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

Sep 3, 2026

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

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ABOUT THE EPISODE

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

READ THE EPISODE

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sure.

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

Sure. 

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

Sure.

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

Sure.

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

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

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

Are we legally compliant?

Sure.

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

Right.

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

Sure.

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

Sure.

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

Sure.

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

Sure.

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

Right, it has no correlation.

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

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

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

Yeah.

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

Yeah.

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

Yeah. 

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

Yep.

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

Oh no.

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

Oh no.

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

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

Yep.

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

Correct.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of course. Yeah.

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

Right.

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

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

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

True.

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

Impossible.

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

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

Yep.

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

My goodness. Right.

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

Sure. 

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

Sure.

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

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

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

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

Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Excellent. Thank you so much, Mark.

Thank you.

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

ABOUT THE GUEST

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

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

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

Jul 23, 2026

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

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ABOUT THE EPISODE

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

READ THE EPISODE

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

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

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

Sure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No impact.

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

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

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

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

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

Sure. 

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

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

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

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

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

Sure.

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

Sure.

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

Yeah. 

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

Sure.

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

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

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

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

Sure.

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

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

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

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

They need somebody to help them implement their values.

Sure.

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

Sure.

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

Sure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sure.

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

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

Thank you for having me.

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

ABOUT THE GUEST

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

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

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

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

Contact Dr. Weatherly

Email: [email protected]

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The Importance of Neuroscience and Behavior in Improving Safety Performance with Cristian Sylvestre

Apr 2, 2026

The Importance of Neuroscience and Behavior in Improving Safety Performance with Cristian Sylvestre

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ABOUT THE EPISODE

In this thought-provoking episode of The Safety Guru, Cristian Sylvestre unpacks the importance of neuroscience and behavior in improving safety performance. Cristian breaks down four key brain modes that drive nearly everything we do, offering a powerful lens for understanding how attention and awareness influence our actions and how subconscious states like complacency, impatience, and fatigue quietly shape behavior in high-risk environments. He also explores the limitations of current safety practices and the critical role of attention in safety, helping us understand why even the best safety systems cannot fully protect us when attention slips. From understanding the root causes of inattention to building awareness and safer habits through repetition, this episode provides practical strategies to help prevent serious incidents and fatalities through individual actions. Cristian also highlights why workers should be seen as valuable resources in safety discussions to strengthen overall safety performance. Don’t miss these transformative insights and powerful takeaways to create safer workplaces. 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 Cristian Sylvestre. He’s a managing director of Habitsafe based out of Sydney. Christian, so happy to have you with me today.

Thanks very much, Eric. Appreciate you having me.

Absolutely. So, I’d love to start with your story and how you got passionate about safety.

Okay, so look, I’m a chemical engineer and I worked as a process safety engineer for a refinery here in Sydney. And what I found, as a process safety engineer, you quickly come to the realization that you can’t rely on the person in order to foresee what’s going to happen and deal with it, because things are very complex. So, nobody’s got enough cognitive horsepower to be able to foresee it with enough anticipation in order to be able to fix it. So, process safety is really very much about having the system and the checks and balances in place. So, things don’t get away from you.

Sure.

But the refinery that I was working for had the worst occupational or personal safety record in the shell world. So, the refinery manager said to me, why don’t you look at it and see what you can come up with? And I looked at it, I looked at the management system, and it was pretty robust. Leaders were talking about safety on an ongoing basis. So, we were doing all the right things. And the only thing that I could come up with at the time was that, well, people are just not paying attention at the time when the hazard is nearby.

Sure.

So initially we went out and we started telling people to pay more attention and be more careful and all that kind of stuff. It had no impact at all.

Right.

So, then I kind of left shelter, went off and did and did other things. And in sort of 2005, 2006, I started seeing papers that were looking at how the brain worked, but not how the brain works from the point of view of, you know, when something, when somebody’s sort of got problems with it, but how the brain worked for the function of how, how things happen. So where does behavior come from? And all that kind of stuff. So, I started looking at that, and what I found was that there were four main brain modes that decide almost 100% of what we do. And that’s conscious control.

Sure.

Autopilot, usually sort of. The third one is impatience. So, fatigue, frustration, anger, that kind of stuff, and also fatigue. So, I started getting interested, given my background with Shell of. Okay, well, how can we use this information in order to help people manage, you know, their ability to pay attention when hazards are about?

And so, when we’re talking about hazards, where do most accidents or fatalities actually happen?

So, when you look at where accidents are happening in the United States, for instance, there’s about 5,000 accidental fatalities every year. And they’re divided between process safety and personal or occupational safety. And when you look at that, what you find, I mean, process safety is really the refinery blowing up, the nuclear meltdown. Really complex things. Not many of those deaths and not many incidents are associated with process safety. But when you have a process safety incident, it’s kind of. It’s big. You’ll see it big.

Yeah.

So, when you look at just the workplace, what you find is that you find for each. Everyone, process safety, accidental fatality, there might be 20, 25. And that’s the same ratio in the U.S. in Australia, in the U.K. i suspect in Canada and New Zealand as well. But that is only 4% of the total data available. What we also know is that 120,000 accidental fatalities happen outside of work, a good deal of those on the road, people driving. So, 4%, in my view, is not really representative enough to give a complete picture of the total problem. And what that leads to is that it leads to a limiting of the range of possible solutions that get considered. So, if you’re wrongly looking at fatalities at work, you’ve got a fair amount of control over the environment. So, what you do is you tend to focus on doing things around the person. Yep. And you tend to assume that the person can’t do anything about keeping themselves safe. And I think that that’s a real weakness. Because when you start looking at all the accidental fatalities, what you find is that the majority of those fatalities, the person could have done something different in order to avoid it.

Sure. And so that brings me to the how does this connect with hop? And maybe some of the challenges with a purely HOP lens when looking at safety, because we’re not talking about blaming the employee, but we are talking about how is it that I can do things differently to have a better outcome?

So, HOP came about from process Safety. And it’s been around for a long time. And I think when you use hop in process safety, it helps a great deal. The issue, I think, is that we’ve extended that into personal safety. And I think what hop it does is actually gives people the sense that they can control everything around the person. So, for me, the problem with hop is that it kind of negates what you can do with the person, which doesn’t really help. So, whether you do hop safety differently, safety one, safety two, maybe they’ll come up with safety 137 soon. That is only about doing work around the person. And that gives us the illusion of control, in my view. Now, I think that is a part of what we need to do. So, we need to do things around the person, so the person is safe. But if you look at the workplace fatalities over the last 10 years in the US haven’t really changed. If you take out the suicides and the overdoses, they’ve gone up by almost 7%. The population has gone up by 6%. So, you can’t argue that that’s actually having an impact.  

And we’ve been doing hop and focusing on things around the person for the last 10, 15 years. So, when I look at the data and you think about, okay, so it seems to be that we’re stuck in a zone of diminishing returns. We keep doing the same thing over and over under a different label, expecting a different result. I tend to think that that’s the definition of insanity. We also need to look at what can we do with the person.

Sure. I would just. So, I agree, the last 15 years of data in the U.S. most countries have shown very little impact. Most cases, an increase in terms of fatalities, workplace fatalities. The other thing, though, a lot of organizations are doing is treating the same thing, the bee sting, in the same way as a fatality or potential Sifs and getting distracted from things that could have CIF impact. But I don’t think it detracts from this element that you need to look at the person as well as the context in the system.

Yeah, it’s kind of. I think it’s fascinating that we keep, you know, riding the worker out of the safety story. If you look at incidents outside of work, sure. The majority of prevention happens because the worker or the person did something different. 

Right.

So, one of the things that we asked when we do some training with people is we say to them, is a safety management system 100% effective, 100% of the time? Every single person goes, well, no. And I Say it’s okay. So, when the system fails, what keeps you safe? The workers intuitively know. They say, it’s me. And I said, that depends on whether you’re paying attention to what could hurt you at the time. Would you agree? So, the second question I ask is, so, what keeps you safe outside of work? And most of the time they go, well, it’s me. And I go. And that is a function of how good you are at paying attention. And given the number of accidental deaths that there are outside of work, what that tells you is that we’re not very good at paying attention, but we think we are. So really, when you analyze that for people, you go, okay. At work, your first line of defense is the safety system. Right. Your second line of defense is whether you were paying attention at the time that it failed outside of work. Your first and a lot of the times your only line of defense is how good you are at paying attention.

Right.

So, for me, it kind of makes sense. If the safety System is not 100% effective 100% of the time, what have you got when it fails? Because at the moment, what I see is all the effort is going into making sure that it never fails,

which is fair. And I think in some cases that’s impossible. I think it’s one thing in a controlled environment to be able to think you can control a lot of the failure points. But a lot of environments people work in are uncontrolled.

Yeah.

They change by the day.

Yeah. So, what I think happens is that people frame the problem in a way with a solution in mind. Right, sure. So, plenty of safety professionals have said to me, oh, no, look, the safety system should prevent all incidents. I go, really? I mean, what about, okay, I’ve investigated a number of incidents, ran into a pole that had been there for 50 years. Right. They tripped coming down the stairs. That have been there for 20 years. Right. So. And some of those have been quite serious in their consequences. You know, you fall down the stairs, and you hit your head hard enough,

and it’s quite charming, substantial.

So, for me, I tend to think that there’s this second sort of layer of protection that we could have that we’re not doing anything with. And the question that I always ask is, I mean, why is it that we are so allergic and want to continue to ignore this? It just doesn’t make a lot of sense. Now, are you familiar with the Lewin equation?

No, I’m not.  

