Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
This week on Safety Labs by Slice: Ep. 24 Scott Gesinger. Scott combines philosophy, history, and psychology to provide HSE professionals with a fascinating overview of the origins of workplace safety, the current EHS landscape, and how the industry evolves going forward.
Safety Labs by Slice is a podcast where we explore the human side of safety to support safety professionals. We move past regulations and reportables to talk about the core skills of safety leadership: empathy, influence, trust, rapport. In other words, the soft skills that help you do the hard stuff.
- [Mary] Hi, there. Welcome to "Safety Labs by Slice."
As George Santayana famously wrote, "Those who cannot remember the past are deemed to repeat it." It was an exhortation to understand our foundations in history in order to provide insight into the present and guidance towards a better future. Safety, like every other system or profession, isn't a static entity. The way safety is understood, practiced, and valued has changed greatly over the decades.
But in what way exactly and why? What major approaches brought us to where we are today? Where is that? And where do we go from here? To help explore this, we have Scott Gesinger with us today. He's put a lot of thought into what beliefs guided safety practitioners in the past and how these beliefs have evolved.
Scott is the author of "The Fearless World of Professional Safety in the 21st Century." He's a safety director and a graduate of Minnesota Duluth with over 20 years of experience in the field of workplace safety. Scott previously held a global role with a Fortune 500 company and has never learned to ice skate backwards. Scott joins us from Minneapolis.
- [Scott] Hi.
- Hi.
- Hi. Yeah. You know, you're up in Canada, so you can appreciate the embarrassment of not being able to ice skate backwards up in the Great White North.
- Yes. Yes. Although I live in the rainforest area, I grew up in the prairie area not unlike Minneapolis. So yes. I also don't know to ice skate backwards.
- Okay. Well, good. There's two of us.
- But I understand the embarrassment. You make a point of mentioning early in your book that safety advancements are written in blood. I think we all know that to be true, unfortunately. So I'd like to talk about a few incidents that shaped the practice of safety. And the first one I can think of really, and maybe most commonly, the first one people can think of is the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911.
So if you were writing a timeline... I just want to gut check that, if you were writing a timeline of relatively modern safety incidents, is that where you would start?
- Yeah. I think it probably is where I would start and for a couple of reasons. You know, prior to 1911, we were pretty heavily in the reconstruction period after the Civil War and safety just wasn't becoming important at that time. And we didn't have the large factories that we started to have at the turn of the century.
And then previous to that, obviously, in the antebellum years, if you had a country that was going to allow slavery, they just were not going to publicize safety in the workplace as a thing. We had to get over that in order to get to a point where safety could become important. And that started to happen around the turn of the 20th century.
And not only did you have these workplaces that were getting large and crowded, but you also had new media that was getting information out quicker to a wider audience. Very similar to today how we're in the fourth industrial revolution and we've got all these new media sources that are also getting information out to new audiences a lot quicker.
So I would say we've almost...if you think of it almost like a clock where Triangle Shirtwaist was midnight, we've almost, I think, reached midnight again where we're sort of in a time that really replicates where we were back then.
- Right. So it's not just the, I mean, it was a horrific incident, which actually, can you just very briefly for those of us who were born after 1911 go over for people who haven't heard of it? Explain what happened there.
- Sure. In New York City, there was a company called Triangle Shirtwaist, and they made shirts, blouses, fabrics. And they were up in an upper floor of a building where they worked and it was several primarily immigrant younger women who worked there. So you had a lot of fabrics, you had a lot of scrap fabric. And so a large fire load that was there waiting to burn.
And management was concerned about employees taking unauthorized breaks, so they blocked many of the emergency exits. And they suspect that it was a discarded cigarette that started the fire originally. But with all that fabric scrap, the fire took off, it burned quickly.
And I forget the number of people who died in that fire, but it was a very large number. And several of the women were jumping out of the upper floor windows to try and escape the heat and the fire. And there were photographers nearby, photography still being relatively new. And they were able to capture pictures of this event.
It got to newspapers. And again, that media distribution, which was very new to people made this New York story a nationwide story very quickly. And interestingly, Frances Perkins was down the street from the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. Frances Perkins would go on to be Secretary of Labor under Franklin D.
Roosevelt. And she witnessed what happened. And then was part of the commission that investigated what happened. And then later went on again to that national prominent role.
- So it's not just the fact that it was, of course, horrific, but there was a confluence there of public awareness that just hadn't happened before. They didn't have mass media sort of in the way that was starting. So if we talk about safety regulations or safety movements being written in blood, what came from that incident?
Is that where fire exit started?
- It helped push them along. It pushed them down the road a little bit. And it brought to light a lot of the sweatshop conditions that workers were toiling under similar to today because a lot of the young women were migrants. It brought to mind the challenges that migrants faced and some of the hurdles that they had to overcome that people weren't necessarily aware of before.
And so the commission recommended several fire code changes and many of those were carried out. A lot of them like any fire code change, took years to be actually put into code and then carried out.
