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.

Happy New Year! This is Eric Michrowski, and welcome to the Safety Guru. Today, I’m very excited to have a great New Year’s episode. A good start to our new season. I have two of our return guests that we’ve had before that had great reviews, Theo Venter and Ken Roberts. Together, they have 70 years of industrial work experience. Great stories, the dynamic duo Welcome to the show, Ken and Theo. Happy New Year!

Here we go. Another year, slog it on. Let’s bring it. Let’s go.

It was that introduction. I reckon you need that. If I had two hands, I would have clapped.

Theo and Ken, you were both on the podcast in the last year. Great stories. And what I didn’t realize until more recently is you actually knew each other. So maybe how do you start out? Maybe let’s start about how you met, because that’s already a pretty exciting story.

Well, I can probably take that lead. Theo is pointing at me, so yeah, you always do, Ken. I was on a work site in Western Australia, remote. I mean, in the middle of nowhere. It was the Pilbara, the biggest mining company in Australia, BHP. I was helping a company return to site after they’d had some safety mishaps. As part of that program, they came up to me and said, look, we’d like to bring a guy called Theo Venter to site as well as part of your program. We think it would really inspire people. And initially I’ve gone, Oh, they’re still in my thunder. They want to bring what, So Theo arrives to site, and they set him up in this little room. Actually, quite a nice… It’s a really good camp, Jumble Bar. And he’s in this room and all the workers pile in. And I thought I’d park myself down the back. And I’m sitting in a chair, and I’m arrogantly got my laptop computer on my knee, and away he goes. Hello, everybody. I’m Theo Venter, and he starts his story. But it wasn’t too long before that lid just slowly came down because I thought, oh, my God, I’ve never seen anything like this.

It was just such a powerful, powerful experience. And then at the end of that show, tears in my He goes, as was everybody, and we’re all shaking his hand. I walked up to him and said, Theo, I really need to speak to you. And he goes, here we go, another one. Yeah, mate. What would you like to say? I said, no, we need to get together and talk. Because during the session, I’d had an epiphany as like, Oh, my God. I’ve been thinking about convenience as the root cause of incidents. Here is an exact story that explains the situation perfectly. And so, Theo, he’s looking at his watch because he’s got a plane to catch. And then just I thought, well, he said, I can’t. Sorry, mate, I’m really busy, but we’ll catch up. And I thought, well, where are you off to? And he goes, I’ve got to go back to Olympic Dam in Rocks by Downs. And I said, I live there.

So, he was stalking you. He was stalking me. What Ken is saying.

I’m not sure who stalks who.

Theo, we’ll get to the rest of the story. But why don’t you refresh us on your story? Because it’s been a few, several episodes since we connected, and it’s a very powerful story. 22 kilovolts went through your body, all for a bolt from what I remember and a rubber glove. Maybe if you can give us the highlights of the story and we’ll get back to your flight to Olympic Dam.

Yes. Okay. All right. One morning, actually, you’ll hear there’s a little bit of accent in my voice. I am from South Africa. I immigrated over to Australia, and I was only here for six months when the one day I found myself working on a power pole. I’m an alignment. And then I found myself in a power pole working and it was a little fiddly nut. I just couldn’t get to it. The gloves were in my hand. Anyway, I decided on my own to take my own gloves off and remove the nut.

Which is a big no-no in the craft.

It is almost… You can’t even imagine taking your gloves off with 22,000 volts around you. That’s something you just couldn’t do. There’s a cardinal sin. Anyway, I took them off. Something happened and I got hooked onto the 22,000-volt line. If anyone knows about any electrical industry, and if I talk to the electrical engineers, I’ll just throw a few numbers out. So, on that specific day, my bad luck was that the protection on the line that should have operated within about 30 milliseconds was faulty. So, the fault current ran straight through the substation, which also did not trip, and then through the bus bars, creating about 1,200 amps of fault current rushing from arm to arm straight through my heart for two and a half seconds. Now, that’s enough. I mean, that’s energy to kill a thousand men instantly. That’s not even…

Yeah. Fifty head of cattle.

