The Safety of Work

Ep. 134: Does caring about psychosocial safety mean we have to stop telling jokes at work?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan, Drew Rae) — Sun, 8 Feb 2026 10:00:00 +0000

The conversation explores how humor serves psychological purposes beyond entertainment, often functioning to establish power hierarchies and devalue professional contributions. Through survey data and qualitative interviews, the research demonstrates that passive coping strategies prevent organizations from understanding the true extent of harm. David and Drew argue that the "just joking" defense creates ambiguity that makes harassment difficult to report, particularly when supervisors are the perpetrators, emphasizing that effective psychosocial safety policies must explicitly address humor-based discrimination.

Discussion Points:

(00:00) Defining psychosocial safety versus psychological safety
(03:07) Introduction to workplace humor research in construction
(06:44) Research aims and the construction industry gender gap
(11:31) Research methodology using surveys and interviews
(15:07) Theoretical framework on humor as communication
(20:10) Survey findings on sexual harassment experiences
(26:24) How humor is weaponized as cover for harassment
(35:36) Conclusions on devaluing professional contributions
(40:08) Key takeaways and practical implications for organizations
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Quotes:

"The harms are real. When we talk about expanding safety into the psychosocial space, however you might feel about that framing and whether safety people are the right people to be managing it, when we're talking about people getting hurt at work, gender based humour is a hazard." - Drew Rae

"I think this is the ultimate, you know, safety is not the absence of incident reports. This is clearly something that's happening to 50, 60, 70% of participants in this study and obviously representative of the broader population. If you're getting no insight into this through any of your systems, then you need to go looking." - David Provan

"The fact that something's a joke is being used almost like weaponised to mask or shield what's actually going on, we need to just like get totally away from the idea that humour is an excuse. The question isn't, is this a joke or not a joke? Question is, what was the underlying purpose of that joke?" - Drew Rae

"If no one's complaining, get worried. We know it's happening. We know that people don't complain. If you're not getting any complaints in your work site, that's not an indication that there's no problem or no harm. That's an indication that people are not feeling safe to complain." - Drew Rae

"Jokes are fine, but not these jokes. And I think this paper really helps us understand where we might be able to draw a less fuzzy boundary around what people can and can't joke about in the workplace." - David Provan

Resources:

Resource Link: https://ascelibrary.org/doi/abs/10.1061/JMENEA.MEENG-7109

Ep. 133: How do policies and metrics shape the outcome of investigations?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan, Drew Rae) — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 10:00:00 +0000

The discussion explores three critical constraint categories: structural elements like mandatory timelines, organizational factors including resource capacity, and relational dynamics affecting investigator access to information. Drawing parallels beyond healthcare, they challenge listeners to reconsider their investigation frameworks, suggesting that organizations inadvertently create systems where investigators focus on meeting procedural requirements rather than generating genuine insights. The discussion emphasizes that effective investigations require adequate capacity, flexible timelines that accommodate complexity, and environments fostering open relationships that enable thorough inquiry and organizational learning.

Discussion Points:

(00:00) Background on NHS patient safety system and 2 million annual incidents
(09:11) Research method and the seven investigation principles
(16:24) Investigation framework with three levels and timeline requirements
(24:56) Finding one structural constraints and how timelines became the focus
(32:41) Finding two organizational capacity and resource mismatches
(37:07) Finding three roles relationships and the independence dilemma
(42:37) Summary deadlines over diagnosis compliance over comprehension procedures over participation
(45:36) Practical takeaways on timelines capacity and relationships
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Quotes:
David Provan: "The more hoops and hurdles and constraints and requirements that you put into the investigation process, the more that those things become the focus of the investigator, as opposed to the learning and improvement outcome that we're trying to achieve."

Drew Rae: "If you wanted to improve investigations in your organization, one simple leadership practice you could take is when someone gives you the investigation report, basically just say, no, there's nothing here that surprises me. Go away, come back and learn something."

David Provan: "These are the outcomes we're trying to achieve and the investigation takes as long as it takes. And if it's being held up for any reason, this is the process to check in on progress. As long as it's being worked on."

Drew Rae: "Investigations are way more about relationships than I think people realise when they're planning them. And so we've got to create an environment in which investigators can build and use relationships."

David Provan: "There's no reason that if you learn something during an investigation that you need to wait till the report signed off and finished before you do something about it... as soon as we learn something that we become curious or concerned about, we should act on it."

Resources:

Resource Link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0925753525002243

Intelligent automated systems to support human teamwork: perceived invasiveness impacts team members’ psychological reactions negatively

Ep. 132: How much should we worry about the invasiveness of team support AI?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 14 Sep 2025 10:00:00 +0000

The findings reveal that invasiveness drives negative reactions more than the stated purpose of monitoring, with participants showing skepticism about AI's ability to accurately measure teamwork quality. The hosts emphasize that even well-intentioned monitoring systems introduce psychosocial hazards and stress, requiring organizations to carefully balance potential benefits against worker well-being impacts when implementing AI-powered team support systems.

