EP 626 - David Provan

Safety FM with Jay Allen

Speaker 2
00:09
Okay, here we are coming to you live from Energy Safety Canada 2024. That's what's happening. Dave Proven, right directly off the stage.

S2
Speaker 2
00:17
How are you?

S1
Speaker 1
00:18
Good Jay, good. It's wonderful to be back in Canada and to have an opportunity to talk to the community here and to speak with you now.

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Speaker 2
00:24
Well, here's the thing. You know that I have had this plan like several times and it has never worked out. We have never managed to pull this off.

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Speaker 2
00:31
And I feel like an asshole to be honest with you from last time because I owe this to you from all in 1

S1
Speaker 1
00:36
yeah well I tend to get distracted I tend to tend to forget commitments that I make so

S2
Speaker 2
00:44
it was my fault I didn't bring you to the bridal suite. Let's make sure that we remember where I was at.

S1
Speaker 1
00:49
Well, Jay, a wise person told me that blame fixes nothing.

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Speaker 2
00:53
I've heard that once or twice. So you just got off the stage. What were you not able to cover that you wanted to cover?

S1
Speaker 1
00:59
Oh, wow, what was I not able to cover? I think I could have done a better job at talking practically about what we can do in an organization. I think I explained a number of problems that all organizations face and how that relates to health and safety and I hope that people found some of the suggestions useful, but you know maybe we can talk a little bit more about you know next steps for people.

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Speaker 2
01:24
So let's talk to some of the people that were not there because of course we have limited audience here, then we'll have some other people take a listen to this. So the global safety landscape trends, insights and prediction. Give me a quick overview on what you're covering.

S1
Speaker 1
01:35
Yeah so when you get a topic that broad like global safety landscape then you really got permission to say anything you like. And I didn't want it to be too conceptual and too sort of abstract and forward-thinking so I actually went it was a new talk and I said what are some trends and insights about organizations today that we may not be talking enough about in health and safety, and Therefore, before we worry about what the future might hold, let's maybe try to deal a bit better with the present.

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Speaker 2
02:05
So what are we not dealing with in the present currently from what you're seeing? Because you're traveling the world, let's not lie here in regards of all the things that you're seeing trend-wise.

S1
Speaker 1
02:12
Yeah, so I really wanted to talk about work and risk. So I sort of talked through 4 different trends. 1 is the challenge of goal conflict.

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Speaker 1
02:22
So this production versus safety and we, I don't think we talk about it as deeply as we need to talk about it. We just say get the job done on time, meet your budget, do it safely, if anything's unsafe you've got the authority to stop work and then we kind of just throw it over the fence and tell people figure it out and we've I think we've built very conflicted organizations around incompatible goals So I talked a little bit about that trend and how as health and safety we're probably not paying close enough attention to those conflicts in our organization and we see goal conflict play out in a number of major disasters. Do you want me to talk through the other 3?

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Speaker 2
03:02
You can talk through the other 3, but before you go there, talk about these goals. These goals that don't kind of intertwine with each other. Because a lot of organizations face that.

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Speaker 2
03:12
They have that problem where they go, okay, our goal setting is this. All of a sudden, a conflict comes in between there. And it's like, okay, how are we going to work this out? What are you seeing there?

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Speaker 2
03:21
And then I'm gonna ask you the next 3, so don't worry about that, we're not gonna go too far away.

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Speaker 1
03:24
No, no, so 1 of the, I guess, contributors that was linked to Texas City was a global cut in maintenance budgets, say 30%. We set our organizations a lot of objectives. The example that I spoke through today was a company that had this real customer-centricity program.

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Speaker 1
03:46
They just started telling the organization that the customer is really, really important. What happened on this case is the customer had asked the workers to do something and because they knew that their company wanted them to satisfy the customer, they took on a whole bunch more safety risk and had a really bad accident. And it wasn't because they didn't want to follow a procedure, it was because the company had said, our customers are really important, so do what basically the customer needs and wants. And they put that over their own safety in this instance, thinking that's the decision that the company wanted them to make.

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Speaker 1
04:19
So we roll a lot of goals into our organization around cost and schedule and and customer and we then just say figure it out.

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Speaker 2
04:27
So do you look at it in some of these aspects that some of these goals are set at the cost of safety? Well, I... As a perspective, so...

S1
Speaker 1
04:35
I don't think that companies do it intentionally. I just don't think companies think about the safety implications of decisions they're making which doesn't have an express safety thing. So for example, know an organization that set their supply chain team a target to reduce the amount of spend in the supply chain.

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Speaker 1
04:53
And this is quite common. You go to your procurement function and you say, procure us the same amount of stuff cheaper. And they set that target and you're incentivizing your entire procurement department to go and find me cheaper people to work with. And that I think does come at a direct cost to safety.

S1
Speaker 1
05:13
But the safety organization is kind of rarely involved in detail in some of that sort of organizational strategy and programs and targets and objectives for other functions. And you know, I think across finance and HR and projects and in that case procurement, I think we're actually setting teams to run hard counter to what we're trying to do in safety.

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Speaker 2
05:40
Okay, very good. Okay, give me the

S1
Speaker 1
05:42
second 1. Yeah, so the second 1 I sort of talked about was this idea that, you know, this Eric Holnagle idea that most things go right, and what Sydney Decker would say is, and we draw the wrong conclusion. So we're not hurting and killing people in our businesses every single day.

S1
Speaker 1
05:56
We've got lots of green dashboards, lots of green audit reports, we've got 99.99% control verifications, it's all looking green, it's all looking good. And organizations have finite resources, management have a finite amount of time. So the logical thing to do is to manage by exception. So if there's no problem, there's no problem.

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Speaker 1
06:16
So if this month safety looks green, I probably don't need to spend as much time on it. And we know that there's a lot going on in organisations when nothing's formally going on in our safety system. So I just sort of talked about how We need to understand how we keep a conversation about risk alive and how we focus on normal work and everyday work and making our organization more effective. As Rene Amelberti would say in his work on the paradox of almost totally safe systems is that when things stop going wrong, you need to find new ways to learn.

S1
Speaker 1
06:50
So

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Speaker 2
06:51
you brought up Decker, and I have to ask you this because I've been wanting to ask you this question for a long period of time. How was it getting your PhD from him?

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Speaker 1
06:58
Well, I didn't get it from him. There were some independent assessors that had a read of the work, but I was incredibly, I felt very privileged to have the opportunity to have someone of Sydney's, I guess, academic, intelligent just such an awesome intelligent guy. And I just couldn't miss that opportunity when he was in the same country as me and we were already doing some work together in the organisation I was working in at the time.

S1
Speaker 1
07:30
I just said, hey look, can I come and do this with you? And gratefully he said yes. So it was good.

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Speaker 2
07:38
How long ago was that, if you don't mind me asking?

S1
Speaker 1
07:40
I started in 2015, 2014, and finished in 2018, 2019, around that sort of period.

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Speaker 2
07:47
It's not old and it's not new. I mean you're kind of, we'll say at that midpoint, so when you went through the process were you already thinking PhD or was going into that PhD angle or was it because of because of Decker that you wanted to do it.