Fifty head of cattle will die from something like that. Anyway, so that’s where the story starts. I then make it through the first five days and then for months and months in hospital and then came out. But It was about four days, five. When the moment when they said to me that you are actually going to survive this incident, there was already work-safe people standing next to my bed. And that day was the day I had to stand and reckon and tell them that every single DNA in my body wanted to blame, excuse, and deny. I want to blame them for what they’ve done to me. Look at how bad my arms are looking. Look at the damage. But I said to them that I owned it. I took my gloves off, and we’ll take it from here further. And that was the most powerful thing I’ve done in my life. Wow.

So fast forward, Ken follows you to Olympic Dam or vice versa, whichever way it went. And then what was the epiphany that the both of you had?

Well, from my side- That we both like beer.

Yeah.

From my side, I was working in this very remote place. I’ve never heard before. It is so far off the grid, no but he knows about it. It’s called Olympic Dam. It’s a big mind. So, I was working at this place. I think there’s about 2000 people living there. There’s like nothing. Maybe more Ken would know. And when they asked me to come and do a presentation about another thousand guys away, and after my presentation, this weirdo walks up to me and said he wants to have a beer with me. And then we realized that he’s actually living in that little town where I was busy working at, it was just the epiphany. That was just the one.

One, two, three, four flights away. Yeah. Incredible. Yeah.

And yeah, you can talk about the epiphany moment when the lights came on and we started from there. Yeah.

We caught up at the Rocks by Tavern, of course. Where else would you catch up? And it was just an instant report. I was just so excited that we were face to face and explaining things. I remember I said to Theo, I’ve got a theory, and I want to run it past you. I said, I believe after all of the thousands of incidents I’ve investigated over the years that convenience is the actual root cause of many, many accidents, many incidents. The idea that if you want to get that ladder, you have to go back to the workshop, so I’m going to stand on this drum. Or why step over that lead? Why pick up that lead when I can step over it? And when I say that to people, the lights go on immediately. And when I said the Theo, Theo, was it convenience? Do you think that it might have been just an immediate biological convenient choice? And there was a bit of a silence there, and he’s staring at me, he goes, No one’s ever said it to me like that in the 13 or 15 years since my accident. And it’s exactly right.

I was not going to do anything else other than get that nut off. And whatever it took to do it, I took the most. I’m looking at my gloves, and there they are. Do you see that’s how you remember it, Theo?

There’s no doubt about it. That moment when you get that gut feel that something is going to go wrong, and you overwrite that gut feel by saying, oh, it’s way too inconvenient to go down. It takes us 20 minutes. We have to talk about this little nut, and it is not justified as it is a little nut. Who It’s way too convenient just to get them off quickly and do it. So, you overwrite the gut feel by making it easy for yourself.

If I recall, Theo, in your story, somebody else had been with you and also tried and couldn’t get the nut in the right place. You had also seen a couple of days before somebody else removed their gloves, which is the cardinal sin in electrical work. So that also reinforced this element. But again, that convenience was that last second decision.

It happens, Eric. In the workplace, you see shortcuts being taken. You see these things and you walk past them sometimes and you go, Yeah, okay. And then when you get into that same situation, you see, in my case, that same early morning, I was speaking to my manager in his office. He said to me that morning, he said, Theo, I’m asking you to go and do this job because you always get the job done. In other words. So, there’s a little bit of ego running around.

Ego, yeah.

And then combined with the previous week where I did see someone take their gloves off to take a little nut off, which I can tell you today, I have never even thought about. It didn’t even cross my mind. Never. He can’t do that. But when I saw him do it, and this guy has only been working for six months, all these the cheese lined up. And that I am standing ready behind my friend, and he’s struggling to get that nut off, all these things in my past, all my experiences just come to mind. And then it goes, you saw that guy last week, he did it. Your manager said this morning to you, you’re the best, you can do the job. My friend couldn’t do it. Now I’m getting my mate couldn’t do it. So, I’m getting frustrated because I’m standing right there. It’s almost like this pressure cooker, and then all of a sudden, now, convenience sets in and goes, just do it. Right.