- So let's go to where you see the beginning of safety as a profession. When do you think people started to kind of study and apply some kind of scientific rigor to the idea of workplace safety?
- Yeah. I think that took another 10, 15 years after Triangle Shirtwaist. If you look at who was focused on safety in the 1910s, it was primarily insurance companies and they had started as property insurance and then were now starting to look at the human element. In the 1920s when the Union started to become popular and you had workers gaining power, you also had the first workers' compensation laws that were now being put on the books.
So it became a lot more expensive to hurt people at work. And with that expense came the recognition that, well, we need to implement some sort of safety programs to try and reduce the number of people who are injured. And they started very rudimentary.
You know, it was a lot of poster programs. It was a lot of, you know, really focused on individuals and behavior. And that was really in the 1920s, I think is when that started. And that was when Heinrich did his research as well was in the 1920s. This is a period of time before the Fair Labor Standards Act. It was before most workplace safety laws were in place.
You had a few states with workers' compensation laws and a few rudimentary workplace safety laws. Research that started to occur was a cultural time and place in America that is vastly removed from where we are today.
- Okay. So I definitely want to talk about Heinrich. I'm just wondering, first, are there any other sort of first players in the space that come to mind or is he really the...I've seen him referred to as the father of modern safety. Was it all him or, you know, what else was going on?
- You know, really I would say Heinrich is probably the primary founding father of looking at safety from a scientific viewpoint. I would say, Frances Perkins, who I mentioned earlier, is also maybe the founding mother. And she looked at it from more of the humanistic standpoint, what is the fair and right way to treat human beings, and do unto the people who are relatively powerless worker compared to the very powerful company owners?
- You talk a lot about Heinrich's ideas. This is in your book, both as an advanced and safety practice, which is kind of where we are in our narrative now, but also as no longer being sufficient. So let's go over some of the ideas that he championed. He's known for a few things, the accident triangle, the Heinrich ratio. If there are listeners who don't know what that is, can you fill them in on some of his thoughts?
- Again, recognizing that really we were starting from zero in safety. So as much as I'll talk about the fact that we need to improve and move on from these ideas that are over a century old, you got to give Heinrich a ton of credit for getting the ball started and for doing the things that he did.
And a couple of things he came up with were the accident triangle that you had mentioned. And it's this ratio where you have like 3,000 near misses, which result... And for every 3,000 near misses, you have 300 minor incidents, 30 serious incidents, and three fatal, something like that.
I may not be exact on those numbers. But then it works out to this pyramid. And so the takeaway from that was if you focus on the near misses, you narrow the base of the pyramid. Meaning you reduce those numbers of everything that is above it, which when you just think of it given only those parameters, seems to make sense.
Problem is that not every near miss is the same.
- Sorry, just to clarify, the near misses are the bottom tier and then at the top are fatalities or like the most serious.
- Right. Yep.
- Okay.
- So again, the idea and the logic was reduce how big the base of the pyramid is and then you'll reduce how big it is at the top as well. The problem is that not all near misses are created equally and not every minor incident is created equally either. If you look at injury and illness statistics in the U.S. after OSHA was implemented, we had this big reduction across the board.
But what has happened is the severe injury and fatality rates after an initial reduction have stayed relatively stable. So we've reduced a lot of what you would think of as the bottom part of the pyramid, but the top has stayed about the same. The problem is a lot of modern safety professionals see it as that we're focusing on near misses and minor injuries that could never result in severe injuries and fatalities.
And we're missing the potential causes of severe injuries and fatalities that will never or very infrequently have a near miss or a minor incident.
- Right. So if something happens, it's going to be bad.
- Right. And just you don't get those near misses. You don't get those almost accidents. One example I would cite on that is the software issue with the Boeing 737 MAX. If that issue occurred, you had a plane crash. There was no, whoops, we almost. Let's learn from that near miss.
It either happened or it didn't.
- So in the book, you characterize Heinrich's ideas as being, you say BBS, behavior-based safety. So these were a good start. Like you just said that, you know, we did reduce accidents to a point. So I guess he or his ideas advanced us in the sense of people taking it more seriously, maybe applying more...it sounded like he did a statistical analysis with his ratios.
- Right. Yeah. So Henrich worked for an insurance company. He looked at incident reports that had occurred, and he said, okay, from these incident reports, what is cited as the cause of incidents and injuries in the workplace? And came up with employee behavior as being around 88% of the causation of everything.
Problem and I think the blind spot that he had was these reports were being written by managers who were not trained on instant investigation. They weren't trained on concepts like the hierarchy of controls or some of the other more advanced concepts that came along later down the road.
And they had a lot of incentive to blame the worker because if you blame the worker and say, the worker has to make these changes, now you, as the manager, don't have to try to change your management systems and the setup of your workplace. What occurred the second and third generation from that is researchers went back and they looked at it and they had a confirmation bias.