Okay, so Lewin was in the 1930s. He was a behavioral psychologist or something. I don’t really know, but he basically wrote an equation that said behavior is a function of the person and the environment. You put the person first. Why did he put the person first is because you’ve got a lot more control over what we do with ourselves than what the world does around us. It seems to me like safety without really realizing or intentionally doing it. It’s trying to maneuver or to change the Lewin’s equation to behavior is only a function of the environment. Which is kind of bizarre to me because you can control a good deal of the environment at work, but the majority of people are not dying at work. They’re not killing themselves accidentally at work. And for me, if I was running a business and one of my employees had a car crash and couldn’t come to work, that is just as bad as whether they got injured at work. I’ve got to find somebody, I’ve got to train them, all that kind of stuff. So, I tend to sort of continue to try and push this argument that it’s great to do things around the worker and we should do as much as we can, but we also need to start looking at what causes inattention and what can people do in order to be more attentive.

Because when we do that, we can actually help prevent many incidents where the safety system wasn’t 100% effective.

And ultimately, behaviors matter, the person matters. If we are taking a view that only the environment matters, then that’s a very fatalistic view that eliminates personal choice decisions. And I think it’s a very dangerous path to go in. In general.

Look, I. I totally agree with you. I mean, this thing about, you know, only context drives behavior. Right? I mean, people. People go, is that true or. And I go, well, it’s true, but it’s also misleading because if you drop the only.

I think it’s okay.

Yeah, I think so. So, I think that when you talk about the environment and people talk about the environment drives behavior, what they talk about is the external environment. And the external environment does generate a situation, right? No doubt about that.

Yeah, no doubt.

But they never talk about the internal environment, what’s going on inside people’s heads. And that situation gets interpreted by the internal environment, which then generates a behavior that could be attentive or inattentive. And that’s what a person needs to do in order to avoid harm.

Sure.

So, what I talk to people about is I say, look, you can certainly control the external environment to an extent, but there’s many situations. There are many different triggers for people. Why would you not want to train people in understanding what causes inattention and how they can be more attentive? Because if you teach them to do that, then their behavior becomes more attentive and it’s much easier for them to avoid harm, which is the game that we’re trying to play.

Yeah. Can we touch a little bit on neuroscience and the link between neuroscience and behaviors? Recognizing that, we could probably talk for an hour on this and probably we can get you back onto another episode to go deeper on the neuroscience piece. But I think that’s a very interesting connection point.

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 [email protected]

So those four main brain modes conscious control, autopilot, impatience, and fatigue. Which one of those so we asked this question when we, when we train, which one of those do you think determines most of what you do? And most people will answer autopilot. Because most of the stuff that I do, I’ve done plenty of times before. And that’s true. But if you think about it, safety through social science or whatever it is, has tried to convince us that it’s conscious control for the last 30 or 40 years. And the assumption is that because safety is important, people should be able to keep it front of mind. Now, I wish the brain worked that way because it would make it a lot easier, but that’s just not how the brain works. So, what happens is that when we are given a situation, what the brain does is it says, it asks itself, what is this most like? Not what is it exactly like, what is this most like? And it decides within 20 milliseconds, right. 1 50th of a second, not even a blink of an eyelid, which of those four modes it’s going to assign.

Sure, if it’s new or different, it’s the conscious mind, because we need to analyze it, we need to sort of work through it in order to get a solution. But the problem with that one is that it’s really slow and it uses a lot more energy, like a hundred times more energy than habits. So the brain doesn’t want to use it unless it’s absolutely necessary. And it’s absolutely necessary where it deems it absolutely necessary. About 5% of the time. I mean, neuroscience measures this. It’s beyond debate in the neuroscience. Right. So new or different is the first option. Second option, is it familiar and do I feel safe doing it? If that’s the case, you do it in autopilot. But most of the autopilot involves an inattentive habit. So, if you think about things like, you know, texting while driving and you talk to people and you ask them, why do you do it? I say, well, because I’ve done it a thousand times before. Nothing bads ever happened. You know, it’s illegal. And they go, yeah. Do you know it increases risk significantly? And they go, yeah, but what your brain does is it assigns behavior today based on the outcomes of the same behavior previously.

So, if you’ve texted while driving, nothing bads ever happened, your brain is going, hey, nothing bad will ever happen. Well, nothing bad.

Will it feel safe?

Yeah, exactly. Right. So, when you are doing things that are familiar, which is most of what we do, it’s not really autopilot. It’s actually complacency. So, what we do is we define autopilot with inattentive habits as complacency.

Sure.

Okay. If you’re short of time or something’s getting in your way, then what tends to happen is that’s frustration, fatigue. Sorry, frustration, rushing, anger, that kind of stuff. What you tend to do is you tend to use a shortcut because you get very focused on the outcome.

Sure.

And the last one, fatigue, is when you. That happens when you sort of don’t have a lot of energy. And what you tend to do under fatigue is you tend to do a bad in the moment decision. So, for instance, if you’re tired, what your brain knows is that you need to go to sleep. And what it also knows is that you sleep much better in your own bed than everywhere else. So it says to you in the car, you know, get in your car and drive home. Right. You, if you were lucid, you consciously understand that that’s high risk. But because you’re tired and you’ve got mental blocks and you’re not making good decisions, that sort of tends to happen. So what the brain does is that it interprets a situation in 20 milliseconds is the size of brain mode. And with that brain mode, what you get is you get an operating mode. And the operating mode, you either think about it consciously or you use a habit. Most of the time inattentive, you either do a shortcut, or you end up making a bad decision in the moment. That you don’t know about.

Sure.

And 95% of behavior is driven by the subconscious brain modes, which are complacency, impatience, and fatigue. But. But this is the catch. It still feels like a conscious decision. And we understand why that is. And the reason why that is, is because the conscious mind is the last step. So, the last step the brain uses is conscious processing. And because as soon as we become aware, the behavior happens, it feels conscious. When we go into organizations and we talk to people, we give them a choice. We say, you can either manage safety the way it feels, or you can manage safety the way it is. Which one you want, because you can’t do both. And in my view, a lot of the safety that we’ve done over the last 30, 40 years, it’s about how it feels. It’s all outside in. There’s none of this, what’s going on inside the brain so that we could understand behavior from the inside out, which. Which is really what I’m interested in.

Right. And so fascinating. But what can we do about it? How do we wire that in so that people actually can make tangible differences in terms of how they show up? 

So, there’s a couple of obstacles. And the first obstacle is that most of the time when people are inattentive, so part of the training, we ask them, so what is the most common consequence when you’re doing things and you’re in an inattentive state?

Sure.

Most people will say there’s an incident. Right. And I go, well, not really. When you’re inattentive, nothing happens.

Sure.

Because if every time you were inattentive you had an incident, you would teach yourself how to pay attention. Right?

Correct.

Most of the time when. When you’re inattentive and nothing happens, what you do as a human being is you repeat whatever it is you’re doing, like texting while driving. So, what that means is that you’re continually embedding inattentive habits. So that’s what you end up with. You end up with a suite of inattentive habits. That sounds bad enough as it is, but it’s even worse because you’re not even. You don’t even know that that’s what you’re doing. So, it’s a huge blind spot for the person, it’s a huge blind spot for the supervisor, and it’s a huge blind spot for the leader. And what we know about human beings is that we do nothing about our blind spots because we don’t even know they’re there. That’s what we Call them. The first obstacle we need to overcome is to convince people that are a lot more inattentive than what they are. But the problem is that their brain doesn’t register inattention unless something new or different happens. Because unless something new or different happens, the conscious mind doesn’t come into play. Right. So, the first thing we get them to do is we get them to look for the causes of inattention.

So that’s the first practice technique. So, this is the whole thing about the neuroscience, is that there’s only one way to change, you know, your neural circuits, and that is through repetition.

Sure.

And what we know is that it’s far easy or far better to do five minutes a day for, then do an hour on Sundays. The rewiring happens when you’re asleep. So, when you’re asleep, what the brain does is that it detaches or it breaks up neural circuits that you’re not using and uses those, make connections with the ones that you’re actually using. So, if you’re talking about if you want to not do texting while driving. So initially what you consciously have to do is stop yourself from doing it.

Sure.

Right. So initially it’s a conscious thing. Right. But with enough repetition, it becomes automatic.

Sure.

And that’s the process that we need to take people through. So, we take people through. The first one is to convince them that they’re a lot more attentive than what they are. But. But, you know, whenever we do the training that we hear this a fair bit, they go, well, if I’m so inattentive, why is it that I’m still alive? Well, most of the time, inattention doesn’t lead to an incident. Maybe in a couple of. Couple of times in your life, you know, you could have been a meter or a second away from, you know, from fitting the gene pool. Have you got any of those examples? And most people have got more than a few. You. Right, right. So, I say to them, well, think about the poor guy that drove when he was fatigued and ended not surviving. Do you think that there was always a close call that made him aware before he had that fatal incident? Sure, he might have been. He may have been, but because he got away with it, he didn’t put any time and effort into changing. Right. So, we give people a technique to first and foremost convince themselves that they’re more inattentive than what they are.

Right.

Even if they improve, you know, even they acknowledge it, you know, 25 or 30% more, that tends to be enough for them to go, oh, maybe I need to do something about this.

Sure.

We give them a technique to deal with. Well, we go with the easier, the in the moment one first, which is impatience. So, things like rushing, frustration, you know, that kind of thing. We give them a technique to deal with fatigue because that’s kind of you can warning signs to fatigue. So, we teach them about what those early warning signs could be and which is the one for you. And then the third one, which is the more difficult one to deal with is complacency. Because when you’re doing stuff inattentive it just feels normal.

Yeah.