And you’ve both written a book on convenience skills. We’ll get to that very soon. But before we go there, tell me about how you build an emotional connection to safety. Theo, I know one of the things you do is you’re known for your very powerful speeches around your story and how do you make safety come to life. Between the both of you, how do you build that strong emotional connection to safety?

Eric, it is amazing to see a big group of industrial workers sitting there all big and tough, and they’re lying on their 75th vertebrate and waiting for something. And then by 5 or 10 minutes in, they’re sitting forward, and all the phones are down 20 minutes in, they’re crying with me. And the moment that you capture someone’s emotion, that’s that limbic part of the limbic brain that really invests in that emotional and those high values. Once you are there with a whole crowd of industrial workers, and whatever you give them from there, it goes into a cellular a level. It goes into a deeper level of… They understand. They’ve got empathy. They know exactly what… They’ve all done it before. I mean, they’ve all been there. They all know exactly what it talks about, and they know that they can see the consequences and then how it affects you. And once you teach people and give them some tools, some bedrock foundation, then that moment is when you see the light comes on. Ken calls the wave. Once you hit them and that wave comes back at you in a room, you actually feel how much they really want to be safe.

And that’s every single time when I finish, they will be outside calling their wives, their husbands, their kids, and, oh, maybe I love you. I’m going to do everything in my power. I’ve got a little nut on my keyring to remind me of how much I love you guys, and I will never do. The emotional connection is so powerful. Right.

I know when we’ve talked before, you shared a story about how somebody spoke about safety with their kids versus at work. Tell me a little bit about that difference.

I was sitting at one of my friend’s houses, and we’re having a barbecue, a couple of beers. He had twins at his house, two little boys, and they were just running around, running amuck. And constantly, we couldn’t put a sentence together because he would be constantly up and running behind his kids and then closing the bullate and then pick up the rate that was lying there and then just constantly predicting things that they’re going to do and laughing about it and going, oh, they’re going to hit that thing. Oh, they did. I should have taken it away. It was the Monday morning when me and him were walking just at work. So, Hivers on, all that clothes on, working. And we’re walking through a construction site, and he literally walked past about five or six different hazards that was on site. And I looked at the hazards, and he looked at him as well. And I said to him afterwards, we had a coffee, and I said to him, Remember, like Saturday when we sat there, you did everything, and you were running around and clearing everything and making everything safe? He said, this morning you walked through past six different hazards and you saw them, you didn’t do anything.

What’s the difference, mate? And he was stuck. He looked at me like, wow, you just nailed it. He says, there’s no emotional connection for me. I don’t have the emotional connection at work. And that’s something he said and in his own words, he said, I need that. I need it. I want that.

And so that emotional connection is key. You can get through it to storytelling. But somebody I used to work with, he said, he says, you can have a post it notes at the front of your mind at the start of the day that reminds you who you stay safe for, why it’s important. But as the day goes on, new thoughts come in, and surely it goes to the back of your mind and you Forget about it, and then convenience jumps in, to use your expression, convenience then kills. How do we make it stick? Ken, I know you have a lot of great ideas on this side. 

It has to be a habit. You see, some of the things that we’re doing on site that are unsafe and risky are habits that we’ve created over time. I’ve taken this shortcut, and it worked. I’ll take that shortcut again next time. And after a while, it becomes a habit ingrained in us to do it a certain way. And so therefore, when we introduce convenience kills into the pre-start meetings, it’s always a bit of a game. It’s like, all right, how is convenience going to get you? And then I tell you what, we’ve got a bunnings card here, $50 voucher. Who can come back tomorrow with the best convenience trap? That one that almost got you and you thought, you know what? I was going to crimp that hose, but I went back to the tap and turned it off instead. And what happens is people are coming back and having fun with it. And so, we’re going, all right, who’s got a good convenience story? Yeah, I’ve got one. I was driving in the Ute; my phone went off and automatically my hand just reached out to go and grab it. And I thought, oh, convenience skills.