And what that confirmation bias is they looked at accident causation. Again, they were already thinking it's employee behavior, whether it was conscious or not, that was the bias. So it just reinforced these ideas. And by the time we got into the 1980s, the 1990s, behavior-based safety was this fully-fledged science. It was the dominant view in safety.
And it wasn't until the 2000s, the last 20 years or so, where really people have recognized that, wait a minute, there's more that goes into this. You know, we can't tell employees that it's their fault when the employer owns the facility, the equipment, makes the rules, controls the environment, has all the power. Now we're going to tell employees it's their own fault when they get hurt, it doesn't add up.
And then when you analyze it trying to take two or three steps back to reduce that confirmation bias, you can start to see where behavior may have a small role here and there. And it's probably is always some sort of influence, but there's something that causes that behavior. There's something that influences that behavior.
There's a reason why the employee made the choices that they made. And that is the workplace system, that is the setup and the environment. And so that's where you're going to find the better root cause.
- You had a bit of a shot across the bow near the beginning of the book where you said, "Safety professionals have become complacent and unfocused ignorantly relying on an 80-year-old paradigm," so you're talking here about Heinrich. You did start to answer this, but where do you see this complacency? And why do you think it's happened?
Do you think it's...yeah, like what do you think is the cause of the stall, I guess?
- Yeah. Like any large problem, and I would say complacency among safety professionals is a huge problem. And like any big problem, it's complex and it's got a lot that goes into it, but a lot of it goes back to that original idea of 88% of the accidents that happen at work are the fault of the employee because that really got drilled into us generation after generation after generation.
I think another part of the problem is that for a long time in safety, we had a large portion of the safety professional population was not adequately educated on how to be a safety professional. So you had people who were drafted in the safety or worked somewhere else and sort of ended up in safety and they didn't get the educational background to really say, this is a science.
Here is the art and science of safety. Here's how to understand it. Some of those people did wonderfully. So I don't want anybody out there to think I'm knocking them. I just think that over time, we've become more educated. We've become a little more adept at looking things from a scientific standpoint. Now, along with that, you had a lot of consultants and vendors and suppliers who were catering to behavior-based safety and making a pretty good living off of behavior-based safety.
You had a safety professional who had either been educated that it's the employee's problem, it's the employee's fault, or who hadn't been educated and then somebody comes in and they say, hey, we've got this great safety program. It'll solve all your problems.
It's X, Y, Z. Then it takes hold and you invest your time and your resources into it, and it's hard to disinvest from that over time. And so I think that's where quite a bit of it came from. And it was, I'm glad you described it as a shot across the bow because I felt like when I wrote the book and I feel like now to this day that in safety, a lot of us devalue ourselves because we're not illustrating to employers that safety is a hard science.
We're doing things like putting up a mirror that says, "This is the person who's responsible for your safety." Just an awful message to send employees. So we're telling them, hey, you're on your own. We might own everything. We might make all the rules and give you all the stuff to use, but you're on your own. That's not a good message.
- But if you have a problem, 88% chance is it's your fault.
- Right. Right.
- So let's talk about using an example, the ways in which behavior-based safety has let us down or maybe just held us back. So you gave the example of the Union Carbide accident in Bhopal. If you're looking at that incident and you're investigating it from a behavior-based paradigm, I guess, where are your blind spots? Like, what are you missing?
Why is that not a great idea?
- Sure. So just to give people a little bit of background on Union Carbide because there's a lot of safety professionals who were born after that occurred as well. It was a pesticide facility in India. There was a chemical process that needed to be anhydrous, it needed to be free of water. And water was introduced into that process, caused a chemical reaction that created a toxic gas cloud which was released and killed several people in the surrounding area.
They weren't workers. They lived in the area. And it caused a lot of long-term health problems too. And it's like a lot of instance where you have these long-term chronic health problems afterwards. It's really hard to come up with a death toll, but, you know, a lot of the estimates are in the tens of thousands of people ultimately died because of this incident.
So looking at it just purely from a human behavior standpoint, Union Carbide claimed in their investigation that the water was introduced as an act of sabotage. So somebody purposely did this to cause harm to the facility, to the plant. Looking at it from the engineering standpoint and the system standpoint, I think the first question to ask is why was the system set up in a manner that allowed water to be introduced.
Why were there not adequate protections against that? And then looking at the history of that Union Carbine plant, there had been several inspections that were done that found a lot of serious safety issues that had not been corrected. So you have, on the one hand, behavior-based safety saying this one person did this one thing.
On the other hand, you have the system safety and engineering perspective saying there were a lot of gaps in the safety program. There were a lot of opportunities for this to occur, whether it was sabotage or whether it was some other causation event. It was allowed to occur.
- Yeah. It's worth pointing out that it's controversial as to whether or not it was sabotage. But either way, whether it was an accident or intentional, the point still holds that's looking at it from an individual point of view as opposed to a systemic design issue.
- And even getting into the more of the cultural aspects, why did you allow poor residential area to be set up immediately surrounding this chemical facility? And the Indian government convicted several Union Carbide executives of crimes because this, but I don't think the Indian government really looked inwardly and said, "Do we need to update our zoning laws and really make some changes to the layout and design of our cities?"
