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This week, Sheldon sits down in person with his friend and fellow safety disruptor, Sam Goodman – The Hop Nerd. Known for his sharp takes on Human & Organizational Performance (HOP), his book Safety Sucks, and his wildly popular “Darrell the Safety Man” YouTube character, Sam brings humor and real-world insight to the conversation.
Together, they dive into:
It’s candid, funny, and thought-provoking—just what you’d expect when Sheldon and Sam get together.
Sam Goodman is The Hop Nerd, a leading voice in Human & Organizational Performance, safety culture, and innovative approaches to worker engagement. He’s the author of Safety Sucks, host of The Hop Nerd Podcast, and creator of the satirical YouTube character “Darrell the Safety Man.” Sam uses humor and candor to challenge outdated safety practices while championing human-centered approaches.
The Safety Consultant Podcast with Sheldon Primus is your ultimate weekly guide to starting or growing a profitable occupational safety and health consulting business. Are you ready to be your own boss and make a greater impact? Your expertise can help more people create safer workplaces, and your skills deserve a platform where they can truly shine. If you feel limited in your current role and believe your knowledge could serve the broader workforce more effectively, this podcast is for you. Join us as we explore the steps to launch your own safety consulting business, share insights on navigating the industry, and provide strategies to maximize your impact on workplace health and safety. Now is the perfect time to take control of your career and make a difference!
[SPEAKER_01]: Welcome to the Safety Consultant Show with Sheldon primus, where we blend safety sparks with business brilliance and the pitch of Sheldon's signature wit, whether you're a safety pro of fresh face consultant, or just safety curious, get ready for a show that will educate, entertain and elevate your safety game.
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's dive into the art of consulting with your safety shirt for himself, Sheldon primus.
[SPEAKER_00]: This episode is powered by Safety FM.
[SPEAKER_03]: Hey, gang.
[SPEAKER_03]: How are you doing?
[SPEAKER_03]: Welcome to a special version of the Safety Consultant podcast.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm your host, Sheldon Prime Minister.
[SPEAKER_03]: The podcast where I teach you a lot about the business of being a safety consultant.
[SPEAKER_03]: I teach you about ocean compliance.
[SPEAKER_03]: We learn a little bit about safety and health.
[SPEAKER_03]: and today we get to touch my good buddy.
[SPEAKER_03]: The hot nerd himself Sam Goodman is here in person in his house.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, it's weird in person.
[SPEAKER_02]: I love it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thanks for having me.
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, yeah, what do you say?
[SPEAKER_02]: Thanks for having me win.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thanks for coming over.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so how does that one work?
[SPEAKER_03]: Great.
[SPEAKER_03]: Thanks for coming to my live work space.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, there you go.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's like me.
[SPEAKER_02]: Every place I go like,
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm not an office guy.
[SPEAKER_02]: No, no, no, no.
[SPEAKER_02]: I learned that a long time ago.
[SPEAKER_02]: If I have to drive somewhere to do the things that I want to do, I do less of the things that I want to do.
[SPEAKER_02]: So the near I can keep the things I enjoy.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: The better.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, that is the truth.
[SPEAKER_03]: Honestly, I keep telling people I'm
[SPEAKER_03]: Unemployable at this point.
[SPEAKER_03]: I feel like everything is so good being on your own.
[SPEAKER_03]: You get your own time.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I know for those of you listening, you know, honestly, that's a good thing when you could say that.
[SPEAKER_03]: But, you know, you've got to do the grind and just go and be happy doing the grind too.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I'm not going to disparage anything, just me right now.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's kind of hard for me to go back to an office.
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_03]: What about you?
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I think.
[SPEAKER_02]: So there's this thing where it's I have jokingly tell people that I don't have a real job.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I couldn't imagine having a real job right now at this point.
[SPEAKER_02]: And what I mean by a real job is that exactly what you're just describing like it.
[SPEAKER_02]: the ability to do your own thing, chase the things that you know, or most valuable pursue your interest, flex your creative muscles around the things that relate to what you do.
[SPEAKER_02]: You don't have that same freedom, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: And a lot of corporate Americans, at least the corporate America that I come from.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Nothing wrong with that, like it love it, you know?
[SPEAKER_02]: Great stuff.
[SPEAKER_02]: But for me, I'm with you.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think it'd be really, really, really hard to try to go back to something.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's nothing like that.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, with that said, though, it's also the hardest thing I've ever done in my life.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_02]: So, you were kind of hitting around that a little bit.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_03]: you will find no worse boss than yourself and that's so true especially when your first gets started well hold on not when you first get started for me I actually had to train my brain as to I have too much freedom I can't just watch TV and you know just hang out and work whenever
[SPEAKER_03]: So that took like a good two months or so, and then I had to, you know, get myself scheduled, and after you get yourself scheduled, you'll find out because you don't have a schedule, a set schedule, you're working on weekends, you're working at nights, you're, you know, when the family's doing stuff, you're squeezing in, oh, I'm almost there.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm almost there.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, there's a, there's a benefit to that in the sense that,
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm just going to say you can get it caught up.
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know that you can ever get it caught up.
[SPEAKER_02]: I've come to realize that it never gets caught up, but you can front load things by yourself time and you know you're creating a lot of times your own deadlines.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: All right.
[SPEAKER_02]: So you can you can
[SPEAKER_02]: do things to where you in-depth and all right okay I'm gonna actually lock myself in this little room for 16 hours today but for the next three days I'm just gonna be home that's right and so that's the part that early on and even now I continue to always struggle with is I am a workaholic and I'm a workaholic because I love what I do and I'm passionate about what I do
[SPEAKER_02]: But I'll also catch myself doing that thing where it's like, oh my gosh, it's been 18 hours, and they have an eaten in two days.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and the kid, um, what is that sound?
[SPEAKER_02]: What's happening?
[SPEAKER_02]: Where am I?
[SPEAKER_02]: Who am I?
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Right, those kind of things.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I think what you described before is really a huge key to that is figure out what that schedule looks like.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm
[SPEAKER_02]: not the best at it.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm probably one of the worst at it because, you know, I will find myself especially when my family is off doing something else.
[SPEAKER_02]: Instead of maybe doing the thing where you probably should plant your butt on a couch and put your feet up for a minute.
[SPEAKER_02]: like, oh yeah, I've got two hours.
[SPEAKER_02]: I can do more work.
[SPEAKER_02]: I can do more for that.
[SPEAKER_02]: I can go make something.
[SPEAKER_02]: I can go do something else.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: So finding a bit of that schedule is really been helpful for me too.
[SPEAKER_02]: As much as I can, you know, I don't know that that balance is the right word is probably ever used a bunch.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think it's fine to know how you blend those two adequately.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's balance, but for me, I go with the creative flow if you would.
[SPEAKER_03]: So if I'm feeling like, I'm in a good, especially when I was doing my courses.
[SPEAKER_03]: doing the video to go with the courses.
[SPEAKER_03]: I had to wait till, you know, I was feeling getting enough to have some energy for video, you know, because you need that.
[SPEAKER_03]: You can't have a video that's boring, because people are just going to turn you right off and you're a YouTube person as well, especially with Darrell, you know, you're probably running right there, someone don't, it's once, it's just don't say it from time to time, it's just right, because at that point, you know, you got to have some energy if you're going to do that.
[SPEAKER_03]: And if you, you know, Darrell comes around and you got no energy, you're might end up, you know, getting locked up in 60 jail.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, that's so true.
[SPEAKER_02]: I never thought in a million years that I would get a lot of questions from a lot of different people all over the map from other folks that do consulting to just folks that create stuff, you know, internal or for fun or completely non-safety related, you know, you know,
[SPEAKER_02]: people ask me about, like, creative process a lot, you know, and they ask me a lot about, like, how do you, what's the logistics of making something like that?
[SPEAKER_02]: And I don't have a really good answer because the only answer that I tend to use is when the idea comes you go, like, yeah, so I think your point spot on, like, you've always got to be at least somewhat prepared.
[SPEAKER_02]: or at least willing to caffeinate at interest in times to go when the idea comes.
[SPEAKER_02]: I've thrown this stupid quote around and it's not a direct quote, it's a very loose quote from a really unknown author by the name of Stephen King that loosely put and there's much more to this quote, but he said something along the lines of a writer's notebook is where great ideas get a die.
[SPEAKER_02]: meaning that if you're super passionate about an idea like if you get hit with this thing you're like oh my god I know what Darrell needs to do next yeah if I write it down the likelihood of me making that video goes to like half a percent but if my cameras are already charged and my lights are already kind of halfway set up and I can go out there and start shooting in five minutes and just make it yeah
[SPEAKER_02]: even if I don't edit it, which I struggle with that because then I will then lock myself in the office for another hour, it midnight to them.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, because I want to see what it looks like, but just go.
[SPEAKER_02]: I just go and create it when the idea happens just run with, I think, with the energy.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think most people that are trying to create things overthink.
[SPEAKER_02]: more than they underthink.
[SPEAKER_02]: They probably need to do less thinking more making it.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's true, because honestly, everyone is caught up with perfection.
[SPEAKER_03]: They want to make it, you know, perfect, and they want to hit the algorithms and all that stuff in order to get it, and they miss the spontaneity of the moment.
[SPEAKER_03]: But then also, there's a little fun about the raw and the real.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know that you're going to end up missing if you're going to try to script.
[SPEAKER_03]: You have to do an outline.
[SPEAKER_03]: Obviously, just so you don't go nuts.
[SPEAKER_03]: You don't go nuts.
[SPEAKER_03]: Some of those aren't that good.
[SPEAKER_03]: We still need allies.
[SPEAKER_02]: I wouldn't know.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that line would help.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I do create outlines from time to time.
[SPEAKER_02]: And at least like loose thoughts.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like a loose, like a couple bullet points.
[SPEAKER_02]: If this happens, this happens.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, type of thing.
[SPEAKER_02]: If I created more outlines, I would spend far less time.
[SPEAKER_02]: piddling in front of the camera, which would probably be good, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Because then you just like, I got the idea, but I remember that I haven't totally thought it out, and I just record 45 minutes worth of footage for a 15 second video right type of thing.