And so, it’s a matter of creating that habit. But what I think one of the remarkable things is, anytime you do a risk assessment, what you’re doing is you’re saying, If this went wrong, this thing could happen. What we’re doing is we’re bringing the risk assessment into actual real-time. What happens is after it becomes habitual, you’re saying, I wonder if convenience could get me in this. It’s not written on a bit of paper. It isn’t on a take five. It wasn’t It’s mentioned in the risk assessment. So, it’s a philosophy. It’s an overarching philosophy. And we’ve had lots of things in safety. You’ve had Zip, Zero Incident programs, and many other types of things. It’s really just another one. But I think how this one differs from the others and why I’m so passionate about it is that I’ve had people come up to me after I’ve mentioned it and go, you know what? I I was down the drive the other day and I was going to just crimp the hose to change the nozzle, and it just jumped into my head. When I heard that, I thought, this has to be explored.

Can you mention it earlier, Theo, you use a nut as a reminder. Tell me about that nut, because it’s a bit of a nudge as well, a reminder following your speech. Tell me about the idea behind that nut that you give everybody.

It was such a simple little thing. I was actually at that same site, you have to come to think of it, many years ago. I did the presentation for a bunch of guys, and then I think it was two weeks later when there was a small little incident, and the manager went to the store and bought a bunch of nuts and handed a nut out for everyone. And he was really drilling into them saying, Guys, did you forget about this story? Did you not listen to what Theo said? And I just went, Wow, what an amazing little reminder. So that started off, I’d say about six, seven years ago. And from that day, I would every single time that I go and do a presentation, would take a handful of nuts and put it on the seats and then connect that nut. And that actually evolved so beautiful because I leave six these foundations at the end of my presentation. And the nut has got six sides. It’s got a perfect serve. Five threads in the middle. So, the nut has grown its own page and its own Instagram.

The nut That’s amazing.

You can see the nut there on my phone.

Yes, on your T-shirt.

So, I think there should be, more or less, give or take, about maybe 150,000 nuts on keyring. And What that does at the moment is, and that’s to tie into where you come from, sometimes we do just work, and we don’t. Our families, we don’t have that posted. No, it doesn’t matter. That reminder. That not only sits on your keyring so that you can remember, but on your friend, on your mates, the guy that works next to you. And what happens is he looks at the nut and he tap you on the shoulder and he goes, Mate, look, I have a look at this. Does this feel right to you? Do you think this feels right?

And then the whole- Feel right is the key. It feels right.

It feels right. It doesn’t feel right. You know that little gut feel that you go. I do a lot of safety transformations for sites and stuff. And that night is a pivotal key for everyone. You make an agreement with that nut saying, I will make sure that I do everything in my power to not end up like Theo with losing his family and all the consequences. It’s the emotion, it’s the feeling that that nut means to you that is on your keeping, but also on your mate’s keeping that says, how does that feel to you? Does it feel right or not? And then that just comes out. And it works so well. It’s incredible how such a small little thing can have such a powerful symbol of your own highest values in your life.

The other thing, too, is Eric, I have the pleasure of going to sites after Theo has done his presentation to implement the ongoing program, where we do the pre-start meetings and other cultural benefits. And quite often I walk into to, say, the refinery, and there we are in front of 20 people, and we’re in the bells here in the pre-start meeting. And I’ll just kick off, say, hi, I’m Ken Roberts, and we’re implementing the Convenient Skills program or the ongoing program. How many here have you seen Theo? And then the hands shoot up. I said, how many of you here have your nut? And then they all just start pulling them out. Someone’s got it in his pocket, on his keyring, the gate key or the computer. It’s incredible how it’s taken off.

And they’re proud of it, isn’t it, Ken? 

Absolutely. And how many photos have I sent you? Can I just bump into people and they’ll go, hey, I’ve seen Theo. Have you got your nut? They pull it out, click, and I’ll send it to Theo. It’s fantastic.

I must have 200 photos of places where that nut goes. They drill holes in it and make key rings out of it and It’s got a life of its own.