So even there, you have... When it comes to safety, people don't want to own the accountability. There's always this push to give the accountability to somebody else. And that, I think, is one of the attractions of behavior-based safety. As a safety manager or as an operations manager, you don't have to own the accountability if it's the employee's problem.
- And it occurs to me, as you're saying this too, that the individual or saying that it is an individual's fault is also simpler. Humans like simple answers to complex questions. And I think that what you're proposing is that it's more complex than that whether we like it or not. So a lot of the discussion revolves around why accidents happen and whose fault they are. In terms of whether it's simple or complex, is there a universal answer to those questions?
And if not, what's the balance and where do you think we need to focus our attention?
- I don't think there is a universal answer to it. And I think the perspective of accident causation or the study of accident causation is intrinsically subjective. And it always will be. Because there are so many factors that go into every accident. Whether you're looking at Union Carbide, you're looking at collision 747s on Tenerife, or you're looking even at 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire, you can look at the systems and find causation.
You can look at the engineering and find causation. You can look at the individuals and find causation. And there's no magic formula at least that I know of to put all of that together to really say it's X percent this, X percent that. It's a naturally subjective thing. What I do think we can do as safety professionals, and again, believing that safety is a science, it's a hard science, is that we can look at the factual portions that create the subjective finding, right?
So we can look at the facts that there were these valves that did not work. There was this training that did or did not take place. There was beam that was meant to be X millimeters thick, was actually Y millimeters thick. The pilot got this much sleep or that much sleep. We can look at all those things.
Now, in the end, it's subjective how we put it together. I think we need to continue to focus on what are the absolute known items without impressing any motivation into that. So we may say the employee pressed the round button instead of the square button, and we stop there. We don't impress any motivation onto it of why the employee did that.
What we can do then later on down the road is we can say, there are these four potential reasons the employee may have hit the round button instead of the square button. How can we address those four potential reasons? Because then no matter which of the four it is, you've addressed it. We're going to change the shape.
We're going to change the location. We're going to change the color. We're going to put a glass cover over it so they have to open the glass cover first. And by addressing all four of those items, you in some way remove the subjectivity of having to pick which one you think was wrong. And you've also eliminated all future...most, you never eliminate all. But you've eliminated most future cases of the employee hitting the incorrect button again.
- Yeah. Because in the end, it doesn't matter which of the four causes. You know, you haven't won by determining which of the four, you've won by making the entire procedure safer in the future.
- Yeah. And then while you're doing that, go to the employee and say, we understand that this is hard for you to know that you hit the wrong button and that an accident occurred and somebody got hurt. That's the second victim concept, which Sidney Dekker talks a lot about. Talk to the employee and make sure that that employee understands that this was a mistake, who knows why it happened, but we're going to try and fix it so that this mistake does not happen again in the future.
And involve that employee and speak to them and treat them humanely as that second victim instead of saying, you did wrong. This was your fault. You're one of the 88% of, you know, why behavior hurts people.
- Talking about that, talking about involving the workers, I think there's a tension in discussions about safety about top-down versus bottom up. So you say in the book that you, "Fully agree that safety works best using a top-down strategy," but you also say that you're curious about the idea that safety works best when thought of like a sandwich using a top-down and a bottom-up approach at the same time.
So, can you expand on that a little bit?
- Yeah. When I had written the book, I was just sort of being introduced to the sandwich model, which is instead of saying you just work on employees and tell them you need to be safe, or you just work on management and say it's all up to you to make the workplace safe, that you sort of do both and then work toward the middle. And the way that I see that working and I am a believer that you should have some sort of balance between focus on upper management and focus on the boots on the ground doing the job.
I think that for each workplace, it's a little bit different and that's up to the safety professional to work out what that balance ought to be. But I do believe that you have to work both sides because the employees who are doing the job are going to be your best resource on here's where the hazards are, here's how we control the hazards right now, here are the hazards we cannot control.
And then you also work on the management side to say, here are the hazards that employees are seeing, here's the resources they need. From the safety standpoint removed from either party, here's what we see and how we think we can address this and mitigate the risk. So that way, you're getting the input that you need from the people doing the work. They know it better than anybody else.
You're getting the input from management on what they want as their end goal. And you're also providing input to each by telling the employees that you're recognizing what you're telling them...what they're telling you. Excuse me. I'm going to go back and say that again. You're giving the input to the employees that you are recognizing what they're telling you, and that you're going to try to make workplace improvements from that.
And you're providing input to upper management by saying here's where we can make improvements and what those improvements should result in. So you balance both. And again, each workplace is a little bit different. There may be some workplaces where really it is just more appropriate at a given time to focus more on the workers or focus more on management.
That's another one where there's no hard and fast rule. It's very subjective depending on the workplace circumstances.