So, we tend to say to people, look, you can’t detect complacency. You have to look at what you do, decide what habits you may need to change and start practicing those new habits. And just to give you an idea of. And this is not; it’s not rocket science to identify which habits is that. Look before you move. Right. Look for the line of fire because if you see it, you can avoid it, but you don’t see it unless you look first. So, a lot of what hurts us we can actually see not everything, but a lot of what can hurt us we can actually see as long as we look for it. And most people are not very good at looking for it. If you have any doubts, Eric, go to the, the go to the, the nearest mall and look at how many people are looking at the mobile phones while they’re walking.

It’s crazy. And it’s getting worse. I’ve actually seen in some countries when I travel where the, they’re starting to change the lights for pedestrians at crosswalks to even be on the floor so that it, you can have a better chance of seeing it while you, you’re walking and texting. It’s scary.

So, it seems like we are, we kind of, we don’t want to help people. And this is what I think. I think that inattention is a modern-day problem that’s getting worse. But everybody wants to ignore it or they only want to deal with it just doing things around the person. And you can’t do everything around the person everywhere. So sooner or later it’s actually going to catch up with you. I think it’s far more efficient in the longer term to teach people what are the core causes of inattention and what can you do to be more attentive. I mean that’s what I do with my kids.

Right.

Nobody’s perfect. But you know, it’s far better to be a little bit more attentive than to be totally inattentive. And I don’t know about. About you, where you are, but I’m now starting to see people cross the road looking at the mobile phone.

Oh, it’s crazy. Yeah, it’s dangerous.

It’s not. I’ve never seen somebody miss a red light or miss a pedestrian crossing, but

I’ve had people walk into me because they were texting.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, when we were. When we were sort of. I mean, my kids now are in their 20s, but when they were little and to teach them how to cross the road, what we would say to them is that, look, I don’t care what the green man’s telling you to do. I don’t care what. I don’t know what you call them Lollipop ladies. You know, the ones that have a little sign, help people, Help. Help kids cross the road. At schools, we call them lollipop ladies. I don’t care what she’s telling you to do. I don’t care what your friends are telling you to do. Right. You look both ways before you go, and you continue to look both ways while you’re crossing until you get to the other side. Because I wanted to put them in a position where they could see it coming as early as possible because that gives them the most chance to get out of the way if somebody misses a red light or doesn’t, like, the lollipop lady tries to hit it or whatever. So, if you think about this as it applies not just at work, but also the people that you care about outside of work, I mean, it’s really worthwhile doing.

And a lot of the stuff that we do with people is we. Actually, the byline at the end of our presentations is take it home, bring it to work, take it home. Because they’re the most important people you are. Teach it to them and then bring it to work. And if they go home and they teach it, they’ve got to model it. And then when they come to work, they’re much better at the techniques that we try and teach them.

Your point around. Look before you move. I think I remember I had a guest earlier talking about the number of electrical contacts with wires above ground. Yeah, I can’t remember the exact number, but I think it was 20 times more per mile of cable versus the one that’s underground that you can’t see because there you are, you don’t see the hazard, you’re more concerned. But people walking in, touching, going up, a boom, hitting a wire is incredibly high. If it’s above ground where you should see it very similar to what you’re, you bring up.

Yeah. Look, if you can, you can look at a lot of behavior through this prism and all of a sudden start making sense.

Right. 

And really, I don’t know why safety is, does not want to understand what’s going on inside the worker’s head. I think it makes them feel good if you just sort of, if you, if you assume that you can just do things around the person and don’t get me wrong, I think that is the place to start. But once you start having good robust safety management systems and you’re doing a lot around the person, then there’s not a hell of a lot left that you have. You get into diminishing returns. What are you going to do next? Well, don’t do it faster, harder and for longer look at what can you do with the person because that is a resource. I mean your workers are your most valuable resource and yet we keep riding them out of the safety story. Doesn’t make any sense to me whatsoever.

Right. Fascinating story. I’d love to explore more on the neuroscience in a future episode. If somebody wants to get in touch with you, Christian, continue the conversation, learn more about some of the training programs you’ve talked about and about habitsafe. How can they get in touch with you?

Well, look, the easiest way is to go to our website, which is habitsafe.com au I live in Australia, so people sometimes forget the AU. That’s the easiest way. You can have a look at the kind of things that we do. And there’s also a contact page. So if you want to shoot me a message, then I can always sort of make contact and talk to them about what we do, how we do it and see if it’s for them. 

Perfect. Sounds good. Thank you so much for joining me, Christian. It’s been a very thought-provoking conversation.

Thank you for having me, Eric. I appreciate 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

Cristian Sylvestre is a chemical engineer with a Master’s degree. He started his 25-year safety career in heavy processing, where he learned to think holistically about safety. His research shows that inattention is involved in 95% of incidents of all severities.

His work uses the discoveries of neuroscience to understand what really drives behaviour, how to minimise inattention, reduce errors, and prevent incidents everywhere, not just at work. He authored “Third Generation Safety: The Missing Piece” to help organisations understand the main causes of inattention and what can be done to help their people fail less.

For more information: https://www.habitsafe.com.au/

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Lessons from Aviation Psychology: The Importance of Competencies and a Broader View of Human Factors with Aleksandra Kapela

Feb 19, 2026

Lessons from Aviation Psychology: The Importance of Competencies and a Broader View of Human Factors with Aleksandra Kapela

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ABOUT THE EPISODE

In this episode of The Safety Guru, we’re joined by certified aviation psychologist Aleksandra Kapela for a deep dive into aviation psychology and human factors, exploring what other safety-critical industries can learn from aviation. Aleksandra shares how modern thinking on human factors has evolved, emphasizing the importance of understanding the environment in which we operate, as well as the capabilities and limitations of the human brain. She breaks down the importance of identifying core competencies and explains why competency-based training and assessment (CBTA) is essential for preparing individuals to perform effectively in unpredictable, safety-critical situations and how these principles can be applied across a wide range of industries. She also explains why a broader, more holistic view of human factors is essential for improving safety performance and building sustainable safety cultures where people feel supported, are encouraged to speak up, and perform at their best. Don’t miss this informative episode packed with valuable lessons from aviation psychology!

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 Aleksandra Kapela with me. She’s an aviation psychologist and human factor specialist. So, Aleksandra, first, as we get started, that’s not a common thing to be an aviation psychologist. So, I’d love to hear a little bit about how you got started, what you do, and the passion you have around this space. Let’s start there.

Sure, absolutely. Thank you very much, first of all, for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here and talk about such important topics. In my stories, usually in aviation, the story goes the same way. People, they fall in love with flying first. They become pilots, cabin crew, and engineers, and only later do they start becoming interested in safety, human factors, or psychology. But for me, for me, that was the other way around. I always knew that I wanted to be a psychologist. Long before aviation entered my life, I was fascinated and fell in love with the human brain. So, behavior, decision making, neurology, and especially human potential. Why do people act the way they do, how they perform under pressure, and how the environment can unlock their potential or, let’s say, limit it? That’s why I started the master’s programs in psychology and human resource management. I knew quite early on that I didn’t want to be a clinical psychologist or psychotherapist. I wanted to work with people and organizations in real, complex environments, helping them understand how and why this behavior might emerge and how systems can support them in that.

Aviation came into my life almost by coincidence. It was supposed to be a summer job at the local flight school to try something new. My friend, he was working there at that time. When I stepped into that environment, I fell in love with the industry as well. I think mostly with people at the beginning. But even more, later, I became fascinated by the safety element and safety culture. Sure. In such a critical, safety-critical domain, when a decision is made, they matter every single day. Actually, I assume that psychology and human factors would be fully embedded. I imagine that at every flight school, not to mention the airline. They would have at least one aviation psychologist supported by a team of human factor specialists. But that was a big surprise that it wasn’t the case. Even though aviation, compared with many other safety-critical industries, is usually thought to be really advanced in terms of safety awareness. I quickly realized that there was still quite a big gap between what we know today in modern psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral psychology, and how stress, attention, decision-making, and the human brain actually work, and how systems are designed and managed in the industry.

That’s when I started to look into how you can become properly qualified in this field of aviation psychology. I discovered that it is a really small, highly specialized discipline. Globally, there are only around 100 officially accredited aviation psychologists with a bit larger group of human factor specialists, of course, as let’s say, the entry requirements are a bit less demanding, you don’t need to be a psychologist. Becoming accredited required a lengthy certification journey, but it allowed me to work exactly at this intersection of psychology, safety, and operations. Today, I work in a few, let’s say, complementary roles. I run my own company, My Wingman, which focuses on supporting airlines and flight schools from the human side of safety. So, competency-based training and assessment, leadership development, instructor support, and well-being initiatives are directly linked to operational performance. At the same time, I also work as an Associate Aviation Psychologist with Symbiotics, a company known for assessment and selection solutions. Along with that, a large part of my work involves speaking and teaching, including delivering speeches, workshops, and training programs for leaders, instructors, and operational teams, mainly in Aviation but also in other safety-critical industries.

I’m also a ground instructor, so I work with students, which I really enjoy. And recently, I’ve been working on a book about Human Factors in Aviation, which is a very big project that is still a bit in the making. So, the book is still with the editor for the final editing. But this is a very exciting project I’ve been working on for the last 2 years.

Interesting. I’d love to start with human factors and really a modern perspective on what is happening in that space, when we’ve talked about it before in terms of capabilities, limitations in your mind, and the environment. Tell me a little more about how this space has evolved.

The modern view of human factors has led us to a bit more uncomfortable truth: the human brain is incredibly capable but also very limited. Sure. As its core, the modern human factor starts with this shift. Instead of asking what’s wrong with the person, why something happened, we ask what was happening inside their mind and how the environment also shaped what was possible in that moment. Because it’s really easy to say what we would do from our couch, but actually, in a specific moment, in a specific situation, with the specific limitations and capabilities of one’s mind, that might be very different. Now we focus on the capabilities and limitations of a brain as such, but also of a person at the moment. We know, for example, that attention can be our biggest help, but also our biggest enemy in stressful moments and in specific environments. We try to blend together the person, those limitations and capabilities, but also the environment, and also the system that the person operates in, which is really important. We have this systemic approach now, so we don’t look at individuals only, but we look at all those elements that made the situation happen in this specific scenario.