S1
Speaker 1
08:01
Well, it was kind of interesting.

S2
Speaker 2
08:03
Well, well, I'm sorry to get off subject, but it's such an intriguing question to me.

S1
Speaker 1
08:07
So I think I think I think someone I would always I've done a couple of other higher education programs, a couple of master's degrees in that. And I sort of I was always interested in in sort of challenging myself and learning and a PhD was always something that was potentially on my radar but maybe I just never found you know a topic or a supervisor and actually at the time 1 of the examples I mentioned inside is I was working in an oil and gas company, oil price fell, I had nearly 300 people in my safety team, I had to turn those 300 people into 120 people. So a big restructure and cost out program and with my relationship with Sydney, I went to Sydney and I said, like, what does the literature say is the role of safety teams?

S1
Speaker 1
08:50
You know, how many do companies need to have? What tasks and activities do they need to do? What capabilities should they have? How should we design and structure?

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Speaker 1
08:56
Because I had a blank page but I had 170 people I had to leave. And I said, what's your opinion on the safety profession? And Sydney in his typical Sydney says is like, mostly useless, right? And if managers do what managers should do and engineers do what engineers should do and workers will listen to and do what workers should do, then the safety organisation is generally an unnecessary nuisance.

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Speaker 1
09:21
That's kind of a bit of an existential crisis because I've been in safety since I left school and went to university. So I was like, surely not. If I could put 120 people into my organization surely there's some value that I could could do that and so that that was the topic for the PhD that's why I actually went to try to a little bit justify my career in some ways but I was very open to the possibility that I would conclude that the function is not required, but thankfully I didn't.

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Speaker 2
09:50
I'm glad that you didn't. I mean, look at where you're at now. Exactly right.

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Speaker 2
09:54
So let's continue. So tell me about the third topic here. Yeah, so the third topic. And sorry once again for interrupting and changing midstream, but I'm so intrigued by it.

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Speaker 1
10:03
Not at all. I talked about misunderstanding risk. Fundamentally, as organizations, we misunderstand risk.

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Speaker 1
10:10
We have all of our risk tools, risk matrices, risk registers, we list the risk and we list some controls and we put it in a green box and we review it every 6 or 12 months. Russ Merson for 30 years ago was talking about the dynamic modelling problem of risk and our static assessments don't match the real world dynamic risk situation that we all find ourselves in every day. So organisations and managers sort of conflate they actually think that their risk is imagined on their risk register is actually risk as it actually exists in their in their business And then when you combine that with workers who have sort of a natural overconfidence bias in their ability to control risks, particularly workers who have a lot of expertise in their work, they might, in the example I gave in was electrical workers who have been electricians for 30 years and they work with electrical hazards all the time, they have a high level of confidence in their own ability to control that risk. So what tends to happen in organisations, 1 of the trends that I wanted to talk to the group about today was that fundamentally both your management and your frontline workforce are going to through no fault of their own believe that there is less risk in the business than there actually is for safety and then we sort of close our minds off to the possibility that our organizations could actually be really quite unsafe.

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Speaker 2
11:34
Give me topic 4. I'm trying to jill them all together as you're going through them.

S1
Speaker 1
11:39
So number 4, yes. So that was the misunderstanding of risk. And number 4 was around the filtering of information that goes on.

S1
Speaker 1
11:45
So, you know, we structure our business and we talked, I talked a little bit about that, you know, with safety being and the incompatible goals discussion that we just had. You know, safety looks after safety training and safety investigations and safety things and we design our organisations into silos and functions and levels. As I said, by the time information flows from the frontline through 7 levels of management, gets put onto a PowerPoint, gets reviewed by 15 different people, that PowerPoint, and talk across, most of the information that we're dealing with every day about work is a fantasy, right? It probably doesn't bear much actual resemblance to the work that goes on.

S1
Speaker 1
12:28
And so, you know, as I said, If we're relying on getting our information through formal information flows, we've got to be very open to the fact that the information we're getting is mostly likely to be incorrect. So by the time everyone puts a positive spin on something and everyone operates on a need to know basis and gets to decide who I tell, what I tell, when I tell. So I really talked about the importance of, you know, direct contact and a questioning culture and really trying to test a lot of our assumptions about work because, like the same with the most things go well example you know the information that flows through the formal channels is yeah very very unlikely to match the reality of work.

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Speaker 2
13:15
So when you're looking at this and you start going, okay, you need to question the things that are in front of you What do you think that where the middle management comes in in particular because I'm sure you get to see a little bit of everything So the field levels are gonna bring you to their middle manager The middle manager is gonna take it to to the to the C suite people and You know that they're in that whole conundrum of, I'm representing the field, but I need to go to the C-suite people. How does that work out based on the stuff that you've seen, of

S1
Speaker 1
13:37
course? Yeah, there's actually some literature around this. I think Patrick Hudson supervised a PhD student couple of years ago, and they actually published a couple of papers where they called that middle management the clay layer of the organisation, this impermeable layer. And what this middle management layer is trying to do is exactly as you described, they actually want to put an umbrella over their operation which is I don't want people to know what the hell is going on in my operation.

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Speaker 1
14:02
I will heavily filter information before it hits my executive. And then coming down, I actually want to protect my operation, so I'll nod and smile and say all the right things, but I don't want the CEO reaching down into my or my senior management. So they call it this clay layer of middle management where information doesn't go up and information doesn't go down. But they actually really become some of the most critical stakeholders to making progress in safety because they are the ones, like you said, that can make those connections between organizational decision-making and operational needs.

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Speaker 1
14:32
But to do that, they have to be quite humble and quite vulnerable to put their hand up and say, I need help over here, or this is what's actually going on.

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Speaker 2
14:40
Are you seeing a lot of people requesting that help?

S1
Speaker 1
14:43
No, it's not a very human thing to do. And our organizations, I don't think, are as psychologically safe as they need to be for people to do that. You know, I said the example in the room today that very rarely do I hear a mid-manager, senior manager saying, I don't have things under control, I need help, I don't know, I don't fully understand what's going on in my business.

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Speaker 1
15:03
I'm not sure I know what to do next. That I think is still seen in a lot of organizations as a very weak manager.

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Speaker 2
15:12
So you're seeing a lot, you're hearing this term a lot. So I wanna bring it up, psychological safety. Yeah.

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Speaker 2
15:17
When you started hearing that, I mostly heard it around COVID. When did you start hearing it?

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Speaker 1
15:22
Yeah, I sort of was familiar with some of Amy Edmondson's work just before, sort of before COVID, couple of very successful books, The Fearless Organization was probably the first book that I read about it. You know, I was sort of even during my PhD talking a lot after doing, I wrote a paper with Dave Woods at Ohio State and we talked a lot about open communication, this idea that an organization is safer when information flows fast and free, right? If someone knows something then how do I get that piece of knowledge heard and understood by someone who's got the authority to make an appropriate decision around that?