- I want to talk about human factors. I'm throwing at you another quote from your own book. "I believe that an entire realm of safety in the 21st century will be dedicated solely to examining human factors of design to reduce human error by improving the design of items." So this is sort of the systemic side of things.
In this context because people use the term human factors in a lot of different ways, what does this mean and how can we improve them or how will we be improving them?
- Yeah. When I use the term human factors, I'm thinking of designing for the human. I'm thinking of Don Norman and his work and how to design for people, making logical designs, right? And in safety, there's been another gap there.
I think most safety professionals can look back on our career...if you've been a safety professional long enough, look back on your career and look at some redesign tool or process or something that sure, technically, it was probably safe after the redesign, but it was so awkward or difficult to use that nobody actually did it.
That was not the proper design of things. And when we think about human factors and safety, really it's the design of things for the human to not make those unintentional errors, to always hit the right button or hit the right button enough of the time that we're not worried about the risk of them hitting the wrong button. We're designing it so if they might hit the wrong button more than we want them to, we create a two-step process so that if they hit this button and it's the wrong one, when they try to do the second step, it's not going to allow them to advance.
That's what I think of these as human factors. And it's a little bit of a tricky term because sometimes people will use it more for ergonomics. Sometimes people will use it more for behavior-based safety and, you know, saying that, well, people are going to be at fault with what they're doing. That's not the idea.
Human factors is engineering to provide the subject, the employee, every opportunity for a success in what they're trying to accomplish.
- Right. So making the safe choice the default choice really. Designing around that.
- Yeah. And I like the way that you say that. I mean, if there's a safe and an unsafe choice, why are we giving them the unsafe choice? And what can we do to always channel them where we want them to go? Everybody is going to have a bad day. Everybody is going to have a day where mentally they're just not there. The dog is about to have puppies.
Your kid just stepped on a nail and has tetanus. Your spouse might get laid off and the car is broken down. You are not going to be thinking about which button to push. Your mind is going to be in a thousand different places. If we can design our system so that person in that situation is safe and they're not going to hit the wrong button, then we've done a pretty good job.
And I do have a chapter in the book where I talk about the [inaudible] award factor, and that's that all of us are going to make the obvious what you might think of a stupid mistake. Now, I don't think it's a stupid mistake. I don't think people are stupid. And I don't want anybody to take any of the terminology the wrong way. The point is that we design for people to make dumbest possible mistake we can ever picture somebody making.
And if we can design for that situation to be safe, we've designed a pretty safe process.
- We've talked about Heinrich now, and I'd like to move on to Deming, if you can tell us a little bit about the red bead experiment and the plan-do-check cycle. So how were those ideas a step forward from bad employee stupid decision?
- Yeah. Okay. So we had Heinrich and that kind of got things going. And then after World War II, you had W. Edwards Deming who really was focused on quality. And that's where his work was.
He dedicated his life to quality and the lessons that he was able to teach the world when it comes to quality can be applied to safety. Really it's a nice one-to-one transfer in most cases. So Deming did things like went to Japan post-World War II and helped them create new manufacturing systems and philosophies.
And we still see today in Japanese companies where they're using a lot of Deming's philosophies. For instance, in Toyota, anybody can stop a line because of a quality or safety issue. Every worker on the line has that right. Japan was so impressed with ding that they actually have an engineering award that's named after Deming that they give out to people.
And you think about the powerhouse of manufacturing that Japan became in the decades after World War II and really that was all from ding and the things he did focus on quality. You mentioned the red bead experiment and Deming has this great demonstration where you've got this bucket of beads, you dip in a tray, and you only want the white beads.
The red beads are not what you want. You have to take them out. And through this experiment, he tries to talk about different ways that you can dip in without getting the red beads or reduce the number of red beads. And you try different ways of doing that. The way that I relate that to safety is that if an incident is the red bead, how do we get that red bead out of there?
If we focus on the worker, you may have 500 workers doing the same task. So you have to make 500 corrections, one for each worker. You could change the task itself, make one correction. and now you've corrected all 500 of those potential red beads. So that's how I try to relate the red bead demonstration to safety.
- Okay. So, again, it's a system's design as opposed to an individual focus, right? You're designing the task rather than correcting the individual.
- Right. Because if one individual either behaves in a way you don't want them to, or they make a mistake, or however you want to relate what that individual does, there are an enumerable number of other individuals who at some point can or will do that same thing, whether it's conscious, unconscious mistake, bad behavior, whatever you want to call it.
So change the system to eliminate that from being a potential. And now no matter who's working on that system, you don't have to go back and invest all this time and energy on trying to coach behaviors and change people to be something that they just may have a hard time being to do something they may have a hard time doing.
- No, I want to ask about the future and then get into some practical tips, some ideas. You say in your book change is coming to safety, whether we like it or not. What do you think is the role of technology in the future of safety and what else do you see on the horizon?
- Yeah. There's a few things I think are coming. I think with AI and computer modeling, as that advances, safety will be written less in blood. I think we're going to get to a point where artificial intelligence is going to be able to look at a process and model enough of the different parameters that go into that process. That they'll identify those risk potentials before we kill somebody to identify them.
