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.

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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.