’s applied implications, he received the American Psychological Association’s Decade of Behavior Research Award in 2006. He received a Fulbright Senior Scholar Award to study errors and safety issues in organizations at the University of Giessen in Germany, and a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant to investigate error management and organizational learning on nursing units.

He has served on two National Research Council/National Academy of Engineering committees. The first investigated the causes of the BP Deepwater Horizon accident, and the second focused on how to improve safety culture in the offshore industry.

Dr. Hofmann has presented his research or conducted executive development sessions in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, the Netherlands, Singapore, Spain, Switzerland, the UAE, and the U.K.

He earned his PhD in industrial and organizational psychology from Pennsylvania State University, his master’s degree in industrial and organizational psychology from the University of Central Florida, and his bachelor’s degree in business administration from Furman University.

For more information: https://www.kenan-flagler.unc.edu/faculty/directory/david-hofmann/

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