[SPEAKER_02]: But there's a benefit to that, too, because to that kind of spontaneous in the moment kind of thing,
[SPEAKER_02]: a lot of the stuff that you see like Darrell talking about and especially the things that like people were like oh that's hilarious that's super thing Darrell said yeah that was never outlined it was never written it was it was that right so it's probably somewhere in the middle between ideation right and then actually shooting I probably should have a couple more bullet points
[SPEAKER_03]: And it'll help you with, I guess, flow to flow, yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: But since you're doing a character and the character is based on, you know, the obscene stuff we see in the field.
[SPEAKER_03]: You got any stories of the field stuff that drove the character?
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, well first, I have to set the record straight.
[SPEAKER_02]: I am not Darrell.
[SPEAKER_02]: Daryl is We can call him a character, but he certainly is a character, that's right.
[SPEAKER_02]: Um, but now I have people have been confused for a very long time that
[SPEAKER_02]: I think you're seeing you two together at the same post picture of all the time and people still don't believe it, but I don't believe it.
[SPEAKER_02]: The funny thing about that though is some all the stuff that I shoot with there.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, get it right.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's there's nothing that's been created that is not.
[SPEAKER_02]: based, sometimes loosely, but based on real life events.
[SPEAKER_02]: So names, identities, have probably been changed a bit to protect the knots of innocent.
[SPEAKER_02]: But it's all based on stuff that I've lived at some point in this age of profession, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: So I think about like the one, one of the ones that people really love is his wacky, wavy and flatable two-man costume video.
[SPEAKER_02]: So he's basically setting in his office and he's gone, my God, it's been a week.
[SPEAKER_02]: We need to come up with a brand new safety campaign.
[SPEAKER_02]: you know what will people think if we don't roll out a new safety something every single week we need to do slogan every week yeah and other it's kind of it's kind of a normal thing that you guys after and then all of a sudden he gets the aha I've got it moment and he's out front of the facility at the turn style at shift change dancing around to techno music screaming at people about staying more safe and paying enough tension you know you know type of thing yeah
[SPEAKER_02]: real story.
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, that's not fake.
[SPEAKER_02]: There was a place that I will not name.
[SPEAKER_02]: I wrote that.
[SPEAKER_02]: Where one of the senior safety executives in this organization basically came up with the idea.
[SPEAKER_02]: Again, this is not exactly what it was called, but they wanted safety man.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so safety man was this inflatable character.
[SPEAKER_02]: They sent out crates of these to all the sites.
[SPEAKER_02]: And, yeah, this leader's got to be safety man for the gate for the day, and they handed out pastries and coffee and balloons.
[SPEAKER_02]: Don't people to be safe, you know?
[SPEAKER_02]: Wow.
[SPEAKER_02]: And all of our workers walk past us going like these idiots.
[SPEAKER_02]: God, yeah, and they were right.
[SPEAKER_02]: They were 110% right.
[SPEAKER_02]: But like, you know, stuff in there like, can electric keep me to death, and you want me to take it like that.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that's what you think keeps the safe.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, sure, man.
[SPEAKER_02]: Good job, dude.
[SPEAKER_02]: Whatever makes you feel better about this all day.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's comical and it's funny and it's sad at the same time because honestly, the psychology of safety, a lot of people don't know, you know, yes, this is something that, you know, you would try to do in order to get the workers more engaged and sometimes you have to prove worker engagement in order for you to get your ISO 45,000 in one or to get your VPP for a voluntary protection program for those of you that don't know.
[SPEAKER_03]: And once they prove that they have work engagement, then they could get to that next year, you know, and the ideas for working engagement doesn't actually mean you're finding things safe.
[SPEAKER_03]: It just means that you're now playing the clown almost in the workplace.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, instead of taking the...
[SPEAKER_02]: far more useful, and sometimes I'm not even going to say that it's that much harder in it is far less embarrassing, action of doing things with people rather than trying to do things to them.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, if you want real engagement, adult relationships with the people that work within your organization, and actually involve them in the things that matter, yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: if you're trying to build a something and that something impacts their work guess who should have a seat at the table yeah probably the person that has to live with whatever it is that you're making in some conference room far far away that's real it's real engagement right that's real engagement that's real involvement
[SPEAKER_02]: Um, we end up with a bit of the theater there, which is the inflatable safety man to man costume, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Or Darrell dressed up as a banana because it represents slip trippin' fall awareness and the way you don't fall down is just paying enough attention.
[SPEAKER_02]: You can't die if you pay enough attention.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's right.
[SPEAKER_02]: We mistake that for engagement.
[SPEAKER_02]: And don't get me wrong.
[SPEAKER_02]: If I'm walking into a site and somebody's giving me a free coffee, I like it.
[SPEAKER_02]: I love it.
[SPEAKER_02]: I got to have more of it.
[SPEAKER_02]: But we shouldn't pretend that that's interchangeable with true engagement, true involvement, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: I think that
[SPEAKER_02]: a lot of times we see that right where it's well we just need to tell them we need to show them and how do we show them we'll shock them the shock them by you know I don't know putting up a don't I don't take out front and throw stuff at your boss and stuff and that's all fun and games right but so many of those situations you know like that one or any of the other stuff you're going to find with Darrell
[SPEAKER_02]: or any of that kind of cast of characters that lives in Daryl's workplace.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's taking these things that
[SPEAKER_02]: are probably a bit more middle of the road in our actual application of them and then running them to their most extreme case.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, right, and that's where I think personally, that's where I find humor in it.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like, yeah, we do it.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not really all that bad, but if we really lived up to what we're trying to do here, we would all be out front wearing an inflatable costume, so I think we'll about safe.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then believing that it works.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then going back,
[SPEAKER_02]: to corporate and patting ourselves on the back.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, we did it.
[SPEAKER_03]: Man, another bad can happen now.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's right.
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's funny because you'll see, you know, the real science, again, I'm saying that term, but honestly, if you're trying to change behavior, you got to figure out what's the motivation.
[SPEAKER_03]: If you don't talk to the people, you'll never know their motivation.
[SPEAKER_02]: You're just guessing.
[SPEAKER_02]: You're just guessing, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: It's it's all in the same line.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, we could we could go,
[SPEAKER_02]: so many videos, right, from posters to the front gate thing to return to work stuff, all the stuff that Daryl tends to get involved with, right, kind of down that path.
[SPEAKER_02]: But no, you exactly right, I mean, this idea that
[SPEAKER_02]: workers somehow have to be told that things in their work environment killed them.
[SPEAKER_02]: I just got really early on in my career.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, if I go out and I spend time with alignment as an example, and I'm like, hey, don't touch that.
[SPEAKER_02]: It'll electrocute you.
[SPEAKER_02]: The very next words out of their mouth are going to sound something other than maybe a few profanities on the front end of that.
[SPEAKER_02]: It'll quickly be followed up with what are you going to do.
[SPEAKER_02]: Tell me not to stare at the sun next.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, I know.
[SPEAKER_02]: Give me something a bit more useful than that.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think that's what people are mostly looking for.
[SPEAKER_02]: They want to be involved.
[SPEAKER_02]: They want their hand on the wheel a little bit.
[SPEAKER_02]: If it impacts my job, I should have a voice in the process.
[SPEAKER_02]: All that stuff that we tend to shift from doing stuff too to doing stuff with, that's a huge change in what engagement looks like, because I'm not just going out there and telling you to try harder now.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm asking you what you need.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: And we're going to sit down and figure out what you need.
[SPEAKER_02]: And my job as a leader then is to resource that to figure out how we can make that happen.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know best, you do the work.
[SPEAKER_02]: my deal was the two men.
[SPEAKER_02]: Maybe more than likely, not just maybe.
[SPEAKER_02]: You probably have a better idea.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's like that is a two.
[SPEAKER_02]: What do you guys?
[SPEAKER_02]: I like it.
[SPEAKER_02]: I got bubble wrap and a megaphone.
[SPEAKER_02]: What am I supposed to do with this?
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_02]: Botools that work.
[SPEAKER_02]: No, no, no, not the tools of work.
[SPEAKER_02]: We're going to stick with the two men.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's right.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm going to spend my money in the safety dollars.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, right.
[SPEAKER_02]: We're going to, we're going to buy more coffee cups for the pros calls.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, tools.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: So when you, when you get to, because you're an active consultant as well, so you get to these organizations and
[SPEAKER_03]: their numbers drive the organization.
[SPEAKER_03]: If their numbers go down, they feel like, you know, they're going to either lose a job or they're going to get off on the highest net world list or a vetalist and now all of a sudden their EMR experience modification rates, so high they can't get a job.
[SPEAKER_03]: and they're just scared that the next incident is going to truly either get them kicked off of a site or something else.
[SPEAKER_03]: So their reaction is I need to control and I got to control my workers.
[SPEAKER_03]: I need to control them so they don't do anything wrong.
[SPEAKER_03]: How do you break that addiction?
[SPEAKER_03]: The addiction of thinking that your action is going to cause these workers to do something different.
[SPEAKER_02]: yeah well there's this thing right where we think we control and that's that's probably the the true way right opening their eyes to maybe that that
[SPEAKER_02]: There's this thing I think in organizations where we think that anything that happens within the confines of our gates somehow we have magic control all over and beyond that we have magic control over the world sometimes.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I was like we can change everything.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, can you know, I mean, that's always the first interesting question.
[SPEAKER_02]: How much control do you really have?
[SPEAKER_02]: How much of that mean something and how much is that?
[SPEAKER_02]: You just thinking that you got it.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's always, that's always a really, really interesting place to start.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, I spend time with, I guess, what we would describe as client organizations and contract organizations.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I spent time on both sides of the fence.
[SPEAKER_02]: In my real job life, when I had a real job, I spent time in both sides of their fence as well.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I know the relationship from both sides.
[SPEAKER_02]: I have trophies somewhere in this attic, looking up for people and see this.
[SPEAKER_02]: That same thing's like, great job.
[SPEAKER_02]: you got us to zero through creative case management.
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
[SPEAKER_02]: I go like those kind of things.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's just a tell you lost.
[SPEAKER_02]: We can get you back to work.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's not going to affect your normal job.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's fine.
[SPEAKER_02]: For a lot of the reasons you just described that we tend to see the way that we have interacted with our contractors.
[SPEAKER_02]: in the past as being this thing that's just completely numbers driven if you get a little bit too much of this then sorry you can't work here anymore.