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Speaker 1
16:00
So you might use the challenger over an example of, you know, the engineering team and how does that then get to like the mission command and get a decision to be made. Right. And so that I always just talked about fast and free flow of information. I talked about open communication and I guess what the psychological safety field has done is sort of explain what are some of the conditions and enablers and ways of trying to create more of that in businesses.

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Speaker 2
16:27
So when you go out now and you're able to talk to people about this, Is this something that you bring up or is it brought up to you in regards to psychological safety as part of the teachings that you're doing?

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Speaker 1
16:37
Yeah, I don't talk too much about it directly. I try to steer away from things that I don't feel that I have the expertise to talk a lot about. So mostly when that comes up, I will point people in the direction of, like I said, of useful things to read about it.

S1
Speaker 1
16:52
But I will talk a lot about the importance of open communication, like in the conversation we've had about what discussion do you have when you get a green dashboard? What does a question in culture of management kind of look like, what do we do about the filtering of information and having more direct interactions at multiple levels in the business. So I'll talk a little bit about the mechanics of what I think needs to happen in organizations, but not so much about the theory.

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Speaker 2
17:16
Do you have a person that you go, hey, this is a good, besides the reading, is there a person that you point to that goes, okay, outside, if you were looking for outside theory, this is the person to go to. And I'm not trying to put any kind of pressure on you and you need to give me a name, but is there somebody that you say,

S1
Speaker 1
17:30
in relation

S2
Speaker 2
17:31
to psychological safety?

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Speaker 1
17:32
Well, like I mentioned, I'm a point to Amy Edmondson's work. But I think Todd's done some great stuff with his books on better questions. I think the 4Ds books from Brents and Josh and Jeff and that.

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Speaker 1
17:46
I think we're all... There's a number of people who are starting to talk in a very useful, constructive way about how to open up learning in businesses. And that's what we're talking about here, right? It's not communication for communication's sake.

S1
Speaker 1
18:02
It's psychologically safe environments to promote communication that helps us learn and ultimately make improvements before we're just counting the number of people that

S2
Speaker 2
18:11
we hurt. So do you look at this at any of the combination of where you used to hear that term centricity, the company centricity on how, oh, we can talk and we can communicate because we have centricity within our organization, within our customer centricity. Do you see any tie-ins to that?

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Speaker 2
18:27
Because I'm gonna say, I mean, it looks like there is some language that is similar. I'm not gonna say exactly the same, but there is some similarities to

S1
Speaker 1
18:33
it. Look, I think there's a lot of language bullshit in organizations, right? Like exactly what you're saying, collaboration, synergy, all these things. And we've been working on teaming and collaboration for 2 decades, right?

S1
Speaker 1
18:49
And we've used all this language in and around our organisations in the past. And psychological safety may just be another term, which is why I try to like to talk quite frankly about what we're talking about here is open communication, where if you can have an environment where any person feels comfortable to say anything to anyone at any time in the interest of a better understanding of the organization and ultimately making improvement, then you're going a long way to being a safe organization. If I've got any barriers to people saying what they think someone should hear because of for whatever reason, then I might have problems.

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Speaker 2
19:27
So as you're going through this whole thing and you're able to talk to all these different organizations, what are the biggest things that come out related to communication? Where are they seeing most of their, only if you can talk about it, of course.

S1
Speaker 1
19:39
Yeah, look, I

S2
Speaker 2
19:40
think- And give me name of companies, no,

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Speaker 1
19:43
I'm joking. Look, I mentioned in the room here today that so much communication that we do in organisations is broadcast style communication. We do it in safety all the time, even when we say we're going to share lessons learned around a business, we're actually just sending a safety alert.

S1
Speaker 1
19:59
It's not learning, it's not communication, it's barely compliance. What I see is that organisations are trying to figure out how do I get a two-way flow of information? And the cop-out is usually we need a reporting culture, you know, we need workers to report things. And, you know, I think there's a space for learning teams and field interactions and a whole bunch of tools we can use.

S1
Speaker 1
20:21
But the biggest challenge I'm seeing with organizations, how can I at scale flow information, get a feedback loop? In complex systems, we want feedback loops. So how can I get that feedback loop really working in my organization?

S2
Speaker 2
20:35
So when you start talking about feedback loops, how do you start doing the process or how do you communicate the process for them to start establishing it?

S1
Speaker 1
20:40
Yeah, so actually...

S2
Speaker 2
20:41
And I'm not trying to put all kinds of weird questions out there, I just want to have a better understanding on how you do the process.

S1
Speaker 1
20:45
Yeah, so I think it's understanding what you have available and how you do things. So I'll use the example about the learning from incidents, right? And so 1 way of us doing 1 communication approach, which I mentioned before, is just here's what happened, Here's the causes of what happens, here's the actions we need you to take.

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Speaker 1
21:02
That's a broadcast, send the same piece of information to every single site and get them to do the same stuff. There's not a learning process. So we think about what would feedback look like in that scenario. So with a few organisations, we've designed them a learning process where we send them a scenario of the event and we just ask them a bunch of questions.

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Speaker 1
21:22
We say, get in a group of people together at your site, read through this scenario and discuss how could this scenario play out on our site? If this scenario played on our site, what would be the likely things that would would cause it? Now are we worried about this issue or concerned? How likely do we think this scenario could be of happening and what do we think we need to do on our site to either better understand this or to improve our situation.

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Speaker 1
21:49
And then feeding that all back into the system. So now I've got all these sites who have told me in their local context how this situation potentially becomes relevant to them. I've asked them what they think needs to be done to understand or improve. I've created this kind of two-way flow.

S1
Speaker 1
22:06
Here's a scenario, and now you tell me a whole bunch of stuff. And with CITC organization now, I really go, wow. Actually, now I've got 100 sites, and I've got this wealth of contextual information and risk information and now I can start to connect patterns in my organization and do something with it as opposed to, I sent out these actions, 60% of sites have done them, but I haven't learned anything. So what we try to do is I think start with trying to redesign processes and build in feedback loops and learning loops in processes that companies are already doing, whether it's investigations or auditing or leadership visits or anything like that.

S1
Speaker 1
22:40
No, I

S2
Speaker 2
22:40
mean, the way that you talk about it is not doing the traditional format of not the audit. It's not the whole thing that people were doing before. So in talking about versions of communication, I need to bring this up.

S2
Speaker 2
22:51
You recently started communicating in a new format and I want to bring this up in regards of you are now co-hosting another podcast. How did this come about? And tell people the concept of it because I think it's genius.

S1
Speaker 1
23:05
All right, well today, I think episode 4 of the Punk Rock Safety podcast came out, so go find it. So there's a lot of cool people in health and safety. We may not have the best brand as a profession, but there's a hell of a lot of really cool people all over the world.

S1
Speaker 1
23:24
And a lot of us are sort of at a similar sort of midlife age and all this, so where we were sort of growing up in the 90s or thereabouts. And many of us before we got into safety had some level of misspent youth. So you know, you just sort of find people at different conferences. And so, you know, a couple of close friends of mine now that I've met through the profession, both US based, Ron Gant and Ben Goodhart, We just liked hanging out and talking shit and on some parts talking quite intellectual safety conversations and other parts just basically taking the piss out of each other a little bit as well.