So a great thing there. And I'm really excited to see which comes first in artificial intelligence. The robots taking over the world and becoming our overlords, or the robots making sure that we don't kill people to advance safety.
I think the safety profession because we devalued ourselves for so long by making games out of safety and focusing on behaviors and a lot of those things, we're still digging out of that to show that no, we are a true, hard science. We are an engineering discipline.
If we're not able to prove that concept and show that we're a hard science and we are an engineering discipline, I think other engineering disciplines will overtake us. And safety will fall to the background even more because it'll be just a part of what the other engineering disciplines are doing as they design and construct and work on new or improved processes.
- So if we don't keep the discipline figures alive, it may wither. Is that too harsh a way of saying it?
- No, I think that's a very good way of saying it and we've done it to ourselves. We spent decades going out and writing safety tickets. We've spent decades instead of looking at a process and working with the rest of the engineering team and saying here's how we can improve this, we spent decades going out and telling employees here's how you're doing it wrong.
And as we did that, every day we did that, we became less valuable because we turned safety from a science and an engineering discipline into more of just a soft we're going to go out and nag people sort of role.
- Okay. So that's sort of a warning but also some hope there in that, you know, new safety designs and systems may have a little less blood behind them, which is what everyone wants. I'd like to move into some specific skills and abilities that you think are the key to a modern and a future safety practice.
And I'm just going to...I'll go slowly, but I'll list out a few things that you mentioned in the book. And if you can just tell us a little bit more about your thoughts on those. So the first one was a Gemba, or perhaps it's Gemba, but G-E-M-B-A walk. What is it and what are your tips for making that successful?
- Yeah. So, Gemba, and I prefer the hard G on it too, but Gemba walk is going out to where the work is performed and learning from the people doing the work, how they do the work, why they do it the way that they do it. And I like to do kind of a supercharged Gemba walk where not only will I go out and observe the person and talk to them, but I'll say, instruct me like I'm a new employee and teach me how to do this.
And there have been times I've invested hours and hours into learning a job just to really understand the challenges that people doing that work are facing. And that's something, again, that grows out of the teachings of Deming where you have to understand the work and you have to understand how the work is performed and why the work is performed the way it is.
And if you think about relating this to evolving out of behavior-based safety, in behavior-based safety, it was all about it's the employee's fault that an accident happened. Well, now what we can do is ahead of that accident ever happening, sort of pre-accident investigation like Todd Conklin would say you do, you go out and you find out why the employee does it the way they do it.
Okay. Why do you hold this tool this way when we train you to hold it the other way? And they're going to have a pretty good answer for you. Why do you feed the material like this? Why do you stand here instead of here? Whatever it is, you learn that, you learn their reasoning for it, and then you can design to accommodate the way they need to do the job. But until you understand why they do the job, you don't have a good way to change the design.
- Yeah. It's too easy to make a rule that, you know, they look at and laugh because it's like, okay, but you've just cut my production in half, so, obviously, I'm not going to do it this way.
- Yeah. Yeah.
- So another one is diversity and the myth of common sense.
- Yeah. Oh, I'm so glad you asked about that. So I just have to say I was at the ASSP Conference earlier this year, and it was great to see how diverse safety is becoming. When I started my career, everybody looked the way I look now, white guy in their mid-to-late-40s, right?
And I remember thinking back then, we're missing so much perspective. You get somebody who has a different background. They grew up differently. They might have grown up exactly the same way, but because they look different, they've been treated different, so you get different perspectives. We really were missing out and I think we're starting to see the world from a more whole point of view by the diversity that we have.
And that is great. The more we can get people from different backgrounds into safety education programs, the better that's going to be.
- The second one was the myth of common sense and in the sense of, is it truly common?
- Yeah. So then we get to common sense, and it's directly tied to that diversity idea because what is common sense to me, a person who grew up on a lake in rural Minnesota is not going to be the same common sense that somebody who grew up in the middle of a huge city, an area where it was all traffic, and, you know, the only water was if you opened up the fire hydrant and, you know, had some water spray on the street to plant.
We're going to have completely different sets of common sense. If somebody just assumes that the rest of the world knows what I know as common knowledge, there's so much that's going to be missed when you're asking questions, like, why do you do the job the way that you do, or why did this person make this choice? Why does this human factor mean so much to this population, right?
And it's hard to do, but you have to let go of assuming that your common sense is the same common sense everybody else might possess.
- I remember as a young person meeting someone who had only grown up on pavement and she got lost one day in the snow, but it was virgin snow. And we were very confused because why didn't you just turn around and follow your footprints back? It hadn't occurred to her. She probably hadn't been off-pavement for most of her life. So, again, not common.
Another one was health as a focus, like bringing the H back into EHS or OHS. And you mentioned obesity, sitting disease, that sort of thing.
