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

Hi and welcome to the Safety Guru. Today I’m very excited to have with me Paul Davison. He’s the CEO and founder of PPWD Consulting, a human performance organization. Paul, welcome to the show. Excited to have you with me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah.

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

My goodness.

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

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

Right.

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

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

Yeah. 

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

Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No thanks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

True.

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

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

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

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

Yep.

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

Thank you so much for joining me, Paul.

Been a real pleasure. Thank you, Eric.

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