[SPEAKER_02]: A couple really weird things that I always struggled with there.
[SPEAKER_02]: is that first it always disproportionately affects small mom and pop local contractors more than it ever affects the big boys.
[SPEAKER_03]: Absolutely.
[SPEAKER_02]: So we got mom and pop down the street.
[SPEAKER_02]: We like to use them.
[SPEAKER_02]: They've been never backwards to take care of us.
[SPEAKER_02]: They do amazing work.
[SPEAKER_02]: We might even actually live next door to them.
[SPEAKER_02]: but because they have five employees and my God Bob tragically got killed on driving a work truck last year.
[SPEAKER_02]: You will never work here again.
[SPEAKER_02]: So now we're going to hire out somebody all the way from the other side of the country that's a mega court that's basically going to be calling a call center to get any feedback on the projects that we're doing.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's way better obviously.
[SPEAKER_02]: So it always works out weird from the client side as you or from the contract side as you described you end up in this weird dance of how in the world do I keep these numbers low enough while still learning while still figuring out while still not discouraging or trying my best to not discourage reporting yeah because if we're not working none of us have to worry about safety.
[SPEAKER_02]: We have nothing to worry about then, except for, I'll see at the unemployment office, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: That's the only thing you've done there, always.
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, the safest unemployment people have.
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I think what's really interesting to me, what gives me a little bit of hope is a lot of the client organizations that I work with, they're changing that, not all.
[SPEAKER_02]: But at least ones that are maybe going down this more humanized approach to things.
[SPEAKER_02]: They're looking at that and they're going, you know, that number doesn't really tell me the whole story.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, you know, they have five employees that was awful.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I knew Bob and when Bob wrecked that truck, it hurt everybody.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like it sucked is putting that company basically out of business, the right move, is hurting them more than they're already hurt, the right move.
[SPEAKER_02]: Is that number really telling us much of anything?
[SPEAKER_02]: And a lot of those companies are starting to change the way that they pre-qual contractors the way that they manage contractors every time.
[SPEAKER_02]: Because back to some of that more involved thing that we're talking about, instead of me client, you contractor.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's more of a we-thing that they're starting to discover.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that's not the norm in our world yet.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's certainly not the norm, but I look forward to the day when it is.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, absolutely, because the market and the insatiable need to make sure you protect yourself from litigation seems to dictate what happens on boots in the ground safety.
[SPEAKER_03]: and the workers are the ones who kept the brunt of it because now they're being treated like kids and not treated like adults because if they don't follow your rules the way you set it that's a violation and here you go you're getting a safety violation and you know OSHA doesn't care about that stuff unless it actually is a violation of OSHA's rules does that mean you're managing risk?
[SPEAKER_03]: probably not if you're just showing some set of control over the worker and if the worker makes a deviation because they're trying to reduce risk and they still get written up and you're going to just get people who are going to be compliant with their rules, but they're not going to take action when they need to.
[SPEAKER_02]: I won't call it worse yet.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'd probably just say factually that.
[SPEAKER_02]: they will show you that they are in compliance.
[SPEAKER_02]: It doesn't necessarily mean that they are in compliance with that.
[SPEAKER_02]: Because now you strip me of my ability to tell you where the rules don't work.
[SPEAKER_02]: You strip me of my ability to say like, okay, you made those 10 gold.
[SPEAKER_02]: And something went a little bit weird and it can find space the other day.
[SPEAKER_02]: But I can't tell you now because if I tell you,
[SPEAKER_02]: You're going to dig and maybe find that we bent a little bit of a rule there, and instead of learning, you're going to fire.
[SPEAKER_02]: So actually around those rules, the things the Golden Rules has an example of the things that mayem and kill people within our work world, that's usually why that short list is.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now those are the things that we know the least about.
[SPEAKER_02]: because you can't say anything or the hammer's coming down.
[SPEAKER_02]: The hammer's coming down, all right, it's just no question to ask.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's no context, no understanding, you know, even trying to understand it's either yes or no.
[SPEAKER_02]: And there's not much in our work roles.
[SPEAKER_02]: And there's certainly not really anything.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think in our world that boils down to a simple yes or no, a lot of times, there's always something more interesting there.
[SPEAKER_02]: And when we just kind of gloss over that, we just step over all that interesting bits and we just land on, well, you bent it, you broke it, you're gone.
[SPEAKER_02]: It feels like what we're really missing out on is the opportunity to understand learning and prove.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's the stuff where we really start to see significant return on our investment, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: As when we start to say, okay, you know what, yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: You kind of broke that rule a bit there, but that's probably not great, but it had to make sense to it.
[SPEAKER_02]: So to help me understand how it makes sense to do that, and when you start to peel back those layers, you start to hear things that sound like, well, actually we always kind of have to bend that rule because the rule doesn't work very well in that situation.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then on top of that, it's just kind of wheat, wheat, and odd nodding, we're kind of everybody knows that they have to bend that rule because, yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: just short of maybe the, the safety box turning from green to red.
[SPEAKER_02]: The other one that's, I'm going to say neck and neck with it is the production box.
[SPEAKER_02]: And if the production box turns red, back to all of us being out of job or some of us getting fired.
[SPEAKER_02]: We gotta keep those boxes green.
[SPEAKER_02]: And with that rule written the way that it currently is, that just don't work.
[SPEAKER_02]: And you discover the wink, not nod.
[SPEAKER_02]: And as long as the outcomes are good, our organizations tend to go, ah, great job.
[SPEAKER_02]: You fall on the reach out.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's the outcome of the shift slow, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Then we go, huh?
[SPEAKER_02]: That's definitely a you thing.
[SPEAKER_02]: You got to get out of here.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: The responsibility for the organization always goes to work or first, and then maybe our policy isn't good.
[SPEAKER_02]: that's always a really interesting part of that's the part that I find so wacky about what it is that we tend to do is that a couple things here probably I'd be interested in what you see with this but a lot of times especially early on in organizations before they really start to shift things around.
[SPEAKER_02]: You'll discover that success as always a we-thing.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, yeah, good operational outcome.
[SPEAKER_02]: We did that, meaning the executives, and our managers, and then maybe our boys.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that's a little, that's a we-thing.
[SPEAKER_02]: But as soon as something goes wrong, it quickly becomes a you-thing.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not a we-thing anymore.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that's an individual value, that's right.
[SPEAKER_02]: Simply put, it's an individual value.
[SPEAKER_02]: Um, but I think the real wacky part is is that we tend to lay all that at the worker's feet when, so often the worker, and I would say pretty much always, the sharpest of the sharp and worker has the least amount of influence over any of those things.
[SPEAKER_02]: They don't have influence over the condition of the context of setting in which they work.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's farther up.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yep.
[SPEAKER_02]: They don't have influence over the rules in many organizations.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's farther up.
[SPEAKER_02]: They don't have influence over production targets and the list goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on.
[SPEAKER_03]: Even the equipment they're using.
[SPEAKER_02]: Exactly.
[SPEAKER_02]: They're the schedule of the budget.
[SPEAKER_02]: They have no control over any of that while at the same time they also possess the highest amount of operational knowledge.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_02]: They know how the work actually happens.
[SPEAKER_02]: But when things go wrong, we say something like, oh, shit, it's not harder.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, instead of maybe looking a bit deeper, going a bit wider and going, what you know, I don't know that that worker necessarily caused failure as much as they experienced failure.
[SPEAKER_02]: As much as they found themselves as the last person that touched it.
[SPEAKER_02]: down at the very end of a long line of problems and issues and setbacks that for the past 20 years they have navigated successfully they have created success out of all of our man's.
[SPEAKER_02]: But now this one time that they didn't.
[SPEAKER_02]: Shame on them.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, it's like the same.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's like when you're your kid goes to school and they get end up getting out.
[SPEAKER_03]: They get the teacher sees them hit the kid and it's like hold on.
[SPEAKER_03]: They've been bullying me for a whole week.
[SPEAKER_03]: they just actually hit me.
[SPEAKER_03]: I protected myself, hit back, and the second hit is what the teacher sees.
[SPEAKER_03]: They don't see the first one, and then your kid gets expelled.
[SPEAKER_02]: So true.
[SPEAKER_02]: We experience this with our daughter some years back, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Is this a random side story?
[SPEAKER_03]: Good.
[SPEAKER_03]: I love these.
[SPEAKER_02]: But she was always raised that you don't put up with a bully.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, so I was right.
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know that turning the other cheek to a bully is always the best path forward.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Sometimes a bully has to be shown that they're bullied.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I'm not condoning violence, especially amongst children.
[SPEAKER_02]: This isn't giddy fight club or anything.
[SPEAKER_02]: Mr. First Root.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: But I was just kind of told her.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm like, you always stand up for yourself.
[SPEAKER_02]: That doesn't mean you put hands on people.
[SPEAKER_02]: That doesn't mean like you rest with people, but you always stand up for yourself.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: And if somebody's being mean to you, you tell somebody,
[SPEAKER_02]: And if they keep being mean to you, they do nothing about it.
[SPEAKER_02]: You stand up that much taller.
[SPEAKER_02]: And you stand up that much taller.
[SPEAKER_02]: And you stand up that much taller.
[SPEAKER_02]: You always stand up for yourself.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so I got to call this.
[SPEAKER_02]: You punch the kid in the throat.
[SPEAKER_02]: Wow.
[SPEAKER_02]: Whoa.
[SPEAKER_02]: One day, this was like first grade, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, my God.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I'm like losing my mind.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like I'm going into like, I'm going into dad mode.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm like, she knows better than that.
[SPEAKER_02]: She's like, go on.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, the same thing that we're described.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, why would she ever, I could never in a million years understand.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm too far away from.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's the same thing we see in our organizations.
[SPEAKER_02]: We get too far away from the farther we get away from the work.
[SPEAKER_02]: The so much easier it is to judge the actions of others.
[SPEAKER_02]: The actions we had nothing to do with, the work we had nothing to do with from our office perch to far far away up up the tower.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's so easy without understanding to judge the actions of others.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so once I finally get to the school, though, and she's sitting there and the teacher is doing the dishes completely inexcusable.
[SPEAKER_02]: We never condone it.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then she tells her story.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's the story that we need to understand in these situations where describing words.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: She didn't just punch a kid in the throat.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Five seconds earlier, the kid put her in a headlock and threw her on the ground.
