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

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

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

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

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

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

Sure.

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

Sure. 

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

Sure.

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

Sure.

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

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

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

Are we legally compliant?

Sure.

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

Right.

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

Sure.

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

Sure.

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

Sure.

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

Sure.

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

Right, it has no correlation.

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

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

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

Yeah.

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

Yeah.

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

Yeah. 

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

Yep.

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

Oh no.

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

Oh no.

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

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

Yep.

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

Correct.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of course. Yeah.

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

Right.

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

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

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

True.

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

Impossible.

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

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

Yep.

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

My goodness. Right.

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

Sure. 

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

Sure.

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

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

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

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

Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Excellent. Thank you so much, Mark.

Thank you.

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