Somebody else or in a different environment could behave in a different way or maybe the same way. This is something that we always need to check.

Rear view mirror, once something happens, a more holistic view of what will occur, how can it practically help proactively? To ensure we act on the environment, we act on capabilities and limitations before something occurs.

Basically, if we take this more holistic perspective, then we are able to actually change things for the better for the future. If we would only focus on, let’s say, for example, in aviation, we’ve used to focus on how we can improve the aircraft for this situation not to happen again? Let’s say a certain switch was connected to this situation. How can we update or redesign the switch to help in the next situation? The problem is that the situations are so complicated that we will never be in the same situation again. Even though we replace the switch or we redesign something, which, of course, is also one of the approaches that we should have, and of course, improve that and upgrade as we can. But also, if we only hope that after changing this one switch, the situation will not happen again, or the bad situations will not happen, then this is a bit of false thinking. We need to understand how complex it is. We need to understand that things are happening both inside and outside. If we focus on this holistic approach, it’s also easier to think, even with changing that one switch of thinking, okay, but if somebody else were working with that switch, would that help them if we redesign it?

Or if this person is in this and this environment, in this company, let’s say, even in this culture, would that help them as well in the future? It helps people to rethink and redesign bigger systems. Also, it helps us educate not only system operators but also leaders and authorities, so they understand that a single change can make a big difference. That’s why, as we understand people more now and gain more knowledge about how we function and the environment, we need to use this knowledge. We need to use these findings, of course, slowly but to help improve safety and change the situation for the better in the future. So, not to add more hours, for example, in case of aviation training, but try to focus, okay, what we can change that actually, regardless of the hours, can help in the future in a similar setting, in a similar situation.

Is there anything that can be done, if I’m thinking particularly of the capabilities, but also some of the limitations, proactively from competencies development, or in terms of assessing competencies as well, for those circumstances that may exist?

Absolutely. This is one of the biggest concepts we focus on right now: competencies and some behaviors connected to them. So, they come out of our competencies. This is really important to focus on at the very beginning because, again, as I mentioned, we can add more hours, more training, more education in different industries. But again, if somebody had a low level of certain competencies, they would, regardless of the training, their knowledge, they would not be able to cope with a specific situation. If the situation becomes more stressful and more complicated, they need to adapt to this specific situation that might quickly evolve into a change. In that way, competencies and this whole approach of competency-based training and assessment, or CBTA, now focus on how we can improve human beings at the beginning. Sure. For them to be able to behave in a situation that we cannot predict. In the past, we tried to predict every possible situation, and we failed in that because those environments, even automation, everything becomes more and more advanced and complicated. One thing can change the situation that we couldn’t predict. Instead of doing that, we now shift, and we try to answer a case.

If this person had those competencies on a very high level, then it might actually be easier for them to cope with any situation. We don’t have to focus on those situations so much, but we focus on people who are capable, within their limits and capabilities of their brain, to react to different situations in different settings with different people. That’s why we first focus on those competencies. Those competencies are, there might be also a bit more technical, but we focus even more on those non-technical aspects. We focus on things that we used to talk about already in the case of human factors. But some of those things we know are actually. We are able to improve them if we know how to work on them. For example, decision making, for example, problem solving, communication, and workload management, those aspects, we know that if we have the right tools and also tools to assess them at the very beginning, and then if it improved, then actually they are proven to be those barriers that actually can stop this bad situation from continuing to happen. Now we focus on, okay, if we know the entry level of someone’s, let’s say, communication skills, then I know this level, that’s the first step.

Then I can, with the right tools, try to improve this. In the future, this person, despite stress, despite a very dangerous situation, will still be able to communicate with others, even though the possibilities of their brain would narrow their attention and their memory. Still, they would have the communication on such a high level that they would be able to communicate, even if the situation is very demanding. We know that in those safety-critical environments, proper communication with your teammates, with some people who might be responsible for the next steps, for example, is crucial. So very often this communication would be the first part that would be really affected by the stress, by this very demanding situation. Because this is a natural tendency of our brain. If we have a very stressful situation, we need to limit our attention; we need to limit what we say to others in order to be able to survive. In that way, if we focus on communication skills despite the stress, despite different problems that might occur, then we keep this relatively high level of communication, even though our brain and the situation want us to maybe limit this ability a bit.

That’s why we focus now on those core competencies, as we call them, because we know that also for the success stories that we have. Sure. Of course, in aviation, those success stories are really spectacular, let’s say. But for those stories, we know that those individuals who saved the day had a very high level of those competencies. In that way, we need to focus on this positive safety approach, as we call it safety to approach. We focus on improving the positives instead of trying to limit the negatives.

Sure. In aviation, you use the example of communication. In many cases, you have a job that is, for the most part, fairly routine until something goes horribly wrong. Then, as you mentioned, high intensity. If you think about the Air France incident where autopilots disconnect, all sorts of signals are giving you contradicting information, and you’ve got to process. Communication and stress levels are incredibly high, and you’ve got very short periods of time to address the risk in front of you. In a lot of other businesses, a lot of other industries, sometimes that difference between routine and high stress isn’t as pronounced, but in some cases, it might still be. How could some of these principles translate to other industries to still help? As you mentioned, communication. On a good day, you could be a very good communicator, but in that peak moment of stress where you really need that communication, that’s where you need at next level performance.

The beautiful and also problematic thing about our brain is that it cannot really recognize the settings that we’re in. In that way, it doesn’t matter really if we are 30,000 feet in the air, and anyone would say that that’s a really dangerous situation if something happens. Or it can be at your workplace, at your desk, but something very suddenly increases your stress level. For our brain, that would be the same situation. Very basic instincts and very basic reactions, they start to happen. We have our fight or flight response that is still really, really strong, even though we don’t have to run away from a lion anymore. But still, our nervous system doesn’t understand that. It doesn’t really matter if it’s a situation in the air or it might be a situation, let’s say, in the operating room. Still, this high peak of stress would narrow our possibilities in the same way. Our brain needs to be really focused on the basic things to survive. That’s why those higher functions, let’s say, like keeping the attention on different sources or communicating with others using complicated sentences, are something that first would be just raised.

In that way, for example, in the case of attention, I think it’s really relevant for different safety-critical domains that you need to keep your attention at a high level. You need to be sure that you’re not making any mistakes. In that way, your attention really needs to be at a high, highly functioning level. In that way, it’s really important to train those abilities. No matter what stress hits you, you can still maintain this high level of performance and teamwork, for example, because this is another competency that is pretty core. Being able to work within a team, which is, of course, connected with some other competencies. They all relate to each other. But most of the safety-critical environments need the same competencies. They need a high level of attention and situational awareness. They need communication, teamwork, and the ability to solve problems and make good, timely decisions. Of course, aviation is the industry that is the most, let’s say, spectacular in that way. But if you imagine someone working in any other safety-critical industry, they need the same competencies. But what would be different is the behaviors, so how they perform or how they use those competencies with specific behaviors.

The pilot would need to behave differently, and let’s say the surgeon would need to behave differently, but they would still need to use, let’s say, the same source and competencies. Of course, I focus mainly on aviation, but I also consult on other industries as well. I use my experience from aviation, but actually, I see more and more that it’s really the same thing, the same elements, because our brain is the same. It just needs to be used differently. That’s why we have certain training. Let’s say this technical part and the educational part are what will be different. But how we act in this really highly stressful situation is something that would be the same across different domains and industries. If we just lack those competencies, our performance will be affected. It doesn’t matter what industry it is. We aim to achieve the highest possible performance to increase safety. To do When you do that, your capacity needs to be enough to handle that situation. Of course, there are some other things, like psychological safety, that need to be at the proper level.

Your, let’s say, physical abilities need to be at the proper level. But we see that those abilities of your brain, in terms of competencies, are one of the most important things to be able to perform at a safe level in any situation that you need to perform.

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.

CBTA really helps us understand competencies that are needed, where I am at, and how I am progressing through different interventions, potentially?

Yes. They also answered the question of why those limitations exist. For example, I might repeat the same mistake in my work, and I might have more training, more education. I will be more frustrated. Still, I would not perform well in certain situations. Sometimes, a very simple key for that is just to improve the competency level. If somebody were, let’s say, very good at, say, communication, again, but they would not be very good at decision-making. They might talk with others. It might help them with other competencies as well. But they still would not be able to make timely decisions, and this can sometimes be really critical for safety. That’s why it’s really important to know those levels right from the start. If somebody enters the training or a job environment. We, as people, would be responsible for training that person. But also, this person themselves would want to know what level of those competencies I have. Because very often people cannot realize that they wouldn’t think about it earlier, that they might have problems with certain competencies because they do quite well, they progress, they live in society, etc. But actually, those levels need to be a bit higher for that safety-critical work.

In that way, it is so crucial to know it at the very beginning, and then only you will benefit from that if you retest it. If you check it again, then you know if the person can progress, if you’re doing the right things in case of the training. And also, they start to feel more and more at ease. So, they might not realize that this is their issue, their problem that they have. But after a certain period of time, we see that people with a raised level of those competencies just feel better, they function better, not even in these very stressful moments, but daily. So, in that way, it gives them more space, more capacity to work with any situation that they face. If the CBTA is done well, the safety conversation also changes. We stop asking who made a mistake and what exactly happened in that situation. We also stop blaming individuals, but we start asking whether the system built the competencies needed to deal with what actually happened. To do anything. It worked both directions, we might say, because we know that people are not perfect, systems are not perfect.