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Speaker 1
24:02
Ben had suggested this idea that he just had this conceptual idea that, you know, how we should approach safety is a little bit like the punk rock movement in the 90s, which is, you know, make do with what you've got, try different things, experiment. If people like it, they like it. If they don't, they don't. Don't take yourself too seriously.

S1
Speaker 1
24:17
Try and have a bit of fun doing it. And so he'd actually, Ben had actually already taken the punkrocksafety.com domain about it 8 or 10 years ago. But when he was down in Wollongong, we talked about it and we roped Ron in and so we launched this podcast. It's really kind of an excuse every 2 weeks for us to get online and press record and go.

S1
Speaker 1
24:39
But a number of people here at this conference and a number of people have sort of connected and who I guess are just appreciating a little bit of maybe fun, just not taking ourselves too seriously.

S2
Speaker 2
24:54
Well, I mean, I think it's such a different approach because it's not just straight about safety. It's a little bit about everything that goes on in the world in regards to when you're having the conversation. So I've been pretty intrigued by taking a listen to it.

S2
Speaker 2
25:03
And I didn't know if it kind of, if it kind of sped out of you doing safety stock, because let's not undersell what you did there. I, this was probably the best party that I've ever been to at a safety event in any conference event overall.

S1
Speaker 1
25:17
How did you come up with the idea? Well, that's a, I'm not sure that's a high bar to jump over, right?

S2
Speaker 2
25:23
Well, okay, the standard's very high compared to other events that you can go to. Let's put it that way.

S1
Speaker 1
25:28
Well, look, I think, so what we did is we had a bit of a music festival, So we got sort of 4 or 5 bands. We got a stage and we got some food trucks and an open bar. And we said, look, at all the conferences you go to, you're sort of sitting around at round tables and having a sort of a chicken and meat type of sort of alternate plate setting and a bit of wine and...

S2
Speaker 2
25:48
Which you really need to describe that to people because they've never experienced this alternate plate thing. It is a hot mess because this is not done in the US. Oh really?

S2
Speaker 2
25:56
No, no, when I was in Australia, that was the first time I'd ever seen that.

S1
Speaker 1
25:59
Wow, there you go. Oh Well, that's sort of like at a big event, you know, when a company's got to try to figure out how much food to buy, they'll say how many people are coming, we'll do 2 main courses. Why don't we eat chicken or fish and why not be meat?

S1
Speaker 1
26:09
And then they just alternate. It's just like you, you, you, you, and they just give you what they give in front of you. And the way it's meant to work socially is at the table, you then figure it out. You say, oh, does anyone want the meat?

S1
Speaker 1
26:20
Because I'm a vegetarian. Then you've got to

S2
Speaker 2
26:21
find- Do

S1
Speaker 1
26:21
you want to trade? You've got to, you've literally, you literally pass the plates around and figure out, and you try to get to a situation where the people who want the chicken or the fish have got the chicken or the fish, and the people who want the meat have got the meat. And I didn't realize that wasn't a done thing.

S1
Speaker 1
26:34
So, but anyway, so, so Safety Stock, which is something that we said, look, if we're going to run an innovative conference, then let's think about how we could do this differently. And again, this is a bit like the punk rock safety thing. You know, we've all we all don't mind a music festival. We've all been to a few, you know, warped tours or big days out or something in our in our life.

S1
Speaker 1
26:54
So then, you know, Karen Bonifant, who's sort of our chair of our organizing committee, has a lot of really strong connections into the local music scene and the international music scene and off we went.

S2
Speaker 2
27:03
And she travels quite a bit to go see these music scenes.

S1
Speaker 1
27:07
So off we went.

S2
Speaker 2
27:08
She talks about them quite frequently. So let me ask you about this. So now we're at the Energy Safety Canada Conference.

S2
Speaker 2
27:12
What do

S1
Speaker 1
27:12
you think?

S2
Speaker 2
27:14
What do you think?

S1
Speaker 1
27:15
I mean, I love it. I was fortunate to be here 2 years ago, just straight after COVID. And so I sort of got a little bit of the conversation 2 years ago and picking it back up now.

S1
Speaker 1
27:26
And I've been sort of seeing the work of the Energy Safety Canada Institute. And I have to say, like, thoroughly impressed at their foresight and their vision, Murray and Gordon and the team. To be an industry association that is not just trying but is being so progressive is very uncommon. It's very uncommon.

S1
Speaker 1
27:46
I actually can't think of another industry association anywhere in my travels in the world that is openly and strategically being so progressive. Which is wonderful because these institutions do have influence over industry practices so

S2
Speaker 2
28:05
I love it. Now this is my second year in a row being here and I think it's beautiful what they have actually organized and what they're actually trying to create out there especially when you sit and talk to Gordon how he explains it on what they're doing overall is just amazing. So if people want to find out more information on what you have going on, where can they go?

S1
Speaker 1
28:21
Look, I'm not... Well, punk rock safety podcast, I think there's a... There's probably an email address there or something that'll go to Ben.

S1
Speaker 1
28:29
Look, I think a direct message on LinkedIn is usually the easiest way. So throw a connection my way and then just send me a message is probably the easiest way. But judging by the amount of people who try to contact me and try and help me with my finances or something, I don't think my contact details are that hard to find.

S2
Speaker 2
28:48
To get a hold of. Also, do you have anything coming up that's open to the public?

S1
Speaker 1
28:52
Oh, I'm going to be in Vegas at the Community of Human and Organizational Learning Conference in the middle of June. So that'll be the next chance. Actually, Ben and Ron and I are doing a fireside punk rock safety chat at Inveius.

S1
Speaker 1
29:07
That stands to be interesting, to say the least.

S2
Speaker 2
29:11
Now, I'm wondering how that's going to turn out. I'm very intrigued already. I'm incredibly curious

S1
Speaker 1
29:15
and incredibly concerned at the level of trust from the organizers to...

S2
Speaker 2
29:19
To allow you to do so.

S1
Speaker 1
29:21
But so that's coming up. I'm bouncing around a few other places in Europe and the US. I mean, yeah.

S1
Speaker 1
29:30
Actually I've got tickets to Denver, Minnesota in, well, in Denver, the Nuggets game this Saturday night. So I'll be in ball arena. So anyone there?

S2
Speaker 2
29:42
Absolutely. Well, David, I really do appreciate you actually coming by and doing this because I know you just came off the stage and I know you have another commitment. So I'm going to cut it short for you, but I really do appreciate your time.

S1
Speaker 1
29:50
Thanks, Jay. Well done.

S2
Speaker 2
29:51
Thank you.

S3
Speaker 3
29:55
The views and opinions expressed on this podcast are those of the host and its guest and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the company. Examples of analysis discussed within this podcast are only examples. They 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.

S3
Speaker 3
30:15
Assumptions made within this analysis are not reflective of the position of the company. No part of this podcast 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, Jay Allen.Speaker 1

00:05

This show is brought to you by Safety FM.