Discussion Points:

(00:00) AI team monitoring invasiveness, AI workplace surveillance
(03:16) Research paper introduction and authors from Germany
(04:48) Previous research on electronic monitoring and employee reactions
(08:49) Study one methodology with invasiveness levels and video scenarios
(12:12) Study two simulation with teams designing fitness trackers
(17:46) Study one findings on invasiveness and fairness perceptions
(24:07) Study two results and participant skepticism about monitoring accuracy
(32:48) Practical takeaways on invasiveness levels and stakeholder management
(40:42) Final recommendations on balancing benefits and invasiveness
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Quotes:

Drew Rae: "The moment you divide it up and you just try to analyze the human behavior or analyze the automation, you lose the understanding of where the safety is coming from and what's necessary for it to be safe."

David Provan: "We actually don't think about that automation in the context of the overall system and all of the interfaces and everything like that. So we, we look at AI as AI and, you know, deploying. Introducing ai, but we don't do any kind of comprehensive analysis of, you know, what's gonna be all of the flow on implications and interfaces and potentially unintended consequences or the system, not necessarily just the technology or automation itself."

Drew Rae: People are going to have reactions. And those reactions are gonna have a big impact on their willingness for you to do this in the first place...You can't just force it onto them… All the things that you're trying to improve might actually get worse because of the monitoring.

David Provan: "But I think this paper makes a really good argument, which is actually our automated system should be far more flexible than that. So I might be able to adjust, you know, it's functioning. If I know, if I, if I know enough about how it's functioning and why it's functioning, and I realize that the automation can't understand context and situation, then I should be able to make adjustments."

Drew Rae: Most people don't mind if their car is giving them feedback on their driving, but most people don't like it if their car is phoning home to your boss, giving information about your driving.

Resources:

Ep. 131: How can we make automated systems team players?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan, Drew Rae) — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 10:00:00 +0000

The discussion centers on two key design principles: observability, which ensures humans can understand what automated systems are doing and why, and direct ability, which allows humans to steer automation rather than simply turning it on or off. Using examples from aviation incidents like Boeing's MCAS system and emerging AI technologies, the episode demonstrates how these 25-year-old principles remain relevant for contemporary automation challenges in safety-critical systems.

Discussion Points:

(00:00) Background on automation and natural experiments in safety
(04:58) Hard vs soft skills debate and limitations of binary thinking
(08:12) Two common approaches to automation problems and their flaws
(12:20) The substitution myth and why simple replacement doesn't work
(17:25) Design principles for coordination, observability, and direct ability
(24:33) Observability challenges with AI and machine learning systems
(26:25) Direct ability and the problem of binary control options
(30:47) Design implications and avoiding simplistic solutions
(33:27) Practical takeaways for human automation coordination
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Quotes:

Drew Rae: "It's not enough for an expert system to just like constantly tell you all of the underlying rules that it's applying, that that doesn't really give you the right level of visibility as understanding what it thinks the current state is."

Drew Rae: "There's, there's gotta be ways of allowing all the animation to keep working, but to be able to. Retain control, and that's a really difficult design problem."

Resources:

Ep. 130: What are the problems with Just Culture models?

djprovan@gmail.com (Drew Rae, David Provan) — Sun, 3 Aug 2025 10:00:00 +0000

You'll hear about BP's attempt to create a fairer process using eight new questions that focus more on system factors like management influence, procedural clarity, and organizational goal conflicts. They discuss how even this thoughtfully redesigned framework still resulted in predominantly individual-focused interventions, with 80% of actions targeting people rather than systems, despite classifying most incidents as system-induced errors. The episode provides critical insights for safety professionals questioning whether just culture processes add value or represent organizational clutter that should be eliminated entirely.

Discussion Points:

(00:00) Introduction to just culture models and their problems
(03:00) Historical context of Jim Reason's culpability framework and industry adoption
(07:37) Introduction to the BP case study research paper and methodology
(15:19) Existing BP just culture process and its implementation problems
(21:27) Literature review findings on just culture model weaknesses
(29:20) The eight question redesigned BP just culture framework
(43:25) Evaluation of the new process and classification outcomes
(53:25) Practical takeaways and system versus individual focus
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Quotes:

David Provan: "I think the problem with the just culture model is that we have a just culture model."

Drew Rae: "If your system problem is, we are not leaning hard enough onto individuals to behave correctly, then you are not really doing system thinking."

