Safety On Tap

What if we spent more time improving work, would health and safety also improve as a result? What if we did that using many of the principles built into safety thinking, but not calling it safety? What if people have been doing exactly that for almost half a decade, with great results? They have, and that's what we're chatting about today.  My guest today is Ian Borges.  Ian is one of the founders and senior leaders at the Semco Style Institute, a collaboration inspired by the almost half a century of revolutionary leadership of Brazilian businessman Ricardo Semler.  Semler's approach to leadership is probably best described as a self-management philosophy, but this kind of approach is often described as democratic leadership, holocracy, or industrial democracy.

I went out three weeks into the real craziness of the coronavirus. I have collected hundreds and hundreds of data points from people like you giving me an insight into what you are facing right now. And the opportunities that adversity brings two things are emerging, which are the focus of today's conversation with Dr. David Provan, the tension between feeling safe versus being safe. And the need for us to intentionally build resilience into the way we work in our organizations, which it turns out seems not to be new challenges. They're just made much more apparent in tough times.

I am planning to still bring you regular podcasts.  But we can't ignore what's going on in these coronavirus times.  To distinguish these podcasts from the regular ones, I thought I would number them C1, C2, but then I realised, coronavirus is not defining who I am and my response right now.  What is defining me, is togetherness.  So this is episode is not C1, its T1, T for Togetherness.  The first of these hopefully short series of podcasts focused on how together we can tackle and adapt through coronavirus times. 

Today's guest brings so much learning to you today. A safety concierge, a career with laser-focused intent, not fitting into a box, and understanding where the real value lies in customer interaction. You're in for a treat. Cameron is a career health and safety professional, with health and safety experience across many sectors with roles from the frontline into senior leadership in high-risk industries. It is his work outside of safety which really cranks up my curiosity. He is currently a Solutions Engineer at RealWear, which their website says is the world’s best hands-free wearable rugged Android tablet for industrial workers. But you won't hear a lot about RealWear or their products in this episode, and that will make sense to you at the end. Cameron is teaching us not just in what he says, but what he doesn't say.

I usually try to make episodes that are as timeless as possible, in as much as you might listen the day it comes out, or a year or two later. Today's episode is both very timely today, because it is the 17th of March 2020, amidst the exponential growth of the coronavirus, or COVID-19, or SARS-COV-2, NCOV, or any other name people give it. But even if you are listening to this in a years time when I hope things are drastically better, keep going, because whilst what you are about to hear is sharply relevant today, it will still be in the future too, because this is about the future we seek to create.

Five times in the past week, I have had business card ceremonies.    You know those moments, not very long, a second or two, the cultural practice repeated millions of times every day across the business world, the moment in time for the passing of a little piece of card from one person to another.    I don't want your business card, and I don’t think anyone else wants yours or mine either.  And I'll tell you why. 

Many of you will know Professor Erik Hollnagel. Erik said he doesn’t like long introductions, so I'll do it in the intro here before the actual interview. Erik is Senior Professor of Patient Safety at the University of Jönköping, Sweden. You may have heard of Erik from his prolific writing, with well knows books including Safety I and Safety II, the Past and Future of Safety Management, and Resilience Engineering, Concepts and Precepts. He is here not because I am a believer, but as Erik so simply tell us, because it makes sense.

In this episode we're continuing our recent theme of looking at the future.  Previous guest and friend of the show Kobi Simmat, CEO at Best Practice, shares a couple of big business trends he is seeing, which are relevant to all of us, we dig into some of the key business skills which might help you become the next CEO, and hear about an awesome live event he is putting on with a phenomenal line up of speakers to help businesses create their own better future.  

It's great to bring you another listener question. These kinds of podcasts are designed to help you bridge the gap between hearing and knowing something, and putting it into practice in real life. I can tell you all the stories under the sun, but there is something special, and simply enlightening about a specific person with a specific goal and you hearing it in the first-person. This is from Clinton Horn, writing to me in response to episode 90, How to prepare for a conference presentation:  

Being future-ready and future-relevant means that we need different skills than what got us here. Not only that, today's guest today sees tensions businesses experience between competing goals, tensions we need to see and wrestle with to be future-ready and future-relevant. My guest today is Sheri Greenwell, a health and safety leader and what I would call a neogeneralist. Sheri is passionately engaged in health and safety which makes an impact, yet doesn't fit the usual mold for a health and safety professionals. Which is the very reason why she adds so much value?