S2
Speaker 2
00:09
Okay, here we are coming to you live from Energy Safety Canada 2024. That's what's happening. Dave Proven, right directly off the stage.

S2
Speaker 2
00:17
How are you?

S1
Speaker 1
00:18
Good Jay, good. It's wonderful to be back in Canada and to have an opportunity to talk to the community here and to speak with you now.

S2
Speaker 2
00:24
Well, here's the thing. You know that I have had this plan like several times and it has never worked out. We have never managed to pull this off.

S2
Speaker 2
00:31
And I feel like an asshole to be honest with you from last time because I owe this to you from all in 1

S1
Speaker 1
00:36
yeah well I tend to get distracted I tend to tend to forget commitments that I make so

S2
Speaker 2
00:44
it was my fault I didn't bring you to the bridal suite. Let's make sure that we remember where I was at.

S1
Speaker 1
00:49
Well, Jay, a wise person told me that blame fixes nothing.

S2
Speaker 2
00:53
I've heard that once or twice. So you just got off the stage. What were you not able to cover that you wanted to cover?

S1
Speaker 1
00:59
Oh, wow, what was I not able to cover? I think I could have done a better job at talking practically about what we can do in an organization. I think I explained a number of problems that all organizations face and how that relates to health and safety and I hope that people found some of the suggestions useful, but you know maybe we can talk a little bit more about you know next steps for people.

S2
Speaker 2
01:24
So let's talk to some of the people that were not there because of course we have limited audience here, then we'll have some other people take a listen to this. So the global safety landscape trends, insights and prediction. Give me a quick overview on what you're covering.

S1
Speaker 1
01:35
Yeah so when you get a topic that broad like global safety landscape then you really got permission to say anything you like. And I didn't want it to be too conceptual and too sort of abstract and forward-thinking so I actually went it was a new talk and I said what are some trends and insights about organizations today that we may not be talking enough about in health and safety, and Therefore, before we worry about what the future might hold, let's maybe try to deal a bit better with the present.

S2
Speaker 2
02:05
So what are we not dealing with in the present currently from what you're seeing? Because you're traveling the world, let's not lie here in regards of all the things that you're seeing trend-wise.

S1
Speaker 1
02:12
Yeah, so I really wanted to talk about work and risk. So I sort of talked through 4 different trends. 1 is the challenge of goal conflict.

S1
Speaker 1
02:22
So this production versus safety and we, I don't think we talk about it as deeply as we need to talk about it. We just say get the job done on time, meet your budget, do it safely, if anything's unsafe you've got the authority to stop work and then we kind of just throw it over the fence and tell people figure it out and we've I think we've built very conflicted organizations around incompatible goals So I talked a little bit about that trend and how as health and safety we're probably not paying close enough attention to those conflicts in our organization and we see goal conflict play out in a number of major disasters. Do you want me to talk through the other 3?

S2
Speaker 2
03:02
You can talk through the other 3, but before you go there, talk about these goals. These goals that don't kind of intertwine with each other. Because a lot of organizations face that.

S2
Speaker 2
03:12
They have that problem where they go, okay, our goal setting is this. All of a sudden, a conflict comes in between there. And it's like, okay, how are we going to work this out? What are you seeing there?

S2
Speaker 2
03:21
And then I'm gonna ask you the next 3, so don't worry about that, we're not gonna go too far away.

S1
Speaker 1
03:24
No, no, so 1 of the, I guess, contributors that was linked to Texas City was a global cut in maintenance budgets, say 30%. We set our organizations a lot of objectives. The example that I spoke through today was a company that had this real customer-centricity program.

S1
Speaker 1
03:46
They just started telling the organization that the customer is really, really important. What happened on this case is the customer had asked the workers to do something and because they knew that their company wanted them to satisfy the customer, they took on a whole bunch more safety risk and had a really bad accident. And it wasn't because they didn't want to follow a procedure, it was because the company had said, our customers are really important, so do what basically the customer needs and wants. And they put that over their own safety in this instance, thinking that's the decision that the company wanted them to make.

S1
Speaker 1
04:19
So we roll a lot of goals into our organization around cost and schedule and and customer and we then just say figure it out.

S2
Speaker 2
04:27
So do you look at it in some of these aspects that some of these goals are set at the cost of safety? Well, I... As a perspective, so...

S1
Speaker 1
04:35
I don't think that companies do it intentionally. I just don't think companies think about the safety implications of decisions they're making which doesn't have an express safety thing. So for example, know an organization that set their supply chain team a target to reduce the amount of spend in the supply chain.

S1
Speaker 1
04:53
And this is quite common. You go to your procurement function and you say, procure us the same amount of stuff cheaper. And they set that target and you're incentivizing your entire procurement department to go and find me cheaper people to work with. And that I think does come at a direct cost to safety.

S1
Speaker 1
05:13
But the safety organization is kind of rarely involved in detail in some of that sort of organizational strategy and programs and targets and objectives for other functions. And you know, I think across finance and HR and projects and in that case procurement, I think we're actually setting teams to run hard counter to what we're trying to do in safety.

S2
Speaker 2
05:40
Okay, very good. Okay, give me the

S1
Speaker 1
05:42
second 1. Yeah, so the second 1 I sort of talked about was this idea that, you know, this Eric Holnagle idea that most things go right, and what Sydney Decker would say is, and we draw the wrong conclusion. So we're not hurting and killing people in our businesses every single day.

S1
Speaker 1
05:56
We've got lots of green dashboards, lots of green audit reports, we've got 99.99% control verifications, it's all looking green, it's all looking good. And organizations have finite resources, management have a finite amount of time. So the logical thing to do is to manage by exception. So if there's no problem, there's no problem.

S1
Speaker 1
06:16
So if this month safety looks green, I probably don't need to spend as much time on it. And we know that there's a lot going on in organisations when nothing's formally going on in our safety system. So I just sort of talked about how We need to understand how we keep a conversation about risk alive and how we focus on normal work and everyday work and making our organization more effective. As Rene Amelberti would say in his work on the paradox of almost totally safe systems is that when things stop going wrong, you need to find new ways to learn.

S1
Speaker 1
06:50
So

S2
Speaker 2
06:51
you brought up Decker, and I have to ask you this because I've been wanting to ask you this question for a long period of time. How was it getting your PhD from him?

S1
Speaker 1
06:58
Well, I didn't get it from him. There were some independent assessors that had a read of the work, but I was incredibly, I felt very privileged to have the opportunity to have someone of Sydney's, I guess, academic, intelligent just such an awesome intelligent guy. And I just couldn't miss that opportunity when he was in the same country as me and we were already doing some work together in the organisation I was working in at the time.

S1
Speaker 1
07:30
I just said, hey look, can I come and do this with you? And gratefully he said yes. So it was good.

S2
Speaker 2
07:38
How long ago was that, if you don't mind me asking?

S1
Speaker 1
07:40
I started in 2015, 2014, and finished in 2018, 2019, around that sort of period.

S2
Speaker 2
07:47
It's not old and it's not new. I mean you're kind of, we'll say at that midpoint, so when you went through the process were you already thinking PhD or was going into that PhD angle or was it because of because of Decker that you wanted to do it.