But we try to find ways to increase both of those elements together. And by increasing competencies, we see that everything goes up.

And how does this connect with psychometrics? Because of the scenario you just shared, somebody who is good at communication, but may not be great at decision-making in a peak moment of stress. And so that could make you incredibly functional in many roles. In some functions, you can have the liberty of time to make decisions. For a pilot, you don’t typically have unlimited time in terms of that decision-making. How do we start checking around for a specific work environment, and how does that connect back to CBTA?

So, of course, in the case of CBTA, the last letter is A. So, this is the assessment. And this is more connected with how the competencies can improve. So, if we can learn, if we can improve them. In case of competencies themselves, it’s a bit easier work because if, let’s say, your baseline is okay, if you don’t have any disabilities, learning disabilities, or any, let’s say, disorders that would not make it possible to increase those levels, you can work with competencies. You can improve your competencies. If you have the right tools, if you know what to work on, you can improve them. Competencies are something that we use on a daily basis in different environments. This is something people sometimes do not realize they can improve if they work on it. It’s like with our memory. We can improve it if we don’t have any disabilities in that area. Sometimes we joke that it’s like a muscle we can just improve by working on it. In assessments, we don’t focus solely on competencies; we also consider other things, like personality or attitudes, which are a bit more core to people.

They are usually built from the beginning of our life, connected with how our nervous system is built. So, they are a bit more difficult to change. Regarding personality aspects, we can also check this. So, with the right tools, with the right assessments, we can check what traits, what, let’s say, tendencies you might have. This might make you better or worse in some specific environments or jobs. Let’s say there is one personality trait called conscientiousness, which is associated with people who like to be organized and structured. They like things. They like routine. This is something that is pretty core in you. People would be higher or lower on conscientiousness. In the case of pilots, for example, we like to have pilots who are high in case of conscientiousness because they need to work with routine most of the time. They need to pay attention to procedures, follow them, etc. They need to be organized, and everything needs to be neat. In that way, if somebody were higher on that trait, it would be easier for them to feel good in this environment.

If someone has a low level of conscientiousness, it doesn’t mean they cannot become a pilot, but it does mean they would just struggle, and that struggle would make them less able to perform well under stress. It will make them less able to train in case of their competencies as well, because those things just go together. For example, there are certain traits that, let’s say, a good accountant should have. I wouldn’t be a good accountant myself for sure, knowing my personality. If I were still trying to keep this job, I would probably be really frustrated, unhappy, and struggling with my performance. In some jobs, that would just make people unhappy. But in safety-critical industries, it’s really important to have people who are a bit better suited to this specific job. Psychometrics is one of the most, let’s say, misunderstood tools in safety-critical industries, I feel, because for some people, the word itself immediately triggers fear of labeling, discrimination, and being put in a box. But that fear is understandable because psychometrics has sometimes been used poorly, so not to use the right tools, not to use the results in the right way.

But when it’s used correctly, they are not about exclusion; they are about information. If we have this information, then, for example, we can place somebody who still wants, let’s say, they really want to be a doctor, but with those traits, they might struggle, they might be not so good, for example, being a surgeon. It would be better for them to work as some other type of doctor. In that way, and for example, for pilots, it’s maybe not best for you to work in an airline when the routine is there, and work is almost the same every day. Maybe it’s better for you to go to flying, which there is less routine, more changes, and a bit more risk. Some people need to have a bit more going on to feel good. That’s why it’s so important to check it at the beginning, not to spend a lot of money, a lot of time, and invest in something that might just be some concept that you might have in your head but does not really fit your capabilities and limitations. A big part of my work is also to explain that to people, that it’s not like yes or no.

It’s more than we need that information to increase safety, because if people who are not fit for certain jobs perform those jobs, it’s the first step toward unsafe acts in this environment. It’s not a verdict; it’s a map that we use for the future.

I think it also, to your point, if you’re going to be frustrated, unhappy in that work environment, that’s not an environment that’s conducive to your well-being, and also will create more friction in terms of the work in addition to some of the safety elements that you brought up. It can also be a vehicle to get to know yourself in terms of where your best fit might be.

Yes, exactly. If you’re more frustrated, a bit more stressed, then the first thing that happens is that your limitations come to the surface. If you’re angrier, sadder, or more frustrated, then you would simply make more mistakes. Then if you make more mistakes, you will be even more frustrated. Then you start to blame, usually people, they start to blame others rather than themselves, because this is what they wanted and why it doesn’t work. Also, in some of those industries, it is really difficult to stop or to say, I’m struggling. In that way, as you said, it is really connected to well-being because not only do you feel bad and angrier, frustrated, but you will have more problems with your family and friends. But also, it adds to that silence that if something is wrong with them or me, maybe I should just keep on going, but then I see that nothing is changing. So, my level of well-being is dropping dramatically, and I might not have a safe place to question that, to ask those questions. So that’s why it is so important to have this information at the very beginning. Sometimes, also what I’ve seen is for those different industries, especially if somebody young is starting in those industries, then parents, it is very important for them, for their kids to perform well and support their dreams.

But if everybody got this information at the beginning, maybe it’s time to rethink, maybe adjust a bit this path that you want to have, then eventually everyone would be happier, more satisfied, and their well-being would be higher. So, all those things that we do at the very beginning are not to make people’s lives more stressful or more difficult, but to make it less stressful and less difficult later.

Yeah. And on this topic of well-being, what other things can an organization do to create a really safe environment where people prosper from a safety standpoint?

That’s a really interesting topic because well-being is something that we hear quite a lot about now. We are more and more about well-being, well-being. We need to ensure that there is a healthy work environment. But what is most important about well-being is to understand it. Again, to understand how people’s brains work, what well-being actually is, and what levels it has, so you can create well-being programs or actions in your workplace. Very often, there is a well-being website, sometimes that is focused on well-being, but this is just like an end product. If there is no box-sticking exercise, when there is no understanding of what really makes people well in the workplace, then it might actually not change anything, but also make things even worse. What is really important is, first of all, that well-being is closely connected to what we call safety culture, as well as psychological safety in the environment. In that way, we might create a lot of things, yoga classes or any other things that should make people more relaxed. But when the workplace is not supporting this culture, nothing really will change.

The first and most difficult element is organization’s working with the culture of the culture. When people feel good about sharing things, especially things they may have done wrong, if they are not blamed for it but it is accepted, and people focus on improving it, they are thankful you share that. Of course, it might be connected with some more serious action as well. But what is really important is that you don’t feel this fear. You have this state of mind that you can talk about everything, about what was okay, but also what was not okay. In that demanding environment, people learn really quickly what is acceptable and what is not acceptable to show. If the safety culture in the workplace is high, then people will start to follow that pretty quickly. If the safety culture is low, people will learn very quickly that you can miss some things, you cannot report some things, and that’s okay. It is really important to understand what safety culture is and how it can be built. That is also, again, connected with the environment on the outside, but also with people from the inside.

What is, I think, most important is to start with education because people are not educated about their own well-being. What does it mean? What does it mean in this specific industry or company, in the training place? People, they need to understand how they might feel. They also don’t have to feel happy every day. But what is, let’s say, in the norm? Also, what they should do very quickly if they feel that something is not right is not wait; everything is open for them to share it. Again, that brings me back to competencies once more, because, again, people with a higher level of competencies deal with some well-being fluctuation better. If you have a higher level of communication and teamwork, then it’s easier for you to share something with others, to communicate it. But without a proper safety culture, you can have great levels of communication, but if you cannot communicate it, then nothing will change. Those are two things: safety culture in an organization. People from the top levels who will set this culture, who will understand that people need to feel good to be safe and to perform well. And then from the bottom, also for people to understand what Wellbeing is.

That is not just a nice word to repeat, but what does it actually mean, and what does it mean in my job? Because for different jobs, it might be connected with a bit different elements. Let’s say in the job of a flight attendant, being a bit lonelier in a sense of not having your family all the time next to you or a lot of people, a lot of crowds to share things with. This is also typical for this job. Again, if you understand that, and do you know what tools you have if something feels different? Also, if you have the right, again, personality and competencies to deal with this specific environment. Everything connects. That’s why this holistic view is really important, no matter if it’s well-being, competencies, or any other assessment, so anything connected with safety. We are only now starting to understand it. It is a bit more difficult now for us because we built those systems that were not built for that, for the holistic view. It’s more built for, again, adding more hours of training or improving one part of something. But now we need to learn, and we start to understand that only changing things from this holistic level can actually improve safety.

So, thank you so much, Aleksandra. We covered a lot of ground today from a modern view of human factors, as you said, that talks about capabilities, limitations, the environment, connects very well to the CBTAs and how do we understand competencies and how we can you give us a little bit more about how you get involved in this element of psychometrics, and is it the right fit? Are there better fits for you? And how that also links back to well-being, which connects back to what we talked about in the environment where we operate. So, thank you very much for joining us today to share some of your insights. Somebody wants to get in touch with you. What’s the best way to do so?

I would say the fastest way would be to contact me on LinkedIn. I’m there with my full name or try to reach me through my wingman site as well. But I’m on LinkedIn every day. I post quite a lot, also about human factors and safety. That would be the best way to contact me.

Excellent. Thank you so much, Aleksandra.