[SPEAKER_02]: in a few minutes before that the kid kicked her in a few days before that she had told the teacher and a few days before that she had told the teacher again and again and again and it finally got to the point where she stood up tall enough but she's like you're not going to put me in another headlock and she punched this kid right now right she got to the end of the line of the good choices right so she probably made
[SPEAKER_02]: the best choice that she could out of nothing but bad choices yeah when you take into account the context now the thing that I promise you that kid never put her in other hell on and by the time we left the school she wasn't a trouble she wasn't the one that was a teacher yeah a case supervisor had some co-pubility there's a little bit there right
[SPEAKER_02]: uh, the stories always more interesting than they just randomly put someone on the court.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, probably.
[SPEAKER_02]: Are you going to find every now and again that somebody does just for the fun of it, put somebody on the court?
[SPEAKER_02]: Sure.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_02]: And should you deal with those people appropriately?
[SPEAKER_02]: Absolutely.
[SPEAKER_02]: Of course you should.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's clearly markers within our world that we know.
[SPEAKER_02]: There are so far outside of the bounds of our accepted behavior.
[SPEAKER_02]: We know those things.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's life, that's work, norms, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: We know those things.
[SPEAKER_02]: But almost always, almost always there's more.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's never that simple.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: When we stop at this thing that sounds like,
[SPEAKER_02]: Worker did something, though, can't fix stupid.
[SPEAKER_02]: When we stop there, who the heck did that all the time?
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like opening a book to the first page and like reading like air or a stupid worker or something like that finding those words on the first page and then circling those and highlighting those and then closing the book and putting it back on the shelf and pretending that we know the rest of the story.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like that's first page stuff, yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like punch in throat, that's first page stuff.
[SPEAKER_02]: machine broke down.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's first page stuff.
[SPEAKER_02]: Somebody messed up.
[SPEAKER_02]: Of course they did because we're all human.
[SPEAKER_02]: We messed up constantly.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's first page stuff.
[SPEAKER_02]: you're not going to find all the interesting bits in the plot twist and the context and the character arc and you're not going to find all of that stuff on the first page.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, you've got to read the rest of the book and so that's what I would encourage people to do is win things, especially win things, what you look at it and you go, my god that person's got to be stupid.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yep.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's the place where you really need to dig deeper because the odds are against you.
[SPEAKER_03]: If you think they're just stupid, it's the whole phrase of, why do they do what they did when they did it for the reason they did it at the time they did it?
[SPEAKER_03]: Exactly, I promise you almost always it made sense.
[SPEAKER_03]: It made sense that that weren't going to do what they did.
[SPEAKER_03]: They didn't absolutely did it for the reason they did it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Our job was to get those to understand how it made sense, because if we can understand how it made sense.
[SPEAKER_02]: because these are awesome people.
[SPEAKER_02]: We forget that sometimes.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think maybe there's something there again, the farther we get away from work, the more maybe we forget it.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: But these people are brilliant.
[SPEAKER_02]: And they're creating success almost always.
[SPEAKER_02]: They create so much more success than they ever create failure.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Sometimes it doesn't feel like that.
[SPEAKER_02]: But if our employees were just creating unintended operational upsets and outcomes constantly, we wouldn't be in business.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: In fact, they are mostly successful at most things that they touch.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's what we're good at as people is figuring out adapting, getting it so wrong that we figure out how to get it right, breaking it six times, but then fixing it and then you know, getting even more right after that.
[SPEAKER_02]: We forget a lot of times just how amazing a brilliant they are and we have to assume that there's no bullet intent there because they're almost always is.
[SPEAKER_02]: You start with no bullet intent until proven otherwise.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: And if you go down this idea or go down this path of seeking to understand truly, truly trying to understand, to develop a bit of that industrial empathy, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Or we can see ourselves in their shoes.
[SPEAKER_02]: If you go looking for that, you're pretty much always fine.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: I like that industrial... Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: So let's say industrial empathy.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so I think... Now, if I'm not mistaken... That's a t-shirt.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, it's not mine.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I'm going to give credit... We're going to do here.
[SPEAKER_02]: If I remember correctly, it comes from Bob.
[SPEAKER_02]: My bed was really... So if I remember correctly...
[SPEAKER_02]: So if I'm still a t-shirt, if I'm a tribute in this to you, Bob, and it's not yours.
[SPEAKER_02]: Sorry, maybe I don't know.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, whoever the connection is, you can point it in their direction.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, but I love that term.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's what you're looking to the very term.
[SPEAKER_03]: I like it too.
[SPEAKER_03]: So, who, when I steal it, who do I attribute to now?
[SPEAKER_02]: I've got to take a bomb for you.
[SPEAKER_03]: For out there, tag bomb.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's right.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then, Bob says, that's not mine.
[SPEAKER_02]: Then we'll sort it out for them.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's right.
[SPEAKER_03]: Ben, when I, I've, I've teach a roughly two to 250 students a year with a, I'll teaching them how to be certified as safety professionals.
[SPEAKER_03]: So, I, um,
[SPEAKER_03]: I only have a week with them, and I'm trying to break some of the old habits that they have, especially the unfortunate people who are safe safety managers in turnaround jobs and for the sum of you that may not be familiar with that, is when there's a plan shut down and you have many contractors on the site and they need to get everything done.
[SPEAKER_03]: get refurbished equipment and a lot of the things so that there isn't any breakdowns that is unplanned because that's more money.
[SPEAKER_03]: So you'll have a sightful of subcontractors and some of them are really good.
[SPEAKER_03]: Some of them they just want to get the money and get out because it's a lot of money and turn around work in a short amount of time and some of people they do that.
[SPEAKER_03]: pretty much full-time turnaround to turn around to turn around and it's chaos and safety, site safety is usually the ones that are responsible for writing people up.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I tell my students all the time that I am not a big fan of safety writing anyone up and I prefer you to hold people accountable by talking to the supervisor and when the supervisor sees it, then the supervisor takes action and it's not you in safety writing them up.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a supervisor going ahead and holding them accountable for whatever action it is.
[SPEAKER_03]: coming from their frontline supervisor and not from safety or one step removed, so you could still be trusted.
[SPEAKER_03]: Am I staring people wrong with that?
[SPEAKER_02]: No, I don't think necessarily.
[SPEAKER_02]: No, I think my approach flexed every time.
[SPEAKER_02]: The situation is you're describing it as near and dear to my heart now.
[SPEAKER_02]: I didn't work in the turnaround space, I worked in the outage space, which is the same thing.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Turn around and then kick around, I think a little bit more than oil and gas, and so I worked in power, gin, power maintenance for a number of years.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I started in the outage space outage turnaround space really early on, so I came out
[SPEAKER_02]: and then took a gig in the nuclear world, doing nuclear outages, not in safety originally.
[SPEAKER_02]: I went straight into the craft world.
[SPEAKER_02]: Hands on work.
[SPEAKER_02]: Work that I know and love to this day.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, and I remember how some of that would play out though, like when you had seen a certain safety professional coming your way,
[SPEAKER_02]: The bird calls would happen and people start whistling and the radio is to go click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click
[SPEAKER_02]: and light up and then they would get excited to talk and the share and the biggest thing that I found in the difference there though was that the one that you would get like the bat signal the safety signal that would go off and everybody would like stop and everybody freeze right yeah um those were the folks that are coming out there to write up either directly or indirectly in some way they're coming out trying to find what you're going wrong um just for
[SPEAKER_02]: They were coming out looking for unsafety.
[SPEAKER_02]: The folks that would come out and people would go, hey, they're here, glad to see you.
[SPEAKER_02]: Those are the folks that were coming out to try to support safety.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think those are two different things.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Right?
[SPEAKER_02]: So we go out and we get into this cycle of, and I've done it too when I found myself in the world early on in my career in safety.
[SPEAKER_02]: I was in a very traditional organization, and I was basically a field tech, right, at that point.
[SPEAKER_02]: Which means here's your clipboard, go find everything that people are doing wrong, reported to their supervisor, and get a fixed.
[SPEAKER_02]: Right, that kind of situation in that world, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: You're a cop, you're basically a cop at that point, give me a badge and ready to go, man.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I found myself the recipient of those calls and those clicks, and I really quickly decided that's not what I wanted to do, but I wanted to show up and ask people what they needed.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: I wanted people to not dread seeing me come and because they thought my God, they're here to slow us down, they're here to get us in trouble, they're going to go and report this up the chain and not even give me the opportunity to fix it.
[SPEAKER_02]: All right, they're going to observe and report.
[SPEAKER_02]: They're going to, they're going to, they're going to, Paul Blardett, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: They're going to take some notes and some pictures.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I'm going to see it.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm going to see it in tomorrow's stand-down.
[SPEAKER_02]: This is what I'm going to be the reason for this stand-down.
[SPEAKER_02]: And the pictures.
[SPEAKER_02]: And the pictures, pictures, they're going to be there.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I'm not going to be at them.
[SPEAKER_02]: But everybody's going to know that that's my job.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's something there about honey, vinegar, and flies.
[SPEAKER_02]: there's something in there about that.
[SPEAKER_03]: Absolutely.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so what I changed really is I wanted to be the person that they knew when I was showing up I was coming to help.
[SPEAKER_02]: How did you do it?
[SPEAKER_02]: When I showed up, I focused on curiosity.
[SPEAKER_02]: I didn't roll in there acting like
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm the safety man.
[SPEAKER_02]: I didn't roll in there with a rule book.
[SPEAKER_02]: I didn't roll in there with a clipboard.
[SPEAKER_02]: I didn't roll in there with a camera on my neck.
[SPEAKER_02]: I would roll in there with a question that sounds like that's really freaking cool to teach me how you do that.
[SPEAKER_02]: And you'd be surprised that how much more interesting things you discover when you start with more interesting questions.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Because if I'm being real,
[SPEAKER_02]: Hey, why are you not wearing your gloves?
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a really boring question.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like that's about as boring a question as it gets.
[SPEAKER_02]: And it gets even more boring when it's just a statement.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Wear your gloves.
[SPEAKER_02]: All right, that's even worse, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Or if I'm starting with a checklist that sounds like our people wearing their gloves, it's very limiting as to what I can actually discover about that word.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Because even if I ask you that question, even if you are wearing your gloves, or it looks like you're falling the rule.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's say something like,
[SPEAKER_02]: You always wear your gloves, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Or you always follow that rule, yeah?