David Provan: "Even though we are saying that, you know, this is great because 79% of these cases have now been classified as system-induced errors, over 80% of the actions as a result of those system-induced errors are at the individual leve.l"

Drew Rae: "Every single outcome from the process is some sort of statement about disciplining a person, even when it's not disciplining a person. That's still the focus."

David Provan: "Any process that you put in place in your organization that doesn't have these quality management aspects is likely to be something that drifts away from its intended purpose."

Resources:

The Big Six: key principles for effective use of Behavior substitution in interventions to de-implement low-value care

Ep. 129: How can we use swapping as a strategy for decluttering?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan, Drew Rae) — Sun, 23 Feb 2025 10:00:00 +0000

You’ll hear six key principles for effective behavioral substitution, drawing parallels between healthcare and safety contexts. They discuss how these principles can guide both the removal of ineffective practices and the implementation of new ones, emphasizing the importance of considering practical needs, existing skills, and organizational resources when making such changes. The episode provides valuable insights for safety professionals looking to improve their organization's safety practices through evidence-based substitution strategies.

Discussion Points:

((00:00) Introduction and episode overview on swapping as a decluttering strategy
(00:59) Background discussion on behavioral science and de-implementation
(02:27) Understanding decluttering and de-implementation in healthcare context
(05:08) Example of de-implementation in clinical practice and patient care
(06:55) Introduction to the paper and authors' background
(16:32) First principle: Evidence and rationale for substitute behaviors
(19:49) Second principle: Meeting both clinical and practical objectives
(24:51) Third principle: Clear explanability of new practices
(26:29) Fourth principle: Time considerations for substitute behaviors
(28:30) Fifth principle: Alignment with existing skills
(31:40) Sixth principle: Cost implications of substitute behaviors
(34:39) Three practical takeaways and implementation strategies, the answer to this episode’s question
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Quotes:

"You can't swap out something that people believe works for something that they don't believe works." - Drew Rae

"A lot of the safety, if not all the safety work we do in organisations is about anxiety reduction, not necessarily about improving safety.” - David Provan

"Rather than thinking about decluttering as just what we can reduce or take away, it may be more useful to think about it as a process of gradually swapping out each thing that's not working well." - Drew Rae

"If you can't explain the substitute behavior with the same ease which you can explain the behavior that you want to be implemented, then people have to work a bit harder and they might go. Why are we making this all so complex?" - David Provan

“That's the point they're making here, is like maybe the patient doesn't need care, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't acknowledge their need for care and their need to be taken seriously.” - Drew Rae

Resources:

Ep. 128: What are the attributes of an effective supervisor?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan, Drew Rae) — Sun, 16 Feb 2025 10:00:00 +0000

The discussion challenges traditional views of supervision by emphasizing the importance of psychological safety and predictable relationships between supervisors and workers. Through analysis of interviews with both supervisors and supervisees, the research highlights how effective supervision requires balancing organizational needs with worker support while maintaining clear boundaries and expectations. The findings suggest that organizations should focus on developing explicit supervision models that promote both technical expertise and relationship skills.

Discussion Points:

(00:00) Introduction - what makes an effective supervisor?
(02:29) Narrowing research focus, specific industry context
(06:07) Introduction to the research paper and authors' backgrounds
(09:46) The literature review's structure and key findings
(22:12) Research methodology, interview approach, eight core themes, Theme 1: Safety and establishing predictable relationships
(26:00) Theme 2-3: Emotional impact of work and learning/growth
(35:45) Theme 4-5: Leadership behaviors and integrity/justice
(42:12) Theme 6-7: Balancing supervision functions and organizational processes
(51:14) Key takeaways and practical implications for organizations
(55:00) The answer to our question: What are the attributes of an effective supervisor? The answer is, everything you expect, but with a new emphasis on the safety and predictability of that relationship.
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Quotes:

"There is a ton of safety research which says that frontline supervision - that direct relationship between a team leader and the people they're supervising - is really, really important for safety." - Drew Rae

"Supervision is a really important aspect of safety and safety management." - David Provan

"Power is inherent in these relationships... Supervisors don't have a lot of formal power, so the supervisor themselves often won't feel that they have power at all." - Drew Rae

"This is not an exploratory study. This is a properly conducted piece of high quality, qualitative research, and I think it does draw novel insights." - Drew Rae

Resources:

Safety as a Fifth Dimension in Supervision: Stories from the Frontline

Ep. 127: Should safety education focus on hard skills

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan, Drew Rae) — Sun, 9 Feb 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Drawing on insights from business leaders and contemporary educational theory, we propose that effective safety professionals require both technical expertise and sophisticated narrative capabilities. The findings suggest significant implications for safety education and professional development, challenging institutions to reconsider how they prepare safety practitioners for increasingly complex organizational environments. Rather than perpetuating false dichotomies between hard and soft skills, we argue for an educational approach that develops both technical and narrative capabilities in an integrated manner, particularly crucial for safety change management where success depends on both procedural competence and compelling storytelling.