Which says something really important to you. Think about it. We’ve stumbled onto something. It’s the anchor. If you can anchor a talus talisman, and that’s what it probably is. It’s like a talisman for people. If you can anchor that object to an experience, to a heartfelt experience like your presentation, or the feeling, it’s the limbic again. That’s the connection you’re talking about, Eric. You are now linking a real life, a present moment to an experiential sense of what might be unsafe.

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I think that’s a powerful piece. It’s a constant reminder you’re wearing on yourself that reminds you and nudges the story, the examples, the associated conversations that you’ve crafted through your storytelling, but it stays on the individual. In this case, it works well because the nut is exactly what Theo you played with.

Think about what we’re talking about here. This isn’t regular safety. We’re not talking about the processes or procedures. We’re not talking about take fives or risk assessments. We’re talking about really deep biological triggers here and that are rarely expressed in the workplace. We don’t ever explore these avenues because I just don’t think there’s enough people out there that has the experience like Theo has, who’s really been through it to say, hey, safety is a feeling. You never hear anyone say, I think safe. They’ll say, I feel safe. I think that’s the unconscious key to everything right there. New Age Safety. I’ve even registered newagesafety.com. Website opening soon.

I’ve had just the last one on what you’re saying is I’ve had so many, a lot of people come and told me that they’ve put that nut between them and their family, their loved ones, their children, everything, and they would use the nut as a. Ken and I are so famous for making agreements because you keep an agreement, it teaches your personal accountability and ownership. And what they do is they put that knot between them and the people that they love most in life and say, I want to make an agreement with this knot as this nut is a symbol that I will do everything that I can to keep safe and make sure that I’m there for you for the rest of your life. But that only means that he’s committing. He is committing to something. Now, the nut is not what it meant to him in the presentation when he saw it, but now he steps it up. Now he goes, this is a symbol of me promising you I will do what I can. When that nut then goes to the field and out to the workplace, it’s got a totally different energy on it.

That’s what you want. Ken, that’s the anchor you’re talking about. Exactly right. Absolutely.

You even have a nut board. We’ve got the nut board. Rather than a lean board, it’s the nut board with a big industrial bloody thing. It’s about half a meter wide, but it’s a constant reminder.

I hear building a strong emotional connection to safety, a lot about the stories, key component. But then you talked about that talisman, the nut, something that’s a reminder that really anchors you back to that emotional connection. I think, Ken, you said something that’s quite powerful around the Keystone habits, really making sure that we start building in habits that bring the right actions in place.

At the source. What we’re doing is we’re trying to create habits around, oh, let’s spot the hazard or let’s ensure that we do our take fives. But we’re talking about a deep, almost unconscious Keystone habit where automatically, I’ve had people say it over and over again, it just popped into my head that this is a convenient moment that’s going to go bad.

Touching on the emotional connection to safety, either one of you care share Nico’s story. So, one time you brought Nico. Theo, you want to share who Nico is and another powerful story on that front.

Yeah, that one I very rarely tell people about because it’s very dear to my heart. Nico is the man that was next to me in the basket when I got 22,000 volts. He was the guy that needed to keep calm. In that moment, he thought I died because I was smoking and everything coming out of me, and I was lying dead in the bottom of the basket. So, he kept everything together, training kicked in, he took us down, and then faced the music, faced all the managers, the work safe, the people asking questions, the press, everyone else. Sure. Nico, from that moment, he’s not someone that actually opens up. He’s not a person that opens up and talks about his feelings. He’s really closed off. And he bears the burden of what happened there. And he felt very guilty of not stopping me from doing what I did. And all these things just overpowered him, overwhelmed him. And he started creating or getting headaches. When you get emotionally sick, mentally sick, you make your body sick. He started getting headaches that could not find where the headaches come from. It was severe migraines, and then it was about 18 months later when he just couldn’t take it anymore and he got prescribed with opiate-based headache.