[SPEAKER_02]: You guys follow that rule.
[SPEAKER_02]: What's the only appropriate answer?
[SPEAKER_02]: Of course they did.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Even when it's no.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes is the only answer that I can give you.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's right.
[SPEAKER_02]: You're leading the witness.
[SPEAKER_02]: Exactly.
[SPEAKER_02]: And there's just inner organizations we give no room for any other answer.
[SPEAKER_02]: And because if you say, well, no one will follow that rule.
[SPEAKER_02]: No, I'm in trouble.
[SPEAKER_02]: I get to tell you that.
[SPEAKER_02]: But if I'm curious,
[SPEAKER_02]: Even if I've done that work and some of that work I've done with my actual hands, they did work at some point and I kind of know how it's supposed to go and it's looking like it's not going out, but it's normally go.
[SPEAKER_02]: But if I show up and I show up assuming that you know what you're doing and I show up the void of judgment.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I show up even if I'm not.
[SPEAKER_02]: at least acting like I'm green as new grass and I'm going to be your princess today.
[SPEAKER_02]: People love teaching you what you're what they do for living.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's no way you do something for a year or 30.
[SPEAKER_02]: If you don't kind of like it.
[SPEAKER_02]: and they want to show you that stuff they want to teach you that stuff and when you pull some of that pointed in this out of those questions and you are genuinely curious you can't fake it because they can smell that from a mile away yeah but if you are genuinely curious they will show you they will show you what works well they will show you what works not so well they will show you where that dumb rule that you wrote and it's gonna hurt when they stab you with this but how that rule is the most stupid thing that's ever been invented
[SPEAKER_02]: and how they can't follow it.
[SPEAKER_02]: And if you would have actually talked to them for five minutes before you wrote it, you would know that they can't follow it.
[SPEAKER_02]: They're going to show you that stuff, but you never get in there with, hey, why are you doing that?
[SPEAKER_02]: They'll clam right up.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm not, I'm not anti.
[SPEAKER_02]: I guess to come back to your actual question.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm not anti-supervisor involvement.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm not anti any of those things.
[SPEAKER_02]: But I don't know, I always viewed that relationship with a real, and this is a strong word, and maybe too strong.
[SPEAKER_02]: But with a big streak of it being sacred, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: That relationship is more important to me than anything, because if I don't have that relationship, I can't effectively do my job.
[SPEAKER_02]: And if it's going to sour that relationship for me to go grab your supervisor when me and you can just fix it, we'll fix it, yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: He just can't be like, we're gonna pretend to fix it.
[SPEAKER_02]: If it's on me and we need to fix the rule, I'll take that.
[SPEAKER_02]: We'll fix that.
[SPEAKER_02]: But we got to actually fix it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, absolutely.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, to some organizations, that feels like a naughty naughty naughty naughty.
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, you gotta... I get it.
[SPEAKER_02]: But again, for me, just me personally, that relationship is the power of what we do.
[SPEAKER_02]: You don't have it, you're not gonna do much.
[SPEAKER_03]: And most people, if you just take the time, talk to them, everyone's favorite topic is themselves.
[SPEAKER_03]: of course so they'll talk to you and you ask the questions humbly and say hey what's the most stupidest rule that I have made or safety is making you do and they'll tell you if you're honest they will tell you and then at that point that's your relationship you'll start
[SPEAKER_03]: having a given take and they will actually talk to you and then that will reduce risk.
[SPEAKER_03]: And when the risk gets reduced, then at that point you have the possibility of eliminating a hazard or actually, you know, addressing how you control the hazard.
[SPEAKER_02]: Exactly.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, what what you tend to see happen there is you get to know more.
[SPEAKER_02]: You get to tap into operational information that you did not have before.
[SPEAKER_02]: whether you're a frontline leader or a middle manager or even executive, or whether you're a safety pro, you need good information to make good decisions.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: If you lack that operational information when you're writing rules, if you lack that operational information, when you're drafting that procedure, all by yourself, like we get stuck sometimes in the room.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, I don't know, we need about a moral safety person.
[SPEAKER_02]: You're here.
[SPEAKER_02]: You can order lunch on your peacard, don't spend over $10.
[SPEAKER_02]: Right?
[SPEAKER_02]: That kind of stuff.
[SPEAKER_02]: We're writing those things, lacking the information that we need to create effective things.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: When we're looking at improvement strategies, that's why so many of them fall flat is because we're not actually tapping into that learning that we require before we start trying to improve things.
[SPEAKER_02]: We're taking our best at it.
[SPEAKER_02]: And as a safety pro, our best at is not operational.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's safety.
[SPEAKER_02]: And the problem of that is, is op still got to happen.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
[SPEAKER_03]: Op's will happen.
[SPEAKER_02]: Op's will happen, whether you like it or not, because, again, whether we like it or not, most organizations aren't in the safety business.
[SPEAKER_03]: Correct.
[SPEAKER_02]: They're not making safety, they're making widgets, they're making power, they're getting the turnaround done.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's the business that they're in.
[SPEAKER_02]: So when we lack that information though,
[SPEAKER_02]: We're not balancing out that right.
[SPEAKER_02]: We're not involving, we don't have that operational information that we need from the people that actually possess it.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's not colored in two hour procedures.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's not colored into our rules.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's not in the job plan.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's not built into the schedule then.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that stuff seems to compound every time.
[SPEAKER_02]: It grow and bloat into this kind of bureaucratic mess that we can see.
[SPEAKER_02]: But if you grow that relationship that we've been describing,
[SPEAKER_02]: And when people get comfortable sharing that information with you, you've got a fond stuff that's going to sometimes, absolutely blow your mind, like peel your scalp back.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, boom, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: What was the Maxwell cassette tapes with the guy on the front?
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, yeah, that's right.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, that.
[SPEAKER_02]: Sitting in the chair is like blowing your hair back.
[SPEAKER_02]: Is you're going to get some of that information for that?
[SPEAKER_02]: No, you know that.
[SPEAKER_02]: No, not to that.
[SPEAKER_02]: My first recordings were on a tape-driven task.
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, that was the email that you had to take the pencil out and reel it back and wind it up.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm hope that I'm older than I look.
[SPEAKER_02]: Sorry, gang.
[SPEAKER_02]: We're really just, you know, we're reminiscing this point.
[SPEAKER_02]: About recording songs off the radio on Maxwell cassette tapes, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: So I can listen to it again.
[SPEAKER_02]: But you're going to, you're going to find those things that are really, really, really in need of a premium.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Not, not all this is low hanging fruit, not all this is easy answer kind of stuff.
[SPEAKER_02]: So you've got to be prepared to hear.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: I would not go out and do this if you have a really big chunk of fofo in your life.
[SPEAKER_02]: You're finding out.
[SPEAKER_02]: like you got to want to know them and if you are actually exercising your curiosity like you're really leaning into that you're going to want to know
[SPEAKER_02]: There's this thing that we do with information as people, right, where we say that's good information, that's bad information, that's strange, that's weird.
[SPEAKER_02]: But that's not really true, those are just labels.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it's just information.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not good or bad, it just is.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it's just information.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's what you need.
[SPEAKER_02]: You just need raw and real information.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so as you tend to grow that relationship, as you start to ask those interesting questions, as people start to understand, oh wait a second.
[SPEAKER_02]: Safety folks aren't out to get me.
[SPEAKER_02]: They want to help me.
[SPEAKER_02]: They're here.
[SPEAKER_02]: Actually trying to help us be more successful.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's cool.
[SPEAKER_02]: I like that.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then as they start to give you this information, you actually help them do something with it.
[SPEAKER_02]: You don't run off with it and then just very poorly fix their problems for them that leave them in worship.
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
[SPEAKER_02]: You don't just run off with it and then put it in the sand down.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: You actually connect them with resources and stuff that will help them shape what that condition looks like on the ground.
[SPEAKER_02]: They see their lives, they feel their lives getting better.
[SPEAKER_02]: They know that not only can they trust you with the information, but they can trust that you will help them do something about it.
[SPEAKER_02]: They're going to bring you more and more and more and more.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think for me, the thing that always found most interesting about that,
[SPEAKER_02]: Is that a certain point, the information gets really real?
[SPEAKER_02]: They're not afraid to tell you that last week the illness died.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's a scary conversation.
[SPEAKER_02]: But that's exactly the conversation we should be wanting to have with our employees.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't want you to feel like that thing almost killed you and now you can't tell me.
[SPEAKER_02]: I want to know where those things exist.
[SPEAKER_02]: So we can do exactly what you said.
[SPEAKER_02]: Is it something that we can eliminate?
[SPEAKER_02]: There's serious injury and fatality potential in that thing.
[SPEAKER_02]: We can't get rid of it.
[SPEAKER_02]: How do we reduce the energy down to where it's survival?
[SPEAKER_02]: But when things go wrong, because it's going to go wrong, how does it not cost you your life or your arm?
[SPEAKER_00]: How do we do that?
[SPEAKER_02]: How do we do that?
[SPEAKER_02]: How do we do that together?
[SPEAKER_02]: That's where those conversations eventually lead.
[SPEAKER_02]: But if we stop at the surface of your wearing gloves, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, always, we never, we never quite get there, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: We never quite get there.
[SPEAKER_02]: We've got to outgrow this idea that we're enforcers and understand that we're actually enablers.
[SPEAKER_02]: we want to enable people to be successful, and if our processes, our procedures, our rules, our approaches, are slowing them down, making their lives miserable, and making it really hard for them to actually get their work going efficiently.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then on top of that,
[SPEAKER_02]: We haven't created an environment where they can share with us their frustration around those things.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: What are we doing?
[SPEAKER_03]: All right.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a lot going on because you're dealing with humans.
[SPEAKER_03]: So when you get those confrontations, you're going to get released of cortisol.
[SPEAKER_03]: And when cortisol gets released, it gets to fight or flight.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then you become safety cops, safety cop is going to trigger that behavior and trigger that mindset.
[SPEAKER_03]: So you got your trigger thought behavior.