S1
Speaker 1
08:01
Well, it was kind of interesting.

S2
Speaker 2
08:03
Well, well, I'm sorry to get off subject, but it's such an intriguing question to me.

S1
Speaker 1
08:07
So I think I think I think someone I would always I've done a couple of other higher education programs, a couple of master's degrees in that. And I sort of I was always interested in in sort of challenging myself and learning and a PhD was always something that was potentially on my radar but maybe I just never found you know a topic or a supervisor and actually at the time 1 of the examples I mentioned inside is I was working in an oil and gas company, oil price fell, I had nearly 300 people in my safety team, I had to turn those 300 people into 120 people. So a big restructure and cost out program and with my relationship with Sydney, I went to Sydney and I said, like, what does the literature say is the role of safety teams?

S1
Speaker 1
08:50
You know, how many do companies need to have? What tasks and activities do they need to do? What capabilities should they have? How should we design and structure?

S1
Speaker 1
08:56
Because I had a blank page but I had 170 people I had to leave. And I said, what's your opinion on the safety profession? And Sydney in his typical Sydney says is like, mostly useless, right? And if managers do what managers should do and engineers do what engineers should do and workers will listen to and do what workers should do, then the safety organisation is generally an unnecessary nuisance.

S1
Speaker 1
09:21
That's kind of a bit of an existential crisis because I've been in safety since I left school and went to university. So I was like, surely not. If I could put 120 people into my organization surely there's some value that I could could do that and so that that was the topic for the PhD that's why I actually went to try to a little bit justify my career in some ways but I was very open to the possibility that I would conclude that the function is not required, but thankfully I didn't.

S2
Speaker 2
09:50
I'm glad that you didn't. I mean, look at where you're at now. Exactly right.

S2
Speaker 2
09:54
So let's continue. So tell me about the third topic here. Yeah, so the third topic. And sorry once again for interrupting and changing midstream, but I'm so intrigued by it.

S1
Speaker 1
10:03
Not at all. I talked about misunderstanding risk. Fundamentally, as organizations, we misunderstand risk.

S1
Speaker 1
10:10
We have all of our risk tools, risk matrices, risk registers, we list the risk and we list some controls and we put it in a green box and we review it every 6 or 12 months. Russ Merson for 30 years ago was talking about the dynamic modelling problem of risk and our static assessments don't match the real world dynamic risk situation that we all find ourselves in every day. So organisations and managers sort of conflate they actually think that their risk is imagined on their risk register is actually risk as it actually exists in their in their business And then when you combine that with workers who have sort of a natural overconfidence bias in their ability to control risks, particularly workers who have a lot of expertise in their work, they might, in the example I gave in was electrical workers who have been electricians for 30 years and they work with electrical hazards all the time, they have a high level of confidence in their own ability to control that risk. So what tends to happen in organisations, 1 of the trends that I wanted to talk to the group about today was that fundamentally both your management and your frontline workforce are going to through no fault of their own believe that there is less risk in the business than there actually is for safety and then we sort of close our minds off to the possibility that our organizations could actually be really quite unsafe.

S2
Speaker 2
11:34
Give me topic 4. I'm trying to jill them all together as you're going through them.

S1
Speaker 1
11:39
So number 4, yes. So that was the misunderstanding of risk. And number 4 was around the filtering of information that goes on.

S1
Speaker 1
11:45
So, you know, we structure our business and we talked, I talked a little bit about that, you know, with safety being and the incompatible goals discussion that we just had. You know, safety looks after safety training and safety investigations and safety things and we design our organisations into silos and functions and levels. As I said, by the time information flows from the frontline through 7 levels of management, gets put onto a PowerPoint, gets reviewed by 15 different people, that PowerPoint, and talk across, most of the information that we're dealing with every day about work is a fantasy, right? It probably doesn't bear much actual resemblance to the work that goes on.

S1
Speaker 1
12:28
And so, you know, as I said, If we're relying on getting our information through formal information flows, we've got to be very open to the fact that the information we're getting is mostly likely to be incorrect. So by the time everyone puts a positive spin on something and everyone operates on a need to know basis and gets to decide who I tell, what I tell, when I tell. So I really talked about the importance of, you know, direct contact and a questioning culture and really trying to test a lot of our assumptions about work because, like the same with the most things go well example you know the information that flows through the formal channels is yeah very very unlikely to match the reality of work.

S2
Speaker 2
13:15
So when you're looking at this and you start going, okay, you need to question the things that are in front of you What do you think that where the middle management comes in in particular because I'm sure you get to see a little bit of everything So the field levels are gonna bring you to their middle manager The middle manager is gonna take it to to the to the C suite people and You know that they're in that whole conundrum of, I'm representing the field, but I need to go to the C-suite people. How does that work out based on the stuff that you've seen, of

S1
Speaker 1
13:37
course? Yeah, there's actually some literature around this. I think Patrick Hudson supervised a PhD student couple of years ago, and they actually published a couple of papers where they called that middle management the clay layer of the organisation, this impermeable layer. And what this middle management layer is trying to do is exactly as you described, they actually want to put an umbrella over their operation which is I don't want people to know what the hell is going on in my operation.

S1
Speaker 1
14:02
I will heavily filter information before it hits my executive. And then coming down, I actually want to protect my operation, so I'll nod and smile and say all the right things, but I don't want the CEO reaching down into my or my senior management. So they call it this clay layer of middle management where information doesn't go up and information doesn't go down. But they actually really become some of the most critical stakeholders to making progress in safety because they are the ones, like you said, that can make those connections between organizational decision-making and operational needs.

S1
Speaker 1
14:32
But to do that, they have to be quite humble and quite vulnerable to put their hand up and say, I need help over here, or this is what's actually going on.

S2
Speaker 2
14:40
Are you seeing a lot of people requesting that help?

S1
Speaker 1
14:43
No, it's not a very human thing to do. And our organizations, I don't think, are as psychologically safe as they need to be for people to do that. You know, I said the example in the room today that very rarely do I hear a mid-manager, senior manager saying, I don't have things under control, I need help, I don't know, I don't fully understand what's going on in my business.

S1
Speaker 1
15:03
I'm not sure I know what to do next. That I think is still seen in a lot of organizations as a very weak manager.

S2
Speaker 2
15:12
So you're seeing a lot, you're hearing this term a lot. So I wanna bring it up, psychological safety. Yeah.

S2
Speaker 2
15:17
When you started hearing that, I mostly heard it around COVID. When did you start hearing it?

S1
Speaker 1
15:22
Yeah, I sort of was familiar with some of Amy Edmondson's work just before, sort of before COVID, couple of very successful books, The Fearless Organization was probably the first book that I read about it. You know, I was sort of even during my PhD talking a lot after doing, I wrote a paper with Dave Woods at Ohio State and we talked a lot about open communication, this idea that an organization is safer when information flows fast and free, right? If someone knows something then how do I get that piece of knowledge heard and understood by someone who's got the authority to make an appropriate decision around that?