- Yeah. So, when I went to school for safety, health was all about industrial hygiene. And you're looking at chemical exposures, noise exposures, vibration, those things. And I do think that's part of it. But so much of the health of one's body and the condition of one's body plays into safety in the workplace.
It's something that we cannot ignore. We have to address. It's a little bit of an elephant in the room too because it's difficult. It's a difficult conversation to say, you know, 35% of our workforce is obese and we also have X number of musculoskeletal disorders. Those things are tied together.
So from a safety perspective, a safety professional perspective, if we can improve the overall health of the employees, we should then see fewer of these musculoskeletal disorders. So there's a payoff in that investment. And by no means do I think we need to tell people how to live their lives or what they should or should not be eating.
That's where it gets a little bit difficult. I don't have those answers. Yeah. I don't have those answers because, look, you put a beer and pizza in front of me and I'm going to...you know, I'm part black lab. You put food in front of me, I'm going to eat it, right? That's just the way I am. You know, I'm not going to claim to be, you know, the pure one when it comes to I do everything health-related.
That's just not the way it is and no humanness like that. So how do we find that wellness balance, that health balance? I think it's something we have in safety yet to discover the best way to do that, but it's a missing piece of the puzzle.
- I think it has to do too, again, with that blaming the individual and systemic issues. Now, obviously, you can't solve food deserts in, you know, in cities or that sort of thing, but you do have some systemic control over the workplace, but it's tricky because it's very tempting for people to hear this is my fault.
This is an individual...oh, now you're bugging me about this, you know?
- Yeah. And, you know, you brought up a perfect example of food deserts in the large cities. So from a safety perspective, if you can recognize that you have this cultural challenge, most of our employees come from a food desert area. Now you can say, how can we orient our wellness and our health program to try and address that and try to create some positive change, whether it's how you stock the break rooms, whether it's educational programs, whether it's going to the city and saying, here's where a lot of our employees come from as a business, here's one of the challenges we're facing, can we partner on giving this population some real food choices?
And it's funny because I think when some of us see a situation like that, we tend to look at it as, well, they don't know any better. No, they know better, they don't have the choice. This is the system into which they have been placed. If you give this population that has this food desert a better choice, you give them the better options and it's affordable and it, you know, is where they live and what they need, you will see some difference.
- What other lessons do you have about, maybe I shouldn't ask this right back to back, but about changing employee behavior? Again, I don't want to imply that, you know, we're correcting their behavior, but in other situations, changing employee behavior, this is maybe unsafe operation or not using blade guards or, you know, that sort of thing.
- So this is where behavior-based safety, really, it kind of flourished is, you know, you would see a situation where employees just don't wear this PPE that we want them to wear, or they don't set this machine up the way that we want them to set it up. I think the key is just really being basic and saying, why? So talk to employees, okay, we ask you to wear a cut-resistant glove on your left hand when you're using a blade on your right hand, why don't people do that?
And then you can take that input and you can work with that input. Or why do we not set the machine up? Why do you not set the machine up the way that we have instructed you to, or the way that we want you to? There's always a reason. There's always, always a reason. So look at it from a root cause perspective. The way that we would look at incidents and say, what is the root cause for this population not doing the thing that we want them to or not doing it the way that we want them to?
And then let's change the system, the setup, the parameters, whatever we need to change because you're not going to change the way 500 people behave. It's just not going to happen, right? You can have all the scratch-off bingo cards and coaching cards and stop and go, and you're just not going to do it.
So look at the process and change the process, but it starts with asking why. This piece of equipment is uncomfortable. It's too hot. I wear it and I can't handle the thing I need to handle. If I set the machine up this way, I can't feed the pieces through that we get. The pieces are too big. They don't fit.
Okay. Now we know what we can change about the system and the engineering.
- So we've talked a fair bit about talking to and learning from and doing the Gemba walks of the boots on the ground. You also mention empathy for senior leadership teams. Tell us about that. Why is that important?
- It's easy to villainize, right? And this goes back to that idea of owning the accountability and the fact that we need to own some of our own, right? We also need to recognize that from a moral perspective, employers are obligated to provide a place of employment free of recognized hazards. Well, the first part of that sentence is provide a place of employment.
We have business owners, business managers, who ultimately are trying to fulfill the first part of that clause, continuing to provide a place of employment. So we have to look at their challenges of meeting the expectations of all of their stakeholders, whether it's shareholders, whether it's ownership, whether it's the C-suite and recognize that for them to prioritize safety, they have to understand how it helps them meet their whole spectrum of goals that they have to meet.
If safety blocks them from meeting the rest of that spectrum of goals, then safety gets pushed out of the way because they've got 20 goals to meet, safety is one of them. If they can meet 19, but not meet that 20th, well, at least they met 19. So if we can come to them and we can say this is one of the 19, I understand that you need to get 50 tons a week produced, here's how safety helps you produce that 50 tons.
So understanding the pressures and having empathy for the pressures that senior management faces ultimately helps the safety professional orient our solutions to not only meet what the workers need, the second part of that clause, a place free from recognized hazards, but for senior management meet the first part of the clause, provide a place of employment.
