Safety On Tap

In my first ever internal safety role, I was shocked to discover in my performance review that my results were tied to the injury statistics of the business units I was supporting.  In 2020, the way I enable people like you to implement learning teams, comes with a 100% money back guarantee.  The fine print is where we should be held accountable for change.  But you know what else happens in the fine print….

There are conversations I bring you on the podcast which have a specific focus, topic or slant.  There are others, which are simply conversations that I want to have, and I thought I would invite you in to listen.  I love exploring my own curiosity about people, their stories and experiences and insights.  This is one of those conversations, which is why this episode is called, Thinking Out Loud, with Adam Johns. 

I've shared with you before some of the most impactful lessons I've learned in my life, which have come from my parents. That's from episode 119, called The #1 Question. My dad's was, 'measure twice, cut once'. An old carpenters mantra, my dad, not being a carpenter, seemed to be a great teacher because he himself was a kind of novice with tools and physical stuff.  

Fellow nerds (or maybe just fellow spreadsheet aficionados), did you recognise what each of the keyboard shortcuts are in the title of this episode? Ctrl+C, and Ctrl+Alt+V+E? These seemingly innocuous actions might make the all the difference between wasted effort and effective work for you.

There is an elephant in my office.  Its been there for ages, thought its only in the past few years that I've actually seen it.  You have one, maybe more, where you work too.  It's time to talk about it. 

Regular listeners will know me for passionately spruiking and putting into practice a few key concepts.  Today you'll hear my conversation with Peter. Peter works in a pretty large organisation which have a very diverse risk profile, and some pretty high risk aspects. 

AmThere is lots of talk about AI. As in, artificial intelligence. Tech is all the rage, and we are interfacing more and more directly with artificial intelligence - just think about the predictive text on your phone. But a much older kind of AI hold huge promise for health and safety practice, if only more people knew about it. Appreciate Inquiry is the topic of discussion today, and I really enjoyed this conversation with Amanda Clements on what it is, and how it has enabled both of us to be better professionals. Amanda is a senior health and safety professional in a large road services construction and maintenance business. She's quite out of the box, as you will discover.

This is a short episode on a big P - a principle to help you improve.  It's a journey, a tension, between trying to know the world, and constructing the unknowable. It will make sense, stick with me.

My guest today is the inimitable and supremely articulate Traci Carse. Traci is the Occupational Psychologist at Fire and Rescue NSW, one of the world’s largest urban fire and rescue services. Traci has significant experience in applying psychology in the workplace through the design and delivery of mental health, resilience & wellbeing assessments and interventions across a range of work settings. Traci is an Adjunct Fellow of Macquarie University, a Board Approved Supervisor, a Certified Gallup Strengths Coach, and recently held a position on the National Committee, College of Organisational Psychologists , as lead for the APS Workplace Excellence Awards.

One of the worst things to do whilst you are crossing the street in downtown Ho Chi Minh City, amongst the cars and mostly motorbikes and tuk-tuks screaming past in all directions, is to stop, to stand still. Crossing the street in downtown Ho Chi Minh City. That's the analogy I used to explain what happens immediately before disruption, in my opening keynote address to the New Zealand Safeguard Conference in 2019. So the metaphorical opposite of this is to be in motion ourselves. Not stuck, stopped, stalled or stale .

Today's guest is Kathryn McEwan an organisational psychologist, executive coach and mediator with more than 30 years consulting experience across all industry sectors. Her contribution to the profession has been recognised through the award of ‘Fellow’ by the Australian Psychological Society and the College of Organisational Psychologists. She has a special interest in workplace resilience and has authored three books on resilience at work as well as led development of the R@W Toolkit. She lectures, supervises students, is a Board member and more. And today is cutting through the BS about resilience.

This anchor concept is really important to understand and utilise when improving learning is your goal. Change isn't just about engines, it’s about what holds us still or steady, for better and for worse. These anchors, in the forms of assumptions and beliefs, when recognised and challenged reveal deep learning that mere knowledge can't. We can change anchors too, swapping less helpful points of reference with new ones which enhance the learning potential we are trying to tap into. Anchoring as a bias affects all of us, and opens up a discussion about the cognitive short cuts which can either make or break our learning experience and learning outcomes. As for your growth, your development, and your effectiveness….all of this applies to you as much to your organisation. What's your plan to lift anchors, to sail, and where to drop anchors?