[SPEAKER_03]: And if that cortisol gets released, that fight or flight, you're going to be
[SPEAKER_03]: It's going to do like a nice little narrow connection that says safety equals fear safety equals fear safety equals for course.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so you're going to have to work hard to have to work on a truly like liking you enough and knowing that you're good to release the oxytocin this safety equals team safety equals team and look like
[SPEAKER_02]: They don't even have to like it.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm here to support you.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm here to learn from you and improve things with you.
[SPEAKER_02]: If hey, you like me is a by-product, I'll take it.
[SPEAKER_04]: No, yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: But what I want you to know is that you could trust me.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm here to support you.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm here to learn from you and improve things with you.
[SPEAKER_02]: that's a big shift from I'm here to quote the rules and do those to you.
[SPEAKER_02]: That is a big shift right that's that's a massive shift because exactly what you said you land in this space of fight fight fun right where you're just like.
[SPEAKER_02]: You can't help it, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: We've been conditioned to kind of get those butterflies.
[SPEAKER_02]: As soon as we see somebody in brand new work boots and a polish shirt coming out in the field, we're like, I know they don't do this for 11.
[SPEAKER_02]: What are they going to do to me?
[SPEAKER_02]: And the right half that you give them.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, they can show them more.
[SPEAKER_01]: What are they going to do to me now?
[SPEAKER_02]: Not again.
[SPEAKER_02]: They just changed everything last week.
[SPEAKER_02]: Go, what are you going to do to me this week?
[SPEAKER_02]: It's terrible.
[SPEAKER_02]: Right?
[SPEAKER_02]: And when we start talking about things like accountability and things like that,
[SPEAKER_02]: A real major problem with that, that type of relationship, a parent childhood relationship is what that is, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: When we have those type of relationships, or when we get into this thing where we're misappropriating disciplinary action, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: We're not digging beneath the surface to understand how that rule bend or well-intended, well-intended violation, which those exist.
[SPEAKER_02]: That mistake, that error, we're not understanding
[SPEAKER_02]: How all that stuff made sense in all the context that led to that probably being the best decision you can make in that moment.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then so we discipline somebody for something that if it's an error or something that they didn't intend to do in the first place, hoping that it stops them from going it again.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's wacky, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: That doesn't work.
[SPEAKER_02]: When we're doing all that stuff, what I do when I walk away from those interactions now is I am now victim.
[SPEAKER_02]: I walk away from that and I am a victim at that point in a victim lacks all accountability because you're doing stuff to me, whether I like it or not.
[SPEAKER_02]: Even if you think it's what's best for me, you're still not asking for any level of consent for me.
[SPEAKER_02]: You're still not involving me in any bit of this, you're not growing this relationship.
[SPEAKER_02]: You're still not applying any of the things that we've talked about.
[SPEAKER_02]: And you walk out and you say, well, look, I know you're safety glasses were fogged up, but I don't care.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's rules as rules.
[SPEAKER_02]: So here's your right up.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm a victim now.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm less accountable, not more.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: So accountability is not something you can do after the fact, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: It's something that you grow before him.
[SPEAKER_02]: So the relationship, the curiosity, understanding how things make sense involving people and powering people could in their hand on that wheel as we've chatted about just a little bit involving them and learning not only learning from them but learning with them and not only improving us building things as 80 pros but putting them at the table helped me build it.
[SPEAKER_02]: You're the one
[SPEAKER_02]: Excuse me.
[SPEAKER_03]: I guess I'm invested too.
[SPEAKER_02]: All those big questions that we tend to try to answer later, they sound like accountability and ownership.
[SPEAKER_02]: If you involve right out of the gate, some of those questions start to take care of themselves because it's really hard for me to not have ownership of something.
[SPEAKER_02]: If I was sitting at the table and built it with you, yeah, that's hard.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, if you said, hey, I come up with the brand new safety manual, and now you get to follow it, yeah, I have very little in any ownership of that, and then when I thumb through it and it's ridiculous, I have even less ownership of it, because I know when that thing sinks, I want nothing to do with it, yeah, and then I'm going to say, ha ha, told you so, you made me the victim.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, that's right.
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
[SPEAKER_03]: And you're safety like I had one client where one of the first things I do and I'm taking on new clients is looked through their written programs and stuff and see if you know work imagine is work has performed and I've never once seen their rally point for emergency action plan is saying around.
[SPEAKER_03]: We're going to rally around the big oak tree and I was like all right is someone get written up if they don't know which oak tree Yeah, is it one of those things we're now in an emergency?
[SPEAKER_03]: They're looking for a tree that was diseased and it was mulched You know it's the stump.
[SPEAKER_02]: We all know it's a stump.
[SPEAKER_02]: You all know it's a stump.
[SPEAKER_03]: You all know it's a stump, you know.
[SPEAKER_03]: So that kind of
[SPEAKER_03]: the just the programs itself they're made in such a way that some people they don't even see that in their safety manuals it's a template and they'll say put the title here or organization here and you know it's in brackets and no one ever took the time to put their no right any name on that and
[SPEAKER_03]: then the workers see it and they need to follow this to the letter of the law and the workers are seeing this incomplete junk, you know that it's not going to work and no one asked them about it, they're going to be set up for a fall.
[SPEAKER_02]: Of course, and then we go, my God, how could you be so stupid, not to follow that?
[SPEAKER_02]: Right, it's ridiculous, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: I told you that that told you to read it and follow it, you signed off that you know.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, you signed the mandatory acknowledgement
[SPEAKER_02]: That's right.
[SPEAKER_02]: Right, yeah, it's that stuff.
[SPEAKER_02]: Plans, policies, rules, procedures.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think that's great stuff.
[SPEAKER_02]: Programs, all the stuff that we think about that goes into a really well-functioning safety management system.
[SPEAKER_02]: Hanging, dandy, good stuff.
[SPEAKER_02]: But plan tools, policies, and procedures, if you want to work them, if you want those to work really, really well within your organization, build them with the people that have to use them.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: from a safety person's perspective and having been the person, as probably anyone out there that's done this for more than about five seconds, I have been the person that has got the action.
[SPEAKER_02]: It says within 24 hours you were going to write 14,000 procedures and you were going to do it by yourself with no support.
[SPEAKER_02]: We get that stuff all the time.
[SPEAKER_02]: That happens to us, where we have to find a free conference room, my God, hopefully there's one.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then we lock ourselves in there until we spit out whatever we need to spit out because it organization is demanding that we spit out this new procedure on time, she likes us.
[SPEAKER_02]: Isn't that what we're trying to do?
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, she believes for something.
[SPEAKER_02]: Nowadays, it's probably a mod easier.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's my chance for it, yeah, yeah, but even from even from just a basic like what's in it from eberspectable number one like people are going to Make the rules much easier to follow.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, because they're going to be based on operational reality All those kind of big questions that we're talking about before tend to get baked in if you're evolving folks in that There's ownership there because I helped you write it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, you didn't do this to me.
[SPEAKER_02]: We did this together That's pretty handy
[SPEAKER_02]: But then just overcoming what we just said, I can't think of any safety pro out there.
[SPEAKER_02]: If you've written a procedure and you've not had a several moments of going, oh my god, I don't know what I just put here.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then you're like down the Google or I have it all like, okay, that sounds good to me, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Either you've not done this long enough?
[SPEAKER_02]: or you probably need to rewind to go, maybe I don't know as much as I think that I don't.
[SPEAKER_02]: Right, that's probably, if you think that you know, you probably don't, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: That is correct.
[SPEAKER_02]: It helps us overcome that part, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: There's this thing that it actually makes our job easier because I don't have to come up with all the answers, because first off, I don't have all the answers.
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know all this stuff.
[SPEAKER_02]: I can tell you how it fits in here and how this works here and regulatory this and what this means there and what this typically looks like and what I've seen over there and I can give you safety brain but it's hard for me to give you how this works in the real world brain because I don't have to take that procedure and then still go make widgets with it.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: But the person that has to take that procedure and then go make widgets for make electricity or drive that truck or move all that stuff from this somewhere else
[SPEAKER_02]: they know how to navigate that.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so if we build their voice into it right from the beginning, a lot of the stuff that we find maybe on the earlier part of our conversation, why aren't there already enough on the rule?
[SPEAKER_02]: I shouldn't.
[SPEAKER_02]: We start to change that stuff right out of the gate.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Because it's real, it's realistic.
[SPEAKER_02]: General rule of thumb.
[SPEAKER_02]: Does it make life easier or harder, typically?
[SPEAKER_02]: If I have to live with it, I'm going to try to make it easy to be successful.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's to be what we're shooting for.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: How do we make it easy to be successful?
[SPEAKER_03]: Now there's a current of
[SPEAKER_03]: mental health and I want to mention this because of course this is a september for those you guys are not knowing what we're recording this is september this is the month for suicide prevention and mental health awareness the current of everything we're talking about here the pressure that the workers are feeling can cause those workers to get in the despair and
[SPEAKER_03]: but the general psychological safety of workers have been challenged because of all these undue pressure.
[SPEAKER_03]: What's your take on psychological safety as a whole, and then obviously suicide and construction in some of these fields, because of the pressure the workers are feeling, what's your take on the mental health of the industry?
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I think, so psychological safety to begin with,
[SPEAKER_02]: I tend to avoid stringing those words together just because it's become such a buzzword now.
[SPEAKER_02]: Um, it's, it don't get me wrong.
[SPEAKER_02]: The true concept of psychological safety is wildly meaningful within our work worlds.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: The problem with it becoming a buzzword, just like when anything else becomes a buzzword, is we print a poster that says we are now psychologically safe.
[SPEAKER_02]: and then as soon as you tell me someone don't like how far are you.
[SPEAKER_02]: But I had the poster this year.
[SPEAKER_02]: We like to say we're psychologically safe.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then we start to come up with wacky ways of trying to measure else psychologically safe.
[SPEAKER_02]: We are even though we're not.
[SPEAKER_02]: Because I got the posters.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I'm going to count how many posters I put up about how much you can tell me stuff.
[SPEAKER_02]: I even wrote a rule that says you got to tell me stuff.
[SPEAKER_02]: because if you don't tell me stuff, how am I going to fire you for breaking the rules?
[SPEAKER_02]: And then if I find out that you didn't tell me stuff, if I fire you for not telling me stuff, see, psychological safety.
[SPEAKER_02]: We try to do that stuff.