Yeah, he just got hooked immediately. Good not stop taking the tablets. For about five years, he one day called me desperately asking me if I could buy tablets for him on the black market. And that was the biggest red flag I’ve ever… I never even knew. But we have caught up between, but he was never the same. I thought maybe it was me, and I blame. I looked at the false one myself, but he was overdosing on these tablets. Immediately got him in and got him went to the EAB program, where Employee Assistant program, started weaning him off the tablets. Sure. And his wife told his wife about it. He’s actually lost his wife and his kids because he had no more emotions. He couldn’t love anymore. He couldn’t think anymore. We had been back, got his wife and his kids back, and everything started going okay until… He’s never seen what I do. Ken and I invited him to come and look. We were sitting in one of my presentations. Eric, it was such a original, powerful, emotional It was just… I looked at him while I was doing the presentation and we both cried.

Right.

I don’t think there was a dry eye in the house.

It was a raw, powerful thing for me to tell him from my side everything that happened from me, but him sitting in the audience. Then when we finished, I didn’t tell him this, but I said to the crowd, it was UGL, I think.

Ugl, yeah. Ugl.

I looked at the crowd and I said, look, I’ve got this most powerful moment. I’ve got the man that stood next to me or behind me in the basket. Can he come up? And everyone said, yeah. And he goes, no, no, no, no, no, I said, Come on, Nico. And he came up and he stood next to me and Ken. And I just said, look, guys, he’s not someone that can talk about his feelings. So, if you want to ask questions, that’s fine. But this is what happens. And then Nico just started talking, didn’t he, Ken?

Yeah, in front of everybody. It just came out of his shell. It was like a freedom, a release, a shedding of his skin. It was incredible. And what was that? That’s 13 years after, 14 years after, was it at the time? Yeah. Wow. Carrying that burden for so long. And I think what you’re saying, both of you, is that it’s not just Theo that this accident impacted. Have a think of the circle. This is 15 years of pain-killing addiction for a man who just couldn’t live with the sight of what he experienced in the basket with Theo. Then it goes to all his workmates and then his colleagues and then the managers of that company, and they are under investigation for how many years. Then the millions of dollars are fined, they probably cop for it. Then the family just goes on and on and on. That’s why if we can nip it in the bud and we create a habit instinctually can stop those things before they happen. That’s the real risk assessment, I believe.  

We’ve touched on the importance of having a very strong emotional connection to safety in the workplace. We’ve talked about ways or strategies to make it stick. This anchor, the nut in your case, Theo, but also the Keystone Habits, that gets me to convenience skills. So, your book that you wrote together, can you share quite a few of the ideas from that when we connected on our episode of the podcast a little while back? Maybe give me a little bit more about the themes you touched on it in terms of how usually those split-second decisions are because of convenience. Tell me about some of the key highlights of the book.

Well, I mean, we had a kickstart. We both wrote a book called Get Real First, Get Real Staying Alive for a Living. And that was like a brain dump where I just threw Theo’s story there and poured out everything that I’d learned after 43 years in the industry and 25 years in safety. And then it was just that one chapter that really stood out, which was called Convenient Skills, because people were coming up to us and saying, hey, you know what? This is a real thing. It popped into my head, Convenience Girls. And so, we rewrote that chapter and turned it into a smaller book. And there’s lots of things about Theo’s story. There’s one particular where he’s waking up in the morning and his arms are up on these suspensions, and he looks down and there’s a black texture mark around his arm, and he goes, What the Earth’s doing here? And they were going to amputate. And so, he needed signatures. Theo tells his story a lot better than me, but we don’t have three hours. And he’s got all these signatures, bar one, which is his, actually. I think his father signed on his behalf.

But it’s the plastic surgeon that’s there right at the end. Theo is looking at him. He’s saying, please don’t let him take my arm. Don’t let him take my arm. The anesthetic had already taken part in his bathing. But he says, just before he goes, he says, please, you must agree with me. I need your commitment. Please don’t do this. And then he wakes up and there’s, Is it Dr. Han Nguyen.