Today's guest recently shared a photo of her lying in the middle of one of the busiest commercial airport runways in Australia. Whilst no planes were flying given Covid-19 disruption, it was an apt visual metaphor for the scope and scale of the operations at Brisbane Airport Corporation. Kersty Christensen is the Head of Health and Safety at Brisbane Airport Corporation and has led this transformation of her function into service to her organisation.

Redundancy is a word quite familiar to health and safety people, we use it in good times, and we fear it in bad times.  And I think we always have the wrong end of the stick, for all the wrong reasons.  Today I want to talk about the way we talk about redundancy, to reflect on the irony which is emerging about redundancy, and to suggest a more constructive way for us to talk about our place in the world.   

Today I'm chatting with Dr. Tristan Casey. He has an interest in teamwork, leadership, and organizational culture. Tristan teaches into the Graduate Certificate of Safety Leadership and Bachelor of Social Science at Griffith University. Recently, he completed his second doctorate, this time in safety leadership. Tristan is currently working on research around the management of safety amid COVID19, psychological safety, and safety climate.

I was asked to be a judge of these awards.  I declined.  Later on was asked to help present the Young Safety Professional of the Year award, by way of a video interview since the awards were virtually presented, which I did do, which is kind of peripheral to this episode, but if you stick around after the music at the end I share a few reflections on why I said yes to that very intentionally.    I wanted to share with you my intent about these decisions, which is less about me and this story and more about how you can reflect more deeply on why you do or don't do certain things, and how you can leverage your circle of control to make the world a better place, to actively construct a better future.    Part of this episode draws on the discussion and email with the organisers, explaining my polite decline to be a judge, my reasoning and my not-so-subtle nudging towards something better than average.   

As professionals, as subject matter experts, we think we are in the business of knowing.  This is one of the greatest traps we can fall into, and it blinds us to arguably an equally if not more important idea - what we don't know.  And actually, we aren't at all in the business of knowing.  How often do you say, 'I don't know', or some variation of that? Questions need immediate, complete, and correct answers right? We've been trained from school and TV shows that are successful, right? Win a prize, get a good score, impress the teacher, get a good grade and some money from your Grandma……but life isn't like that. 

I talk a lot about learning because it's the key to performance improvement for all of us.  Today, the previous guest Ron Gantt and I compare and contrast how each of us has been putting social and experiential learning into practice for hoards of people like you amidst the Coronavirus disruption.  Through this, we created something called the Dialogue Manifesto, which I talk a little about in the conversation today, but you can read it for yourself over at safetyontap.com/manifesto.  I encourage you to consider our invitation to start some dialogue of your own using this as a guide. 

The past few months have been hard, for everyone. Like it or not, we leaders who are working on improving health and safety, are inevitably closer to current challenges in business than many other professionals. I don't work on the frontlines of health and safety. My work and my impact happen a little further back, away from the spotlight, supporting people like you to be more effective, to grow, to overcome your challenges. I help leaders like you, and the amazing people in your organisations to learn better, to be more adaptive and resilient - capacities which have never in our lifetime been more important. 

Many of us would have heard a saying like "health and safety professionals have a little hand a big S". If this is true for you as it is for me, then you might have also found the H has felt smaller than ever as the world is gripped by the Covid-19 public health crisis. Similar but different, the public health perspective reveals some interesting insights beyond what an OHS perspective brings, to make us more effective. You've heard today's guest, Steffan on the podcast before, in episode 104. Steffan was the first guinea pig who did a live coaching call with me, so you got a voyeuristic insight into Steffan's challenge, and how we worked through to a better future. This is an awesome example of really powerful learning not just for him but for you the listener. Steffan is back today to offer his insights based on his professional expertise in public health. He was seeing how the little H was leaving many of us scratching our heads in this current mayhem, and very generously offered to share an insight into h