[SPEAKER_02]: We do this thing where we take really, really, really good things, meaningful things.
[SPEAKER_02]: And we put it through the corporate meat grinder that simplifies it down to what I wrote a rule that says you're now so I go out to play safe.
[SPEAKER_02]: So we've got that, so a bit of a rant I guess right at the beginning right at the beginning of that to just say that
[SPEAKER_02]: That's an environment that you create, that you have to lead up to.
[SPEAKER_02]: You have to prove that to people.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not just something that you can say, it's not a poster that you can put on the wall.
[SPEAKER_02]: None of that stuff works that way.
[SPEAKER_02]: And if you stick with it as a buzzword, it becomes a poster.
[SPEAKER_02]: You gotta live up to those key ideas.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, to me, there's this really interesting thing because we've been talking about,
[SPEAKER_02]: really dialogue with an organization has been a lot of a lot of our conversation, gaining access to the vitally-needed operational information that we need as leaders and safety professionals to make good decisions, good operational decisions, and that our organizations need to
[SPEAKER_02]: Meaning that when we actually go to improve stuff, it doesn't make things like 100 entrepreneurs.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: And the improvements actually tend to work from, they tend to work from time to time.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Those kind of things.
[SPEAKER_02]: But with this information piece, and we struggle with information within our organizations, the biggest thing that we tend to really struggle with, the thing that stands in our way of gaining access to that information is silence.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, silence is a big scary word, and we know that, especially in our jobs,
[SPEAKER_02]: that after sometimes even short stretches of very, very deafening silence, bad thanks to that happen.
[SPEAKER_02]: And almost always, like really tragic, catastrophic things to happen when we can't free flow that information within our organizations.
[SPEAKER_02]: So silence ain't good, and I broadly state a lot any time that I hit a chance.
[SPEAKER_02]: Any way or that I get a chance that anything that creates silence in our organization is bad for us.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's bad for us as leaders.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's obviously bad for our employees, my God.
[SPEAKER_02]: Probably leading into some of the second question that you're asking.
[SPEAKER_02]: But it's bad for our businesses overall.
[SPEAKER_02]: When we can't really talk about the truth, even when that truth is unsettling, even when
[SPEAKER_02]: It's the exact wrong time that I need to hear that.
[SPEAKER_02]: When we can't hear that, we can't innovate, we can't approve, we can't get better, we struggle.
[SPEAKER_02]: We struggle without that information.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, with silence though, we always have to understand that as people, silences are neutral position.
[SPEAKER_02]: And this leads directly into this idea of psychological safety that
[SPEAKER_02]: As people, we move towards silence because silence, at least in its immediate sense, is safe for us as individuals.
[SPEAKER_02]: If I don't open my mouth, I can't look like an idiot.
[SPEAKER_02]: If I don't tell you about that, times it almost died, you can't fire me.
[SPEAKER_02]: If I just shut up, I won't get judged, I won't get blamed, I won't get any of that stuff.
[SPEAKER_02]: So at least in the immediate sense, it's safe for us.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, in the long term,
[SPEAKER_02]: problems faster again worse right pain points problems issues they never get better on their own usually a 10 to faster rot and grow right so that's bad that's bad but in the immediate sense we're safe we're safe right now
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, the other side of that there that I tie in a lot of my conversations around, again, I won't say the word psychological safety, but words, the next piece of that for me around silence is this idea that people will only tell you what you allow them to tell you.
[SPEAKER_02]: Even if you have a rule that says they got to tell you stuff, that rule means basically nothing.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: because now I'm thrust into this negotiation.
[SPEAKER_02]: Negotiation between self and everybody else.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I'm going, okay, well, I know my intent.
[SPEAKER_02]: I know I wasn't trying to cause problems.
[SPEAKER_02]: I know that I was trying really hard to actually create success, but I had a bit of an event.
[SPEAKER_02]: And nobody saw it, but I know the history here.
[SPEAKER_02]: When people share events like this in this organization, now they're certainly not fired for reported and never, never, never, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: But they'll find a reason.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: There'll be a rule, because I know if you look hard enough at anybody's job, you're going to find that somebody made him stay.
[SPEAKER_02]: Something was broke.
[SPEAKER_02]: Somebody better rule.
[SPEAKER_02]: Something went a little bit sideways.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so now I'm having to negotiate this choice to report or not to report.
[SPEAKER_02]: That is the question.
[SPEAKER_02]: To report or not to report, do I, as our organizations will tend to frame up this way, do the right thing.
[SPEAKER_02]: and report the event, even when I know after I do, it's going to be blame-shame retrain fired, somewhere in that wheelhouse of really painful reaction to the event, or do I just keep it to myself.
[SPEAKER_02]: Maybe I keep it to myself, fix the problem, get the work done, and this work might have been important.
[SPEAKER_02]: So then instead of blame-shame retrain,
[SPEAKER_02]: You're never going to know about the event, and because I got the work done, you're going to give me praise and pizza for getting the work done, and you'll never know.
[SPEAKER_02]: You'll never any wiser.
[SPEAKER_02]: That thing's actually called it like literally called on fire, like an hour ago, but I put it down and you don't know.
[SPEAKER_02]: So this idea that people can only tell us what we allow them to tell us is really important, because I hear a lot of organizations say that they have something along the lines of a reporting problem.
[SPEAKER_02]: People won't tell us stuff, damn, they, they won't tell us stuff.
[SPEAKER_02]: They won't report events.
[SPEAKER_02]: They won't share this information with us.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's always a day thing, the mystery day, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: And usually they live closer to the work.
[SPEAKER_02]: But the funny thing is, is it's not a day thing.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a we-thing.
[SPEAKER_02]: If people can't tell us the truth, it's because we haven't created an environment where they can't.
[SPEAKER_02]: If I'm having to choose between doing the right thing,
[SPEAKER_02]: be jobless versus it wasn't that big of a deal and the risk of me getting fired for not reporting this event.
[SPEAKER_02]: At least gives me a chance of not getting fired.
[SPEAKER_02]: I know which one I'm picking.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm picking.
[SPEAKER_02]: You're never going to know about it.
[SPEAKER_02]: So when we hear things that sound like people can't tell us stuff, when we hear things that sound like we only hear about events, if they're big enough for us to hear about them.
[SPEAKER_02]: We certainly don't find any opportunities where people tell us that that rule doesn't work, that procedure doesn't function well, or I have to break that or I have to bend that or almost dialed less.
[SPEAKER_02]: We certainly don't hear any of that.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's pretty much always because we haven't created an environment where people can make that kind of noise.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, people can't tell us that stuff, because if they do, the consequences will be extreme.
[SPEAKER_02]: That should be an easy decision, and it's on us as organizations to make that decision easy.
[SPEAKER_02]: Writing a rule that says you have to isn't making it easy.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's just letting me know, my God.
[SPEAKER_02]: Look at what you would do to me.
[SPEAKER_02]: If I don't tell you, imagine what you do to me.
[SPEAKER_02]: If I do, I guess even worse.
[SPEAKER_02]: You're probably gonna put me in one of those stock hate things that throw tomatoes at me and then fire me.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I'm sticking with that one.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm sticking with silence.
[SPEAKER_02]: So this whole idea to me,
[SPEAKER_02]: And it even gets into some of this idea around human and organizational performance, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: To me, when we talk five principle stuff, when we talk about leading with those, and we talk about all that stuff.
[SPEAKER_02]: To me, what we're really chipping away at is creating an environment where we get to know more, creating an environment where we can actually learn, pretty deeply, and then do something with that.
[SPEAKER_02]: So if you wanna spend time focusing on psychological safety, that's probably a really good thing, but you gotta mean it.
[SPEAKER_02]: And you've got to understand that if there's a problem with the flow of information within your organization, it's rarely, hey, they just won't tell us stuff.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's almost always, I can't tell you stuff, eh, because if we want to get into some of what that definition is,
[SPEAKER_02]: It doesn't mean warm and fuzzy we get misconstrued as that sometimes.
[SPEAKER_02]: It doesn't mean like group hugs and playing bongos in the middle of the conference room, burning in since it doesn't mean all that stuff.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean that's cool.
[SPEAKER_02]: That sounds like a fun place to work.
[SPEAKER_02]: What it means really is that I can extend that information.
[SPEAKER_02]: I can tell you stuff even when it's scary and inconvenient.
[SPEAKER_02]: I can stick my neck out and share that information without the fear of you logging off my hand.
[SPEAKER_02]: I know that you were going to appreciate that I share the information, that I am not going to get just axed.
[SPEAKER_02]: Go ahead.
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
[SPEAKER_02]: I can say, I messed up.
[SPEAKER_02]: I made him a stake.
[SPEAKER_02]: We always been that rule and it worked well for the best 25 years and now it didn't.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I know.
[SPEAKER_02]: I know that when I share that with you.
[SPEAKER_02]: We're not going to go down that blame-shame retrain cycle.
[SPEAKER_02]: We're not going to go down that I'm going to preach at you thing.
[SPEAKER_02]: You're not going to put me in time out and they're not going to be any of that stuff.
[SPEAKER_02]: What we're going to do is we're going to do something useful with the information.
[SPEAKER_02]: Work went well for that long.
[SPEAKER_02]: Let's understand how it went well and now let's understand how it went.
[SPEAKER_02]: We went not so well and let's make it far easier for that work to go right.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's the other side of the action side of it, which I think sometimes I don't have enough conversation about.
[SPEAKER_02]: If I bring you information, and I'm taking on the risk of bringing you information, and that is always a risk.
[SPEAKER_02]: Anytime I open my mouth, it's a risk.
[SPEAKER_02]: And maybe you don't panic melt down freak out throw chair at me or anything that's fine.
[SPEAKER_02]: But then that information just goes away and dies and things just stay the same.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's almost, not quite, almost, almost as bad.
[SPEAKER_02]: So yeah, and I'm still probably not going to bring you more stuff.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, and then turn on that as well.
[SPEAKER_03]: Of course.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then that's going to fester and that's going to cause them where they're going to and I can feel comfortable with this organization.
[SPEAKER_02]: Of course.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's this thing for me, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: So one of the main, I don't know if there's any, I don't really put any order on them.
[SPEAKER_02]: But I would say probably one of the most useful hot principles, especially early in trying to humanize your approaches to this kind of stuff.