S1
Speaker 1
16:00
So you might use the challenger over an example of, you know, the engineering team and how does that then get to like the mission command and get a decision to be made. Right. And so that I always just talked about fast and free flow of information. I talked about open communication and I guess what the psychological safety field has done is sort of explain what are some of the conditions and enablers and ways of trying to create more of that in businesses.

S2
Speaker 2
16:27
So when you go out now and you're able to talk to people about this, Is this something that you bring up or is it brought up to you in regards to psychological safety as part of the teachings that you're doing?

S1
Speaker 1
16:37
Yeah, I don't talk too much about it directly. I try to steer away from things that I don't feel that I have the expertise to talk a lot about. So mostly when that comes up, I will point people in the direction of, like I said, of useful things to read about it.

S1
Speaker 1
16:52
But I will talk a lot about the importance of open communication, like in the conversation we've had about what discussion do you have when you get a green dashboard? What does a question in culture of management kind of look like, what do we do about the filtering of information and having more direct interactions at multiple levels in the business. So I'll talk a little bit about the mechanics of what I think needs to happen in organizations, but not so much about the theory.

S2
Speaker 2
17:16
Do you have a person that you go, hey, this is a good, besides the reading, is there a person that you point to that goes, okay, outside, if you were looking for outside theory, this is the person to go to. And I'm not trying to put any kind of pressure on you and you need to give me a name, but is there somebody that you say,

S1
Speaker 1
17:30
in relation

S2
Speaker 2
17:31
to psychological safety?

S1
Speaker 1
17:32
Well, like I mentioned, I'm a point to Amy Edmondson's work. But I think Todd's done some great stuff with his books on better questions. I think the 4Ds books from Brents and Josh and Jeff and that.

S1
Speaker 1
17:46
I think we're all... There's a number of people who are starting to talk in a very useful, constructive way about how to open up learning in businesses. And that's what we're talking about here, right? It's not communication for communication's sake.

S1
Speaker 1
18:02
It's psychologically safe environments to promote communication that helps us learn and ultimately make improvements before we're just counting the number of people that

S2
Speaker 2
18:11
we hurt. So do you look at this at any of the combination of where you used to hear that term centricity, the company centricity on how, oh, we can talk and we can communicate because we have centricity within our organization, within our customer centricity. Do you see any tie-ins to that?

S2
Speaker 2
18:27
Because I'm gonna say, I mean, it looks like there is some language that is similar. I'm not gonna say exactly the same, but there is some similarities to

S1
Speaker 1
18:33
it. Look, I think there's a lot of language bullshit in organizations, right? Like exactly what you're saying, collaboration, synergy, all these things. And we've been working on teaming and collaboration for 2 decades, right?

S1
Speaker 1
18:49
And we've used all this language in and around our organisations in the past. And psychological safety may just be another term, which is why I try to like to talk quite frankly about what we're talking about here is open communication, where if you can have an environment where any person feels comfortable to say anything to anyone at any time in the interest of a better understanding of the organization and ultimately making improvement, then you're going a long way to being a safe organization. If I've got any barriers to people saying what they think someone should hear because of for whatever reason, then I might have problems.

S2
Speaker 2
19:27
So as you're going through this whole thing and you're able to talk to all these different organizations, what are the biggest things that come out related to communication? Where are they seeing most of their, only if you can talk about it, of course.

S1
Speaker 1
19:39
Yeah, look, I

S2
Speaker 2
19:40
think- And give me name of companies, no,

S1
Speaker 1
19:43
I'm joking. Look, I mentioned in the room here today that so much communication that we do in organisations is broadcast style communication. We do it in safety all the time, even when we say we're going to share lessons learned around a business, we're actually just sending a safety alert.

S1
Speaker 1
19:59
It's not learning, it's not communication, it's barely compliance. What I see is that organisations are trying to figure out how do I get a two-way flow of information? And the cop-out is usually we need a reporting culture, you know, we need workers to report things. And, you know, I think there's a space for learning teams and field interactions and a whole bunch of tools we can use.

S1
Speaker 1
20:21
But the biggest challenge I'm seeing with organizations, how can I at scale flow information, get a feedback loop? In complex systems, we want feedback loops. So how can I get that feedback loop really working in my organization?

S2
Speaker 2
20:35
So when you start talking about feedback loops, how do you start doing the process or how do you communicate the process for them to start establishing it?

S1
Speaker 1
20:40
Yeah, so actually...

S2
Speaker 2
20:41
And I'm not trying to put all kinds of weird questions out there, I just want to have a better understanding on how you do the process.

S1
Speaker 1
20:45
Yeah, so I think it's understanding what you have available and how you do things. So I'll use the example about the learning from incidents, right? And so 1 way of us doing 1 communication approach, which I mentioned before, is just here's what happened, Here's the causes of what happens, here's the actions we need you to take.

S1
Speaker 1
21:02
That's a broadcast, send the same piece of information to every single site and get them to do the same stuff. There's not a learning process. So we think about what would feedback look like in that scenario. So with a few organisations, we've designed them a learning process where we send them a scenario of the event and we just ask them a bunch of questions.

S1
Speaker 1
21:22
We say, get in a group of people together at your site, read through this scenario and discuss how could this scenario play out on our site? If this scenario played on our site, what would be the likely things that would would cause it? Now are we worried about this issue or concerned? How likely do we think this scenario could be of happening and what do we think we need to do on our site to either better understand this or to improve our situation.

S1
Speaker 1
21:49
And then feeding that all back into the system. So now I've got all these sites who have told me in their local context how this situation potentially becomes relevant to them. I've asked them what they think needs to be done to understand or improve. I've created this kind of two-way flow.

S1
Speaker 1
22:06
Here's a scenario, and now you tell me a whole bunch of stuff. And with CITC organization now, I really go, wow. Actually, now I've got 100 sites, and I've got this wealth of contextual information and risk information and now I can start to connect patterns in my organization and do something with it as opposed to, I sent out these actions, 60% of sites have done them, but I haven't learned anything. So what we try to do is I think start with trying to redesign processes and build in feedback loops and learning loops in processes that companies are already doing, whether it's investigations or auditing or leadership visits or anything like that.

S1
Speaker 1
22:40
No, I

S2
Speaker 2
22:40
mean, the way that you talk about it is not doing the traditional format of not the audit. It's not the whole thing that people were doing before. So in talking about versions of communication, I need to bring this up.

S2
Speaker 2
22:51
You recently started communicating in a new format and I want to bring this up in regards of you are now co-hosting another podcast. How did this come about? And tell people the concept of it because I think it's genius.

S1
Speaker 1
23:05
All right, well today, I think episode 4 of the Punk Rock Safety podcast came out, so go find it. So there's a lot of cool people in health and safety. We may not have the best brand as a profession, but there's a hell of a lot of really cool people all over the world.

S1
Speaker 1
23:24
And a lot of us are sort of at a similar sort of midlife age and all this, so where we were sort of growing up in the 90s or thereabouts. And many of us before we got into safety had some level of misspent youth. So you know, you just sort of find people at different conferences. And so, you know, a couple of close friends of mine now that I've met through the profession, both US based, Ron Gant and Ben Goodhart, We just liked hanging out and talking shit and on some parts talking quite intellectual safety conversations and other parts just basically taking the piss out of each other a little bit as well.