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

Aleksandra Kapela is a certified aviation psychologist, speaker, author, and independent consultant specializing in human factors, safety, and competency-based training and assessment (CBTA) programs. She works with airlines, flight schools, and other safety-critical industries, supporting organizations where performance, decision-making under pressure, and human reliability are critical. Her work focuses on human potential, well-being, operational performance, and modern, evidence-based approaches to human behavior in complex systems. Aleksandra is the founder of MyWingman.eu and the author of an upcoming book on human factors for pilots and aviation professionals.
For more information: https://www.mywingman.eu/
Email: [email protected]
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aleksandra-kapela/

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Aviation Learnings and Human Factors: Turning Complex Challenges into Simple Solutions with Ian Hollingworth

Apr 17, 2025

Aviation Learnings and Human Factors: Turning Complex Challenges into Simple Solutions

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ABOUT THE EPISODE

Drawing from his extensive experience in high-performance aviation, Captain Ian Hollingworth joins The Safety Guru to share powerful insights on aviation learnings and human factors. In this engaging episode, Ian brings riveting real-world case studies to life and explores how key aviation principles can be applied to safety-critical industries. He also unpacks three essential elements of human factors that are vital to improving safety and performance. Whether you’re in aviation or another high-stakes field, Ian’s insights offer practical applications to elevate safety, decision-making, and problem-solving. Don’t miss this episode—you’ll walk away with valuable takeaways to help turn complex systems and challenges into simple, actionable solutions.

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 Captain Ian Hollingworth. He’s a former fighter pilot as well as a commercial pilot with a lot of experience flying but also brings a lot of expertise in human factors. Ian, welcome to the show. Very excited to have you with me.

It’s great to be here. Thanks very much indeed. I’m looking forward to it as It should be a lot of fun.

Excellent. Let’s start with your background in aviation and safety. You’ve crossed analog last flight decks. We’ll get into all of that very soon. But tell me a little bit about your background and how you got into human factors.

Well, done. You’ve already introduced me as the former fighter pilot and commercial airline captain. Well, for over 40 years, Eric, it’s been a privilege to be involved in aviation as an instructor examiner on the airplane types themselves, which vary from 1980s times in the UK Royal Air Force, flying the lightning, which is akin to the F-104-star fires It’s that generation of airplane. I was firstly flying those as an instructor, very much during the Cold War in the 1980s, which turned out to be quite hot from time to time. It was not cold at all, really. Then Once I’d done that for 12 years or so, and in the meantime, moved on from being a single fellow to being married with kids, I did the hop, which is not unusual to commercial types. I then joined commercial aviation, initially flying the very early 747 model, 747 Jumbos, the one and 200 series, very early analog aeroplanes as well. That was quite comfortable for me, and I had introduction through flight engineers, et cetera, et cetera. Through to more modern types, you might say, through to the 737, where I attained my first command, more models of that, back onto the jumbo as a captain and as a trainer, and then more laterally as a trainer on the Boeing 777 and the 787.

Most of my time, almost all my time has been with Boeing as well as my time in the UK Air Force. How I got into the safety side of things? Well, right now, my business, Cassandra Flight Training in UK and Plainetalks.com, really consult to aviation and non-aviation industry, but principally safety critical organizations such as nuclear, health care, and fire and rescue services here in the UK. Sometimes I work through associate companies as well. It’s great to cross-pollinate and work with other teams. This takes me to all parts of the globe from time to time. More recently, it’s been Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and generally throughout Europe. I do what I’m not doing now. I don’t tend to do a lot of talking. I tend to do much more listening in this environment and facilitate and craft a discussion, generally using case studies, really to get inside the heads of those operators that had been involved in incidents and accidents to work out what was really so compelling and was right about what they were doing that led them to the accidents. That’s it. How I arrived here, to a certain extent, Eric, is still a bit of a mystery to me.

But I was a child of the ’60s and ’70s, and I very much was building those plastic models when I was a kid, throwing them out the window and following the likes of the Gemini and Apollo programs for NASA. I watched the development of Concord. I sat there, my I had at three o’clock in the morning with a black and white TV watching Neil Armstrong land on the moon. How could I not be inspired to go into aviation or other? It wasn’t with any great plan, Eric, at all. I got out of university, really, as the world’s worst physics graduate. But all I wanted to do was to do my best within aviation, which was to fly the most exciting airplanes available that signed to me in the Air Force, which is the Harrier and the Lightning. As far as the safety element of that question goes, I like to aviation, I’ve always been interested in the background as to what makes a complex system work so well. But it’s when safety becomes personal that your mindset develops as it does.

When I look back to the frequent accidents that occurred in and around me in my time on the lightning in particular, the second time I flew the airplane as a single-seat fighter, I had a catastrophic engine failure myself. Oh, my goodness.

No big deal because it had two big engines, and the other one was quite capable of getting me back on the ground again. It was a case of, pick up another airplane, go with it. But we had several accidents which involved the loss of airplane ejection, and also from time to time, the loss of the pilot as well, which really hurt, particularly when it’s your friend. In ’88, in particular, my very best friend at the time was killed in a Red Arrows accident. When we think of the red arrows as a team of excellence, really, akin to other great aviation teams. It was a massive shock to me. But the results of that accident inquiry, essentially, the word pilot error. But there was much, much more involved in that accident from a systemic that really concentrated my mind, I would say. The loss of a friend in the 1985 Manchester 737 accident, a commercial accident, Papa 2 8 Mike, was my wife’s best friend, in fact, my wife’s best friend, really does offer you more in terms of understanding aviation safety. And that’s it, really. But my first formal exposure to CRM, as such, on joining British Airways.

I think I’d always been involved in airmanship, as it was told. Sure. It was. But joining BA, and thereafter much more deeply and enjoyably working with a guy called nick Dahlstrom at Emirates Airlines, probably about 20 years ago now. So that’s me. That’s my general background in aviation and safety.

I’d love to explore in terms of how decision-making has shifted in the aviation world. You alluded to analog versus glass-flight decks and shifting from one to the other, from the older generations of 47, 100 as an example, to more modern to 787. Tell me a little bit more in terms of how decision-making has evolved over time.

Sure. You’re absolutely right. In my case, I’ve been exposed to a lot of analog type airplanes and those systems all the way through to really sophisticated airplanes, glass carpets, et cetera, and digital stuff. Also, operating with basically a single pilot, but within a team, if you like, all the way through to multi-cruise on big airplanes. It’s worth looking at what is still the same, if you like. We still work to a checklist. It’s a checklist environment. We still adhere to standard operating procedures, either in the military or outside. The decisions that we make as a human being are still essentially the quick ones, the experiential ones, the recognition prime ones. If I go back to my engine failure on my second flight on the light, it went bang. I knew what it was. You could instantly recognize that and had to deal with it through a checklist which you practiced, all the way through to the more considered or rule or procedural bound decisions that we run to in more complex systems. So, type one, type two, fast and slow. But the big difference now is the complexity of circumstance. It’s sifting through the large amount of data that’s available to to the operator or to the pilot, and to be able to prioritize exactly what you’re going to do and how you move forward.

Sometimes, I try to offer an analogy to that with the teams that I’m working with. It’s like if you’ve got a deck of cards and the 52 cards in the pack, and each card offers a solution or a part solution or a way forward. Sometimes those cards can be in a pack in your hand, all folded up. Or you can have the same 52 cards all spread out on the table, and you can have a whole group of people having a big discussion about which card you pick up first and why and how it’s going to work. It all depends upon the time that you’ve got. And quite often in aviation, time is limited, or the perception of time is limited. So, you can pick cards up in your hand and you can pick a card up, that doesn’t work. Pick another one up, that doesn’t work. Pick a third card up. That keeps me safe and that allows me time to make another decision. And that’s a way of thinking about decision making. But within this, we’re still the same human being, and the system will become much more complicated and much more complex.

But we’re the same. We haven’t evolved particularly well. We have to manage our time. We’re still subject to the same time constraints, and it is crucial to understand how much time is perceived to be available in order to get these decisions made. So, one of my struck lines, Eric, is trying to simplify solutions to complex problems. And when you have a complex problem, a complex non-normal, let’s say, on an airplane, begin with just starting the clock. Always, always start the clock because the time will run away with you otherwise. Then quite quickly, I think it’s like going back to Apollo 13 and missions that can quickly go so badly wrong. You have to ascertain your bottom lines very quickly. What are the non-negotiables? And work on from there. Once you’ve got the clock running, once you understand how much time you got, once your bottom line’s ascertained, then you can work simply from there. One of the great things that’s worked in the evolution of CRM is the evolution of decision-making models. You may have heard the acronyms FWDEC, DODAR, T DODAR, grade, they’re all doing the same things. They all offer you a framework to build a decision.

So DODAR, for instance, which is well used within aviation, first off, once the time is sorted out, then you spend time in diagnosis of a problem, and the time is rarely wasted diagnosing a problem. Coming up with options, so D and then O, options and risk, how we’re going to categorize risk, decide what you’re going to do, assign the tasks, and then review. So, you’re going through a well-founded circular pattern to go back into your original diagnosis to make sure that what you thought was the problem was actually the problem and that you’re not trying to offer a solution to a problem that isn’t there. In a way, how has decision making shifted? It’s become more sophisticated, and it’s cognizant to the fact that the human being has to be able to break down that complexity of circumstance into a simplified form. Within that, then we can learn how to brief a circumstance and debrief a circumstance and learn from that effectively.

Sometimes you’ve got very short periods of time. We’ll talk about some of the lessons from aviation. Air frost comes to mind in one of those cases to diagnose a problem when autopilot kicks Tell me a little bit about some of the key takeaways in terms of what are really the key essence of human factors and maybe bring some stories and some examples from aviation.

Well, the problem-solving decision making that you’ve just talked about is central to the 9 or 10, let’s say, assessment markers that we use for pilot competencies nowadays in a era. Those pilot competencies are way beyond just the technical ones that that were experiential for me in the 1970s and ’80s, where it was stick and rudder and you were learning to fly the airplane, hand-eye coordination. Really, it now evolves much more into the social skills of leadership, communication, teamwork, et cetera. But the stuff that I work around with is the cognitive factors, the thinking things of the problem solving and how that manifestness itself in terms your workload management, your situational awareness, and your threat and error management understanding. So, the essentials of human factors, as you say, spin out from that. And I’m not going to list them all, but the few that are important to me here, if you like, and some of the others are available. As I’ve said, effective communication really is a skill set that runs through everything that we do in terms of normal and normal operations. Effective communication is much more than what it just says on the 10, if you like.