- Right. So yeah, the difference between, you know, I'll scream the loudest, my priority should be your top priority and you have these 19 other priorities. Let me show you how my priority is not in competition with those, but actually supports them.
- Yes, very well-said.
- Is there anything else I missed? You know, it was a wide-ranging book. There was a lot of stuff we can't get to all of it today. Is there anything, any sort of final thoughts on this that you'd like to kind of impart?
- I would encourage safety professionals to continue expanding their network, learning, you know, the value of that network, and really understanding what that can bring to you because whatever challenge as a safety professional you're going through, you can likely find somebody else who has gone through a similar challenge.
They may or may not have the answers for you on how to address it, but there's something about the human condition where when we see that somebody else has gone through a similar experience, it helps us face that. It helps us know that it isn't an insurmountable challenge. So the first time you have a nasty amputation that you have to investigate, the first fatality you have to investigate, the first time you have an employee throw a tantrum and swear at you and tell you how awful of a human being you are, the first time you have somebody in the C-suite just completely shoot you down in a horrible ball of flame when you have what you think is a great idea, now you have this network of people that you can go to and you can say, here's what I'm going through today and they'll listen because they've been there.
- Okay. Well, I do have a few questions that I ask at the end. I ask all my guests these. They're just a little bit fun and get to know you, even though it's at the back end of the interview. But if you were to develop your own safety management training curriculum, and we could take out all the sort of regulatory training, all the PPE training, all the technical training, what core human skills would you see as the most important to develop in the students?
- Ability to empathize and to understand what other people might be experiencing, how they might be interpreting that experience, and what the pressures of those other people are. And in the book, early in the book, I talk about watching "Jaws." And every new safety professional should watch the movie "Jaws" and how it really is the perfect movie about safety because of all the challenges that Chief Brody is going through and all these things that he faces.
And I would say that should be required watching for every safety program because it teaches you so much about why you have this mayor who is insisting we have to open the beaches even though there's a shark out there and won't recognize how dangerous it is. It teaches you about how Brody felt the pressure to let something happen that normally from the outside you would look at and say, "You should never have done that."
But he did it and then there was a terrible consequence, but you see what the pressure is and you see why he made that decision. So I think that level of understanding, here's what other people are experiencing, and then how that is going to translate onto the pressure they place on you. That from a humanistic perspective is I think really important to understand.
- I think that's, A, fantastic and the mention of "Jaws" and the sort of the critical and moral implications in the study of "Jaws" is also probably the most original answer I've gotten. But if you want to learn more about the parallel, there is a strong parallel, you're going to have to read the book.
So here's the next one. If you could travel back in time and speak to yourself at the beginning of your safety career and you could only give young Scott one piece of advice, what do you think it would be?
- Never eat airports... Wait, no, I can do better than that. Let's see. I would tell the young me, you are going to get a lot of stuff wrong. You're going to screw a lot of stuff up. You're going to get a lot of stuff wrong. You're going to accidentally say the wrong thing to wrong people.
And it's all going to be okay. You need to make those mistakes in order to grow and in order to recognize that no matter how strongly you might believe something today, you have to be open-minded enough that if somebody comes to you and shows you that it's not the best way of doing things, that you can recognize that and change and adjust to continue being not just a better safety professional every day, but a better human being every day.
You know, I mean, I think what we learn in our career can translate to our lives very well. And the better we are as a safety professional, the better we can be in everything else we do and vice versa.
- So one last question for the guests. Do you have any books, any websites, any resources that you would encourage listeners other than obviously your book, but any wider resources that you'd encourage people to look at if they want to learn more?
- Yeah. I would encourage people to look really at two authors primarily. And I mentioned them earlier in the interview, Sidney Dekker, Todd Conklin. They have a lot of really intriguing ideas. I feel like right now they're kind of the primary thought leaders in safety. There was another researcher named Fred Manuele, he's since retired, but he really set the table for a lot of these ideas of safety differently, which is what a lot of people will call the modern philosophy.
So I would say read some Fred Manuele, read Todd Conklin, read Sidney Dekker, and keep an open mind.
- That's great. So where can our listeners find you on the web?
- Sure. So if you look me up on LinkedIn, I'm right there. And if you look up "The Fearless World of Professional Safety in the 21st Century," you will find my book. And as much as I respect my editor and just love the job that he did helping me get that book written and published, we probably should have chosen a shorter title cause that's awfully long.
- Well, now they'll know that it's yours. I can tell you, folks, it's an easy read, not in the sense of facile, but in the sense of it's conversational. It's easy to understand the concepts that you're talking about and it's really interesting.
- Well, thank you.
- Okay. So that is all the time we have for today. Thank you so much for joining us Scott, and thanks to our listeners for tuning in.
- You're very welcome and this was a lot of fun. So, thank you.
- Awesome. And, of course, as always, my personal thanks to the Safety Labs by Slice team. They are a part of the fearless world of podcasting in the 21st century.