S1
Speaker 1
24:02
Ben had suggested this idea that he just had this conceptual idea that, you know, how we should approach safety is a little bit like the punk rock movement in the 90s, which is, you know, make do with what you've got, try different things, experiment. If people like it, they like it. If they don't, they don't. Don't take yourself too seriously.

S1
Speaker 1
24:17
Try and have a bit of fun doing it. And so he'd actually, Ben had actually already taken the punkrocksafety.com domain about it 8 or 10 years ago. But when he was down in Wollongong, we talked about it and we roped Ron in and so we launched this podcast. It's really kind of an excuse every 2 weeks for us to get online and press record and go.

S1
Speaker 1
24:39
But a number of people here at this conference and a number of people have sort of connected and who I guess are just appreciating a little bit of maybe fun, just not taking ourselves too seriously.

S2
Speaker 2
24:54
Well, I mean, I think it's such a different approach because it's not just straight about safety. It's a little bit about everything that goes on in the world in regards to when you're having the conversation. So I've been pretty intrigued by taking a listen to it.

S2
Speaker 2
25:03
And I didn't know if it kind of, if it kind of sped out of you doing safety stock, because let's not undersell what you did there. I, this was probably the best party that I've ever been to at a safety event in any conference event overall.

S1
Speaker 1
25:17
How did you come up with the idea? Well, that's a, I'm not sure that's a high bar to jump over, right?

S2
Speaker 2
25:23
Well, okay, the standard's very high compared to other events that you can go to. Let's put it that way.

S1
Speaker 1
25:28
Well, look, I think, so what we did is we had a bit of a music festival, So we got sort of 4 or 5 bands. We got a stage and we got some food trucks and an open bar. And we said, look, at all the conferences you go to, you're sort of sitting around at round tables and having a sort of a chicken and meat type of sort of alternate plate setting and a bit of wine and...

S2
Speaker 2
25:48
Which you really need to describe that to people because they've never experienced this alternate plate thing. It is a hot mess because this is not done in the US. Oh really?

S2
Speaker 2
25:56
No, no, when I was in Australia, that was the first time I'd ever seen that.

S1
Speaker 1
25:59
Wow, there you go. Oh Well, that's sort of like at a big event, you know, when a company's got to try to figure out how much food to buy, they'll say how many people are coming, we'll do 2 main courses. Why don't we eat chicken or fish and why not be meat?

S1
Speaker 1
26:09
And then they just alternate. It's just like you, you, you, you, and they just give you what they give in front of you. And the way it's meant to work socially is at the table, you then figure it out. You say, oh, does anyone want the meat?

S1
Speaker 1
26:20
Because I'm a vegetarian. Then you've got to

S2
Speaker 2
26:21
find- Do

S1
Speaker 1
26:21
you want to trade? You've got to, you've literally, you literally pass the plates around and figure out, and you try to get to a situation where the people who want the chicken or the fish have got the chicken or the fish, and the people who want the meat have got the meat. And I didn't realize that wasn't a done thing.

S1
Speaker 1
26:34
So, but anyway, so, so Safety Stock, which is something that we said, look, if we're going to run an innovative conference, then let's think about how we could do this differently. And again, this is a bit like the punk rock safety thing. You know, we've all we all don't mind a music festival. We've all been to a few, you know, warped tours or big days out or something in our in our life.

S1
Speaker 1
26:54
So then, you know, Karen Bonifant, who's sort of our chair of our organizing committee, has a lot of really strong connections into the local music scene and the international music scene and off we went.

S2
Speaker 2
27:03
And she travels quite a bit to go see these music scenes.

S1
Speaker 1
27:07
So off we went.

S2
Speaker 2
27:08
She talks about them quite frequently. So let me ask you about this. So now we're at the Energy Safety Canada Conference.

S2
Speaker 2
27:12
What do

S1
Speaker 1
27:12
you think?

S2
Speaker 2
27:14
What do you think?

S1
Speaker 1
27:15
I mean, I love it. I was fortunate to be here 2 years ago, just straight after COVID. And so I sort of got a little bit of the conversation 2 years ago and picking it back up now.

S1
Speaker 1
27:26
And I've been sort of seeing the work of the Energy Safety Canada Institute. And I have to say, like, thoroughly impressed at their foresight and their vision, Murray and Gordon and the team. To be an industry association that is not just trying but is being so progressive is very uncommon. It's very uncommon.

S1
Speaker 1
27:46
I actually can't think of another industry association anywhere in my travels in the world that is openly and strategically being so progressive. Which is wonderful because these institutions do have influence over industry practices so

S2
Speaker 2
28:05
I love it. Now this is my second year in a row being here and I think it's beautiful what they have actually organized and what they're actually trying to create out there especially when you sit and talk to Gordon how he explains it on what they're doing overall is just amazing. So if people want to find out more information on what you have going on, where can they go?

S1
Speaker 1
28:21
Look, I'm not... Well, punk rock safety podcast, I think there's a... There's probably an email address there or something that'll go to Ben.

S1
Speaker 1
28:29
Look, I think a direct message on LinkedIn is usually the easiest way. So throw a connection my way and then just send me a message is probably the easiest way. But judging by the amount of people who try to contact me and try and help me with my finances or something, I don't think my contact details are that hard to find.

S2
Speaker 2
28:48
To get a hold of. Also, do you have anything coming up that's open to the public?

S1
Speaker 1
28:52
Oh, I'm going to be in Vegas at the Community of Human and Organizational Learning Conference in the middle of June. So that'll be the next chance. Actually, Ben and Ron and I are doing a fireside punk rock safety chat at Inveius.

S1
Speaker 1
29:07
That stands to be interesting, to say the least.

S2
Speaker 2
29:11
Now, I'm wondering how that's going to turn out. I'm very intrigued already. I'm incredibly curious

S1
Speaker 1
29:15
and incredibly concerned at the level of trust from the organizers to...

S2
Speaker 2
29:19
To allow you to do so.

S1
Speaker 1
29:21
But so that's coming up. I'm bouncing around a few other places in Europe and the US. I mean, yeah.

S1
Speaker 1
29:30
Actually I've got tickets to Denver, Minnesota in, well, in Denver, the Nuggets game this Saturday night. So I'll be in ball arena. So anyone there?

S2
Speaker 2
29:42
Absolutely. Well, David, I really do appreciate you actually coming by and doing this because I know you just came off the stage and I know you have another commitment. So I'm going to cut it short for you, but I really do appreciate your time.

S1
Speaker 1
29:50
Thanks, Jay. Well done.

S2
Speaker 2
29:51
Thank you.

S3
Speaker 3
29:55
The views and opinions expressed on this podcast are those of the host and its guest and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the company. Examples of analysis discussed within this podcast are only examples. They 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.

S3
Speaker 3
30:15
Assumptions made within this analysis are not reflective of the position of the company. No part of this podcast 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, Jay Allen.