To have a true understanding, you need to be able to obviously convey information clearly accurately and timely within aviation. But as a crew, you need to be both concise and interactive, and that’s quite difficult to achieve sometimes. Normal communication, generally from one person to the next involves talking effectively to pair of eyes and using body language, which sometimes is mitigated, again, on the flight deck. But it’s, again, the use of the spoken word, again, which is high upon the list of communication within aviation in a way that you’re using both open and closed questions and limiting those questions appropriate to a circumstance. So, Communication runs through everything in human factors. But if I just pick out some other bits and pieces from that. Let’s look at assertiveness, for instance, which in the West of the world, UK in particular, we’re very good at not being very clear. We use mitigating speech the whole time. We playthings down when really in a safety critical environment, you have to be, at all times, clear and concise and well-paced in your delivery and understand that your delivery is only appropriate to the receiver. Can the receiver take that information and understand it?

The package needs to be delivered clearly, objectively, and non-aggressively. So, all those things come up. We see a lot of case studies, a lot of accidents and incidents, whereby people knew what was going on, but they just didn’t communicate that clearly enough to be understood.

Great.

If I might just bring in three other elements that are essential to me. Five things, if you like, that are essential to me in terms of human factors. First of all is threat and error management, which is part of the latest iteration, if you like, of human factors CRM. It’s understanding what the threats in your business, both obvious and not so obvious, the later ones, and how to manage those, and spending most of your time avoiding situations. The anecdote, the one that I learned when I was a kid learning to fly was that superior pilots should avoid situations that might require the use of their superior skills. So, you’re spending your time avoiding threats and managing them rather than working hard to obviate the results or to mitigate the issues. The other two that I build in are absolutely essential, and all these things dovetail. Situational awareness, and I think awareness is a bit of a misnomer. Situational awareness means the perception of a circumstance, your comprehension or understanding of it, and then projection of that understanding into the future. So, you can really work out what you think is going to happen next, five minutes down the line, 30 minutes down the line.

Clearly, if you’re operating transatlantic on a big airplane, what happens? Do they get sick? Where do I divert to? What is the weather, et cetera? That’s your situational awareness. And then is resilience, because there are so many times when you get hit by a problem, and then another, and then another, and then another, that those things for me, communication, assertiveness, threats, and management of your circumstance and the resilience are really important. What I would say is, how does it go wrong? More often than not, we talk about loss of situational awareness rather than trying to regain situational awareness. I had an issue. Well, very early on, I was quite a competent fighter pilot, so mid-1960s in the Cold War, and I was scrambling for what’s called a QRA sortie, which is quick to reaction alert. You’re fully armed. Basically, you’re the policeman of the skies, in my case, around the United Kingdom. I was scrambling at night in the most awful conditions and scrambling from slumber, from bed. But if I take that flight forward about three or four hours, I was fulfilling mission, which was to interrogate the outside of an airplane, which was a Russian airplane, a Russian four-engine bomber, a bear foxtrot, way out over northern Scotland, going out into the Atlantic.

I was taking photographs for intelligence purposes, obviously. But I was very quickly way beyond the capabilities of where the airplane should be. I was flying in an airplane that never carried enough fuel. It burnt whatever fuel it had very, very quickly indeed. You needed air tanker support to get the job done. I stuck myself on a limb and I wanted to get this job done. It was very much a can-do scenario. I had a cockpit fire. I was underneath this airplane, pretty close to this Russian guy, taking photographs of aerials and stuff like that. In those days, you flew the airplane with the control column between your knees because you had a handheld camera. There I am in a squashed-up airplane. That was away from anywhere. Those airplanes were rudimentary. There’s no GPS. There was no initial navigation system, no nothing. It was all to do with mental dead reckoning, how far you’ve been traveling for how long at what speed in what direction. You work out where you would go. When I was on my own, I’d left the tanker a long, long, long way back in order to intercept these guys. So, when I had the cockpit fire, all of a sudden, my mindset turned from a QRA, operational intelligence gathering scenario to, one, a survival Am I going to burn?

Am I going to fire the canopy off and freeze to death? Or am I eventually going to have to eject from this airplane into a sea and never be seen again? And my mindset turned completely. So, how did it go wrong in terms of human factors? And where did it start? I’ve asked myself those questions so many times because I clearly did not think through positively enough about what could happen, how things could possibly go wrong. And at that time, because you’re then in a circumstance with a radar that basically was on fire. It was only about half a meter away from my face. Do I have the cognitive capacity to update myself under those circumstances particularly well? Had I thought this through? No, I hadn’t. And I was in a right old mess, a right old pickle. And I was quite fine, Eric. I really was. But then I had to disengage from that operation and find my tanker, again, just using mental maths. We’re at four o’clock in the morning in a hazy early morning sky north of Scotland in May, trying to find some contrail of what I hope was a tanker and to be able to have him intercept me because I was very short of fuel to grab to get home.

I needed to get the fuel in order to make some landfall back in the UK, maybe more fuel, keep the fire down to be able to land back at pace. It was one thing after another. But I really messed up that day. But It was a great case study for me to reflect on how I got it completely wrong and how fortunate I was in the end to be able to bring the airplane back, along with some pictures for intelligence reasons. And there we go. That’s one of a number of personal studies, and I kidnaped Eric. There are lightning pilots out there that’ve got much better stories than that and many more of them because that was the nature of the operation.

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.

It gets to what you were mentioning before around making it personal as well, that safety is personal in a circumstance like this from a learning standpoint.

I was a complete rookie. I didn’t think I was. I was a second tourist. Most accidents and incidents happened to people that were the most experienced guys on the squadron. They were tasked with the more difficult scenarios. Sometimes it was the can-do attitude. You were good enough. You were fully operational. You could do all these things, but sometimes you stuck your neck out far too far. That’s what I did on this occasion. But it got me thinking about myself, my self-awareness in terms of my capabilities or lack of in this case. Then as I went into commercial aviation a little later on, you’ve asked me about things like Tenerife and Air France 447. What are those things bringing? Clearly, anybody that knows about this this circumstance and have analyzed those accidents in considerable detail. But I try to look at accidents with colleagues through different eyes, really, and go beyond the accident report. For instance, if you look at the Tenerife accident and essentially, the KLM captain, Jacob van Zante, was a very senior training captain within- Very senior. Yeah. That accident was caused by a whole bunch of circumstances. The American side doesn’t quite agree with the KLM side, the Dutch side.

But essentially, the captain’s mindset was very much can do on that day. You have to try to work out why was that? Is that just his personality, or can we shift that behavior? Okay, he was very, very clear about what he wanted to do. And we had perhaps a less than assertive crew copilot within there. But the mindset of that captain was probably driven as much as anything else by the fact you spend a lot of time in the simulator. When you’re training in the simulator, Eric, you can utilize the four hours that’s in there as best you possibly can as a trainer. We don’t spend a lot of time, as you would do in real-time circumstances, taxiing around as they were in Tener Reef, you can reposition the simulator instantly to another point, debrief, even brief for another approach. You If you can reposition the airplane in the sky or on the ground. But if you’re minded like that, that you can do stuff and circumvent time to a certain extent, I can understand where Captain Van Zante just wanted to get this this airplane, airborne as quickly as to get to these destination within time, within the flight time limitations for the rest of the crew and so on and so forth and make that commercial viable.

There’s a lot of things that go in there. Into the mix that are not just the obvious. Sure. And there we go. So poor outcomes from that. Similarly, the Air France 447, 20 years later, June 2009, we come up with now a very sophisticated airplane of Petro Cube icing, which compromises a highly complex system, not necessarily easily recognized by the crew. Then if they’re not trained in dealing with that in this circumstance, then what’s the outcome going to be? It’s generally going to be less than ideal. Finding those positive outcomes, the great stories, there’s less outcome. But clearly, in ’89, for those people that want to research this is a really interesting one is United 2: 32 that landed at Sioux City, which the headline is, Eric. It was survivability from a non-survivable accident. How did that happen? By to have great communication and quality CRM in action from the very early days of a formal CRM being taught, a superb Al Haynes-led incident from which we learn a huge amount from as well. There we go. I’ve rambled on for a bit, haven’t I? Essentially, human factors.

Human factors, yes.

It’s the case studies that are important. It’s not somebody like we’re talking about. Absolutely. It’s the case studies that always surprise, and it’s the case studies that are really interesting.

You mentioned the word CRM. For anybody in aviation, that’s a very common word. Tell me a little bit more in terms of for somebody who may be outside of the aviation industry, what is CRM and how has it really evolved? Because it’s a very key component to a lot of the progress that’s been made in safety in aviation.

Perfect. Well, put indeed. I mean, the definition is out there, and it’s what it says, really. It’s utilizing all resources, human and others, other human beings, the technical side of stuff, in order to get the best and the safest outcome from any circumstance that you might find yourself in. That is essentially it. How has it evolved within aviation? Aviation has obviously been the background to CRM. My first understanding of CRM which is crew resource management, was actually cockpit resource management. Let’s say the late 1980s, evolving from NASA studies and high-profile accidents all the way from late ’60s, ’70s, it became cockpit resource management, meaning captain resource management, to start off with, understanding how the captain led a team and stuff. Then recognizing that it was more than just one man or one lady. It was to do with a crew and a team and all those elements that go into a safe operation. It then started to evolve, and there are a number of iterations of which we’re now looking at the sixth and generating the seventh. But it involves understanding the fact that error is a human issue. Error is out there. We’re never going to change the fact that the human being creates errors all the time.