A sunk cost is the bias in many animals, humans and pigeons included, to continue with a course of action or commitment on the basis of costs already incurred.  These costs might be time, money, energy, or even social capital (being seen to be committed).  The more we perceive that we have invested, the more likely we will continue down the same path even in the face of contrary information, changing circumstances or diminishing chances of success. 

Can we learn better about our operations? What if we learned, to learn better? My guest today is Andy White, a superbly intelligent, caring, and insightful safety professional.  An engineer by training, he morphed into safety given what he learned about managing actual safety managing construction projects.  Andy is a lifelong learner, in both the experiential sense and the academic sense.  He has worked in Antarctica as safety advisor to the New Zealand contingent down there, he's worked in adventure tourism, he's a university lecturer, and now head of safety innovation at one of Canada's largest infrastructure construction firms.   Andy has been such an impactful peer, and teacher for me, so it's quite exciting to share him with you.

Every episode of this podcast finishes with these same words: Until next time, what's the one thing you'll do to take positive, effective or rewarding action, to grow yourself, and drastically improve health and safety along the way?   What does that action look like? Because there is a good action, and there is not so good action.

This one is a melting pot of ideas and perspectives. Learning about microlearning, learning from gifted kids, and all of this from a chemical engineering Ph.D.My guest today is Kirstine Hulse. She is a chemical engineer, who ended up in a really diverse range of roles including health and safety. And she is a leader in the field of gifted kids education. She is currently the General Manager of Health and Safety at Cavalier Bremworth, the carpet industry legends in New Zealand, and is a Director at the New Zealand Centre for Gifted Education.

In that sense, I am not the flower flourishing but the gardener, carefully helping prepare soil, to sow new seeds of ideas and challenge, to water and fertilise the growth of others. But events can be a flash in the pan, superbly energising and flourishing in the moment, which often fades away quickly. I will be supercharging this hybrid combo approach to learning in 2020.  

For how long did you and your partner date? How long before you and your partner made some significant decisions, like meeting each other's family, going on holiday together, getting a dog, sharing bank details, moving in together, or maybe (call me old fashioned), getting married? We are all in sales now.  To sell is human.  Maybe you might spend some of your reflection time in the holidays thinking about how you can improve your marketing and sales capability. 

Here at Safety on Tap, we spend a lot of time looking forward to new ideas, innovation, and a future-focus.   But, as you know, reflecting on our experiences, and making sense of that socially with each other, is one of the most powerful sources of learning right under our noses.  Today, my guest reflects on a career of insights, to fuel your growth.  I'm chatting with Russel Skilleter.  Career health and safety professional, looking back on a few decades of experiences.  I'll let him tell you the story. 

Here is our first taste, bringing the Safety Color Concept to an entire conference room, most of whom who have never heard it before, live from the South Australian Safety Symposium. It describes the nature causes problems and effects of Safety Cutter. Dave Provan and I started Collaborating a little while ago to bring the Safety Cutter problem and solutions to life, out of academia and into practice.

My guest today is Professor Andrew Sharman, President of the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health.  Many of you listening will be IOSH members or might have done training which was delivered or accredited by IOSH.  Andrew is the CEO of international culture and leadership consultancy RMS, with qualifications in health and safety law, industrial psychology and organisational behavior.  Andrew is professor of leadership and safety culture at CEDEP, the European Centre for Executive Development, and a prolific author with titles including from Accidents to Zero, The Wellbeing Book, Naked Safety, and Mind Your Own Business: What Your MBA Should Have Taught You About Workplace Health and Safety which he co-authored with former Chair of the UK Health and Safety Executive Dame Judith Hackett. 

I literally just had a conversation with someone, who told me about a serious near-miss incident.  An incident so close to deadly for one person it gave me shivers.  Thankfully they weren't badly hurt.  The trouble was, after that happened, someone else died.  This is the story of the relationship between blame and learning.