[SPEAKER_02]: If you're trying to create that environment, in particular, that we're discussing, is this idea that how we respond matters, and it matters a lot.
[SPEAKER_02]: And if we think about it in this frame of react versus respond,
[SPEAKER_02]: like a reaction is way different than a response.
[SPEAKER_02]: A reaction is almost always emotionally driven.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's almost always melt down for you got panic.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's almost always cross my arms and say, go, my God, why'd you do this?
[SPEAKER_02]: Right?
[SPEAKER_02]: It almost always sounds something like that.
[SPEAKER_02]: And especially when things go wrong,
[SPEAKER_02]: And even maybe when work's going well, but things got a little sideways, any time that somebody's reporting something to us, that's such a critical juncture in our organizations, such a critical touch point.
[SPEAKER_02]: Because what happens is,
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm testing you, if I'm bringing you information, it's right.
[SPEAKER_02]: If I bring you and say, hey, I got a booboo and then I get the cheer over the head, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: And then somebody punches a hole in the draw wall, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm never telling you about booboo again.
[SPEAKER_03]: We are done.
[SPEAKER_03]: We're done.
[SPEAKER_02]: We're done.
[SPEAKER_02]: Never happened again.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's this, I like this idea and I share it with leaders a lot is that the way that I respond today determines how much I get to learn tomorrow.
[SPEAKER_02]: So when somebody brings you something like that, even if you have to take a pause and go, thank you for the information, give me five minutes, and you have to shut your door and cuss it, God, go outside and smoke cigarettes, I know that's the super unhealthy, but whatever, whatever your coping mechanism is to calm down before you just, ah, I get somebody, do that.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then make your first words curious words, not judgmental words.
[SPEAKER_02]: Walk me through that.
[SPEAKER_02]: Help me understand how this happened.
[SPEAKER_02]: Not why I'm the heck would you ever that never works well They make sure that that interaction always goes well.
[SPEAKER_02]: It should go well people are already hurt Sometimes on top of that they're already terrified because they're bringing you information that they don't want to tell you because they know you don't want to have to hear And then you prove them right Prove them along in the best possible way
[SPEAKER_02]: and guess what people are gonna be more comfortable doing every time you do that.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, they'll tell you good, the great, the bad, the ugly, the scary, the weird, and everything in between.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's what we want, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, we want.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: So, rambling mess around psychological safety, but yeah, I think it leads maybe to some of your other comment, you know, with the importance of this month and kind of all that stuff.
[SPEAKER_02]: I am not a mental health expert by any stretch of the imagination, either of my.
[SPEAKER_02]: But, you know, the environments that we describe so far, at least in maybe the more extreme sense, and having lived in those environments, as I know you have to, and so many other people have, like you think about those days where it's like, man, rock in art place.
[SPEAKER_02]: It doesn't seem to matter what I do, like it doesn't get any better.
[SPEAKER_02]: I got executives yelling at me from the top.
[SPEAKER_02]: I got leaders tugging on my legs.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's easy to find yourself in a position in these type of work worlds where I could easily see how you feel like you're at the end of your road.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like you feel like you're at the end of it.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: You got injured and now all of a sudden you're stuck with the opioid addiction.
[SPEAKER_02]: Just stuck with the opioid addiction.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: You've been away from home for three weeks and you miss your family, but no one to talk to.
[SPEAKER_02]: Three weeks, three months.
[SPEAKER_02]: God knows how long it's been, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: And then you're dealing with a situation where you're going in to work.
[SPEAKER_02]: and you're going, this place is a circus.
[SPEAKER_02]: In the worst part, this is not my circus, it's not my clowns.
[SPEAKER_02]: But I got to live with it.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I can't even tell people the truth.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I've got a manager information.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I dread coming here every day.
[SPEAKER_02]: But I've got to, at least for the next six months, until I hopefully get rolled out of here to another project that's better.
[SPEAKER_02]: Please God let's do this, Dr. I guess.
[SPEAKER_02]: Please God.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and you know, you're putting your name on the layoff list.
[SPEAKER_02]: pick me please first get me out of here right this kind of things it's so easy I think to to see as as complex as that issue is it is so much more than we could probably ever go into right now but if work sucks it's just going to make whatever's going on that much worse if coming to work and you feel like you treated like a kid
[SPEAKER_02]: and every time you go to work, you're walking around on eggshells because my God, if I even, like, if my safety glasses are like a two millimeter too long, I know as I'm getting fired, I think that's a miserable situation.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that's a miserable situation.
[SPEAKER_02]: So if you're already dealing with stuff and you're dealing with all the other stuff that you just described, the stuff that comes with being a bit of a road dog.
[SPEAKER_02]: right gone for six months here and there in my god i thought i was getting two weeks often now i got to go over here for another year before i get to go home dealing with all that stuff and a work environment that's not optimized
[SPEAKER_02]: for humans at all.
[SPEAKER_02]: It seems like some of these places we build it to just be torture chambers for people, or the optimised for people.
[SPEAKER_02]: It doesn't have to be optimised.
[SPEAKER_02]: Just make it kind and not suck.
[SPEAKER_02]: That counts for something.
[SPEAKER_02]: That has to count for something there, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: You think about those jobs as you had where you've got
[SPEAKER_02]: that tyrannical boss you're dealing with already work that's complex and complicated you're dealing with problems you're dealing with issues and all that stuff tends to kind of marry up and then you're going I really don't want to go here anymore but I got it but I got it yeah yeah I think that all that stuff tends to play together
[SPEAKER_03]: Mmm, it really does.
[SPEAKER_03]: Wow, who went full circle, start talking about Darrell's and inadvertently we ended up talking about safety sucks your first book.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, yeah, that's been a minute of your time.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, that really has.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think that was maybe the last time that we actually have an interview together right around that to do in a minute.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's been a long time and we've been tried to do a um
[SPEAKER_03]: a live stream with me and Sam playing music together.
[SPEAKER_03]: He's a guitarist, a guitarist, a guitarist, a guitarist, a guitarist, a guitarist, a guitarist, a guitarist, a guitarist, a guitarist, a guitarist, a guitarist, a guitarist, a guitarist, a guitarist, a guitarist, a guitarist, a guitarist, a guitarist, a guitarist, a guitarist, a guitarist, a guitarist, a guitarist, a guitarist, a guitarist, a guitarist, a guitarist, a guitarist, a guitarist, a guitarist, a guitarist, a guitarist, a guitarist, a guitarist, a guitarist, a guitarist, a guitarist, a guitarist, a guitarist, a guitarist, a guitarist, a guitarist, a guitarist, a guitarist, a guitarist, a guitarist, a guitarist, a guitarist, a guitarist, a guitarist, a guitarist, a guitar
[SPEAKER_02]: Instagram off stuff.
[SPEAKER_02]: Not this week.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm starting on some next week.
[SPEAKER_02]: So if you're bored and you want to split screen on on Instagram, we'll probably be meeting you again.
[SPEAKER_02]: But who have a good dog?
[SPEAKER_02]: It's great.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, you're the guys who introduced me to Run the Jewels, man.
[SPEAKER_03]: I love Run the Jewels, man.
[SPEAKER_03]: I love Run the Jewels, man.
[SPEAKER_03]: I love Run the Jewels, man.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I love it.
[SPEAKER_03]: So hey, everybody.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm going to ask Sam to tell you how to reach him and his good friend, Garal.
[SPEAKER_03]: Darrell.
[SPEAKER_03]: So go ahead.
[SPEAKER_03]: Tell everybody how to reach him.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, the easiest way to get a hold of me is just the hop nerd that's the HOP nerd at gmail.com.
[SPEAKER_02]: If you're interested in any of the wacky fun stuff that I tend to do, you can find out more at the HOP, the hop nerd.com.
[SPEAKER_02]: We've got all kinds of free resources and stuff over there.
[SPEAKER_02]: You can download.
[SPEAKER_02]: If you have seen the videos or if you haven't, if you do stumble across Darrell or any of the other kind of content, things that we make, I have to keep telling people, as I've said it like a
[SPEAKER_02]: You can download all that stuff.
[SPEAKER_02]: So if you're looking for some wacky something to throw in your presentation You can throw a deral in there.
[SPEAKER_02]: You can go to the website those videos in the video player under the resources tab They are for download there for you free take them one rule used them for good not for evil
[SPEAKER_02]: That's it.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's the only real.
[SPEAKER_02]: And if you get a chance, you know, if you can put, you know, the hopmer, you know, a little credit.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's not, but not a hundred percent required, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: But there's a ton of stuff over there.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's, and you can get time on my counter.
[SPEAKER_02]: You can learn more all that kind of cool stuff.
[SPEAKER_02]: And probably where I'm most active with content and things like that would be on LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram.
[SPEAKER_02]: So it's either Sam Goodman or the Hopmer or you can
[SPEAKER_02]: and spend time a lot of different organizations and people focused on humanizing their approaches to safety and beyond on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on on
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you for coming by and hanging out at your house.
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, no.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm going to show you.
[SPEAKER_03]: So, thanks for having me.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's always, always good to see you.
[SPEAKER_03]: It is always good to see you.
[SPEAKER_03]: So, everybody, just stop by.
[SPEAKER_03]: See Sam and all his social media.
[SPEAKER_03]: And, uh, tell him who heard him here on the safety consultant.
[SPEAKER_03]: She blitz y'all in the premise show.
[SPEAKER_03]: And, go get him.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a wrap for today's safety show.
[SPEAKER_01]: Remember, safety isn't just about hard hats and caution signs.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's about business smarts too.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks for joining us on the safety consultant show with Sheldon primus.
[SPEAKER_01]: Until next time, stay safe, stay savvy, and keep consulting like a boss.
[SPEAKER_01]: Go get him.
[SPEAKER_01]: The views in the opinions expressed on this podcast or broadcast are those of the host in its guest and did not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the company.
[SPEAKER_01]: Examples of analysis discussed within the past hour only examples.
[SPEAKER_01]: It should not be utilized in the real world as the only solution available, as they are based only on very limited and dated open source information.
[SPEAKER_01]: Assumption made within this analysis are not reflective of the positions of the company.
[SPEAKER_01]: No part of this podcast of broadcast may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means mechanical electronic recording or otherwise without prior written permission of the creator of the podcast or broadcasts shelled in premise.