So, it was trying to mitigate errors and then understanding that errors actually are generally systemic, understanding that they’re part of a system and a procedure. Right now, we’ve got evolution of CRM with the sixth iteration, which is threat and error management right at its core. But it’s also evolving along with the technology. It’s evolving along with the training systems. And now we’re into We’re learning systems that mirror exactly what the needs of the system are. It’s competency-based training, not learning to do just one thing, deal with an engine failure on takeoff. But it’s enhancing all the skills are softer skills, that allow us to take those skills in a translational way into any circumstance. The evolution considers the early analog structures, the training systems that reflected the fact that machines initially were unreliable and could be regarded as dangerous, through to So the more modern stuff, which innovations, GPS, performance tools, digitalization, super reliability. But constantly, we’re trying to align human capability with a level of the tech system that’s there at the time and what we do best. So, producing super reliability probably reduces human resilience because we’re not exposed to the same stuff as we were, thankfully, 30, 40 years ago.

It’s trying to make sure that we, as human beings, still do the stuff that we’re best at, which is decision making and allowing the system to do what it does best, which with highly complex systems is generally monitoring the systems themselves and data analysis. It’s constantly on the move. We need to perceive the erosion, if you like, of traditional pilot skills. We still need to have manual handling skills. We still need to have this situational awareness. It’s marrying all those things together. We now have a very complex understanding of training systems and how we manage training systems within the sphere of CRM, which leads to things like evolving cultures and just cultures, where we can really learn, and business can learn from aviation.

I think that’s a good segue in terms of how do these principles we talked about from human factors to CRM, to some of the elements around decision making, more complex systems, how can this translate into other industries? A lot of the work you mentioned that you do now is in other industries that are also high risk or require high reliability in bringing some of these principles from aviation to them.

That’s a fantastic question. The learnings for industry are so many. We just talked about just culture, and I don’t know whether an understanding of a true just culture needs to be probably defined first. Trust, which is a proactive and generative culture. Trust and transparency need to be there and accountability. It promotes learning from mistakes, effectively, to understand that we’re distinguishing between the good behaviors and the bad behaviors, aiming to create the ideal environment to support a good organization. In terms of particularly industry, which industry is the safety critical stuff? First, you have to ask from a high level whether that particular business has the moral courage and vision to move forward with this and have the passion for a possible reset of an organization if things are not going quite so well. That is a big buy-in to start off with, courage and vision. But because you’re going to be looking at organizational performance from the top down, from the philosophies driven by management all the way through to the procedures and practices, in my case. Sure. There are some big questions to be asked first before you embark on this, but the consequences, the positives are myriad and absolutely fantastic, if you can embrace it.

When I work with, for instance, work with nuclear power for the first time, and I was working predominantly with nuclear reactor control room staff and how they were assessed in role. Basically, in the UK, at the time, there were eight nuclear power stations. All of them were different because there were all sorts of prototypes. The systems were different, and the people involved in running the control systems had been in place for 20, 25 years, so lots of legacy items going on. How do we learn from aviation in terms of managing this and keeping the system safe? Well, first of all, it doesn’t start with the sharp and the interactive control room staff. You have to pay close attention to effectively the organizational blunt end of your operation and understand that within your system, error is the human precondition to start off with. But if you got frequent error in any of those systems or any of the way in which people work, it It’s really a system of a less ideal circumstance within the system. And then understanding. The third thing I would say is understanding the levels of accountability and trust that are placed within those people within your team, those safety critical members.

Once you’ve done that, so you analyze what you’re doing, then you can find, and this is the crucial bit, you need to find the stuff within your system that is latent, is unsafe, that nobody knows about, because that’s the stuff that’s going to cause harm in the end. It’s not the accidents and the incidents that we that we analyze. It’s the stuff that’s been in there for years and years. It’s built into the system. You can do that by, again, using your people. You need to embrace a dynamic and facilitative series of discussion and learn how to brief and debrief efficiently and giving people the opportunity to do that by setting up, for instance, human factors CRM sessions in a company, let’s say, a nuclear or an aviation or a maritime company that involves initial CRM. Everybody gets to know the culture of the company. Then you revisit that on an annual basis or semi-annual basis and refresh it all the time by having these discussions. And within that, you can then explore and analyze your industry case studies or your personal case studies within the business and encourage people to be imaginative and creative in their thought.

And this is quite fun, actually. It does cost a little bit of money, but it’s a great exercise to get people actively involved in understanding the culture of their business. From there, stuff drops out. People begin to find those latent threats and make them less latent, more observable. You can then start to properly explore strategies that develop the resilience in your business, both individual and systemic, to continue, to obviously make you a safer and more effective entity. You’re going well beyond regulatory compliance or a need to know this, and you need to have serious, from a business perspective, outcome-based conversation, what you want out of this rather than how much is it going to cost.

Right. In How do you surface, you touched a little bit on it in terms of some of those lean conditions, because that’s a key element in terms of really addressing some of the system factors.

You talked about some training, but there’s also workshops conversations. Tell me a little bit more in terms of what that looks like, if you can. The workshops that I run generally work from an organizational perspective. If you got, let’s say, between 6 and 12 people in a room, and it’s a classroom environment. This is not something that’s technically difficult to achieve. It is a real privilege to be involved in these circumstances where you are utterly comfortable in saying what you need to say and feel without feeling of compromise or of blame. This is who doesn’t just culture. And generally, within a simple environment, cup of coffee, classroom, whiteboards, flip charts, not doing everybody’s death with PowerPoint, a management video, but straightforward, having an understanding, find Fred, the guy who is really critical to your organization. It might not be the CEO in the business that’s most critical to your organization and the way in which it works. It’s somebody further down the peaking order. So, this is a bottom-up circumstance where everybody is getting to understand the culture of the business. And from time to time, you were involved in a circumstance happened a couple of weeks ago where I was in a classroom week with some guys from Air Baltic, from Latvia, smart airlines, smart people, seven or eight training captains.

We talked for a week about how we can improve various circumstances within the business, training systems in particular. It was a complete joy. Once everybody got to know one another, we’d introduce one another and each other’s background. We then get into the anecdotes, the case studies. Those are the things that people learn from area. It’s the personal stuff, and it has to be entirely relevant to what they’re doing and how they see themselves. Quite often, it’s a journey of self-knowledge, to be quite honest, understanding where you fit in the system, but being assertive enough and comfortable enough within the system to be able to deliver whatever material it is that feeds back into the system. And feedback is absolutely critical. And that’s all that we’re trying to do. And I facilitate that as best I can. I don’t talk through it. I allow people to talk and spend a lot of time listening and try to work out cognitively, sometimes paraphrase what people have said, but try to work out cognitively what this actually means within the business. James Reason, and you may have heard of Professor James Reason, sadly, he passed away earlier on this month.

He was one of the greatest giants of human factors. I don’t know whether you know he passed away. I didn’t. No. He was so instrumental in the way in which human factors work, both in aviation and outside aviation. He’s famous for the Swiss cheese model. Yeah? Yeah. Great. Yeah. He’s in recognition for the Swiss cheese model. Most people know about Swiss cheese. I won’t go into that. But He said that the operator in accidents is operating but adding the final garnish to a lethal stew whose ingredients have already been. Right. With that, a phrase that sticks with me at the end of every day and before I go to work is having, as he said, a sense of chronic unease about what you do. If you can teach your staff in a safety critical environment that. When I mean chronic unease, it’s not being scared about what’s happening. It’s just knowing about what ifs are going to happen today, how my day is going to finish. Everybody that’s crashed an airplane that’s had a problem at sea didn’t think that the day was going to end up with their demand. It’s always thinking about the what ifs in the future.

Chronic on ease will keep you safe within your system, if you can say that your system is about safety and more, and it’s about what we do, and that is a strapped line that works, then it’s good enough for me. It’s The lesson is learned.

That’s it. There we go. That’s it. I think that’s a key piece, this element of chronic unease. It’s almost a healthy form of paranoia of being prepared for what could happen, as opposed to what I often see in key industries is an overconfidence of, I know my craft, I know what I’m doing.

You’re absolutely right. You have to take into fact that the skill of the craft, if you’re a director control room team supervisor, is essentially what it’s all about. But I really enjoy the cross-pollination of taking circumstance from aviation into, let’s say, nuclear industry. To have these open discussions, it’s a really healthy place to be. Similarly with the healthcare scenarios, nobody knows everything. The more I’m around, the less I feel that I know. That’s a very good analogy.

So, Ian, thank you very much for joining me today and for sharing some of the key elements around human factors, CRM, but also the applicability in other industries. If somebody wants to get in touch with you, what’s the best way to do that? In many ways.

You can find me on LinkedIn, on YouTube. My Gmail address, which is simple, [email protected] It will almost get me there. I’m quite happy to pick up anything at any time, and I’ll always respond. That’s it. Excellent. Well, thank you so much for joining me today.

It’s been a great pleasure, Eric.

Thanks a lot for the invitation.

I appreciate it. Absolutely. 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

Having been an integral member of some of the world’s most respected high-performance aviation organizations, Ian Hollingworth is able to share unique insights into truly world-class standards, behaviors, and cultures and how they are both built and maintained. 

Drawing upon his unique experiences flying military fast jets and within commercial aviation, Ian will engage your audience with anecdotes and tips on how to build winning teams, inspire great leadership, and overcome adversity whilst maintaining focus in challenging and pressurized scenarios. 

Ian is extremely passionate about people reaching their full potential and setting big goals; for the past 20 years has worked with some of the world’s most respected businesses in order to develop the talent of tomorrow. 

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

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