Han Nguyen, yeah. So, you see, I carry this thing on my chest, on all my shirts. It says ready Made. Han is the guy that saved my arms, and I will forever and ever be thankful for that, just to be able to push buttons and have the arms. He put his practice on the line for someone he’s never met before.

He put his practice on the line. It’s And the story behind that, of course, is the agreement. What more powerful agreement on the planet you’re fading, anesthetic’s taken over, please make an agreement with me that you won’t take my arm. And then you wake up. And so that particular chapter around agreements is powerfully reinforced by that story, as is lots of others.

And I think, Ken, your story, you shared a lot about that in our episode that we recorded a while back. Very, very powerful example. I remember one that stunned me was the one in a mind site where everybody was breaking the rules by being in the cell phones, and you got them to get to an agreement around. That’s right. What’s going to be the consequence if we break that rule and how after years of not being able to get people to do the right thing, people did just because of that power of the agreement.

They’d all seen Theo. And so, I’m able to introduce something of that magnitude because I can relate the story. There’s no more powerful story than Theo’s arm, right? And I replay it to them. And then I go, so, listen, what’s this thing about the phones in the tank house? It’s just something that is a rule that’s been there for 20 years. But instead of just enforcing it like it was, I said, let’s talk about it. Why can’t you take phones into the tank house? There were various ones If they fall into the chemical, there could be a reaction and it’s unsafe. And so, what we did was then make the agreement. So, can we all agree here and now between us that we won’t take the phones in the tankers? Do you all agree? Because they actually agreed, believe it or not. They said, Yeah, look, it’s dangerous. We don’t want it in there. It’s also distracting. And then you add that powerful thing. What would be the consequences if you did? Now, we don’t say it. The supervisor didn’t say it, nor the manager. You tell us what it is. And then someone says, well, you know what?

Dismissal. And I went, that’s a bit harsh, isn’t it? Maybe we scale it back a bit. And he said, no, let’s think about this. We’ve been banging on about this for 20 years, and we have to all stand strong here and make a commitment. You were talking about commitments earlier, Theo. So, we write it up on the board. We put it here. This is with the consequences. And instead of coming into the pre-starts now and saying, is everybody kept their agreements? What we just mentioned is the story about Theo. Bang, everyone knows straight away. It’s this thing about connection. I think there’s a theme running through our podcast, Eric, this idea of creating habits through connections to a story, to a feeling, to an ideology or philosophy. It has much more power than, here, here’s the procedure, follow it. If you don’t, you’re breaking the rules.

Well seen.

So Convenient Skills, available at Book people can pick up. If they want to get in touch with the both of you, how they can do this, I definitely recommend that you spend your time to listen to Ken Roberts’ story in the podcast from a couple of months back, as well as Theo Venter, a little bit further back in history, but both are really good podcast episodes to listen to. But if they want to get in touch with both of you, how can they do this?

Well, I’ll speak for you. There’s theoventer.com. And if you go theoventer.com/theoventer, books, you’ll get all of the material that we’ve done together. We’ve also got an audio book for the Convenience Kills as well. And there’s another site called conveniencekills.net. All of the details are on there, how to contact us, and you’ll see the team there with me and Theo and our supporters.

Excellent. Well, thank you so much for joining me. Happy New Year to everybody. Happy New Year. I’m glad we’re able to get to the folks of your New Year show.

I’m going to lose some weight. I’m telling you, this year, I’m definitely going to share it with you. Oh, and I’m going to stop drinking.

What’s the consequence, Ken, if you don’t follow through.

My wife will kill me.

It doesn’t It didn’t seem strong enough, Ken.

Thanks, Eric. It’s been fantastic. You’re such a great presenter. It’s just fabulous that we can be on here. And it’s much more fun with Theo than it is when I was on my own.

I agree. And lastly, if I could say this, I am definitely coming over to Canada and North America very soon. Have a look at my calendar. On my website, there’s a little page called Booking Information. There’s a live calendar on there. I do put that calendar every day. So go and have a look if you want to even get me booked, and we’ll take it from there.

Sounds good. Perfect. Thank you so much.

Here we are. Cheers.

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.