Discussion Points:

(00:00) Introduction - Should safety education focus on hard or soft skills?
(01:04) Background - Safety Science Innovation Lab and higher education context
(02:27) Hard vs Soft Skills - Discussing the limitations of this categorization
(05:08) Storycraft Report - Overview and methodology of the Oxford study
(15:00) Understanding Narrative - Definitions and importance in business
(18:15) Three Core Business Purposes of Narrative: Communicating business values, persuasion and influence, driving and managing change
(26:06) Five Essential Narrative Skills Framework: Narrative communication, empathy and perspective taking, critical analysis, creativity and imagination, digital skills
(36:00) Who Needs Narrative Skills - Integration of STEM and humanities in education
(40:35) Three Key Takeaways - Value of tertiary education, importance of narrative skills in safety, managing change
The answer to our question: Should safety education focus on hard skills or soft skills? If you didn’t like the question, I think you will like the answer, which is: We should stop dividing the world into hard skills and soft skills, or into STEM and into humanities. Just teach everyone both.
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Quotes:

“There are different skill categories, but they’re mostly about specific skills versus transferable skills.” - Drew

“One of the things that Griffith [University] was specifically set up for is based on the idea that education is important for social mobility.” - Drew

“A narrative in business is the communication of a business activity or idea…it’s the ability to tell your story or your direction.”- David

“if a business can convey some narrative or strategic vision about who they are and what they’re doing, they’re going to get much more useful work out of their employees.” - Drew

Resources:

Storycraft: the importance of narrative and narrative skills in business

Seeking a scientific and pragmatic approach to safety culture in the North American construction industry

Ep. 126: Is it time to stop talking about safety culture?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan, Drew Rae) — Sun, 26 Jan 2025 10:00:00 +0000

In this discussion, we dissect various models of safety culture, scrutinizing how organizations perceive, measure, and manage these concepts. From artifacts like management systems to individual attitudes and behaviors, we delve into the inconsistencies and challenges of these models. We also revisit historical perspectives, such as Dov Zohar's work, to understand their influence on contemporary safety paradigms. Our conversation critically examines the missteps of industries like nuclear and aviation, which have mandated the management of ambiguous concepts without solid scientific grounding. We advocate for a shift from vague cultural mandates to actionable strategies, offering insights into enhancing clarity and effectiveness in both regulatory practices and organizational improvements. This episode aims to inspire a reevaluation of safety culture, pushing for a more scientifically grounded and practical approach to safety science.

Some highlights from the paper:

Safety culture as a concept is examined from scientific and pragmatic perspectives.
The case is made for the removal of safety culture from the safety science lexicon.
Much safety culture research is vulnerable to a fallacy of logic – we should not take a selection of parts to equal the whole.
Robust research of the various individual ‘elements’ of safety culture, in methodologically appropriate ways, will enhance the field of safety science and better support improvements in practice.

Discussion Points:

(00:00) Introduction: Rethinking Safety Culture - An overview of the conversation around safety culture and its evolving significance
(07:04) Challenges in Defining Safety Culture - Exploring the difficulties in pinning down a clear and universal definition of safety culture
(10:00) Safety Culture Research Models & Philosophies - different research models in safety culture, and the philosophy behind them, issues with lumping all safety-related terms together
(17:00) Three Definitions of Safety Culture - Is it social, individual, or organizational? Each perspective offers a unique research approach
(21:00) Perceptions of Safety Culture - The way we understand safety culture might differ greatly from someone else’s interpretation
(22:00) Buckets of Safety Culture: Young vs. Mature Organizations
(24:23) The Importance of Specificity Over Vagueness, difference between safety climate and safety culture
(29:11) The One-Question Survey: Industry Perspectives and Practical Insights - Examining the one-question survey methodology, participant responses, and the insights gathered from industry perspectives.
(36:00) Safety Performance vs. Safety Culture
Discussing the distinction between safety performance and the broader concept of safety culture.
(39:52) Clarifying Definitions: Drew and David’s Papers
(40:25) Meta Takeaway: Defining 'Culture' Specifically - ask yourself what you actually mean and define it specifically
Conclusions and Takeaways
The final question: Is it time to stop talking about safety culture? The answer: "Yep."
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Quotes:

“The paper itself is very very stylish and self -aware and that's important not just for readability but for the state that this conversation is in...it's got all of these references that show that they're very aware of the landmines that people keep stepping on, in just even trying to write and untangle safety culture.” - Drew

“When someone uses the term ‘safety culture’, it's very common for them to be thinking about everything from commitment of people, compliance with procedures, level of resources, the balancing of goals, safety communication, leadership. All of these individual things just get lumped together into this term ‘safety culture.” - David

“The moment you start trying to turn it into practical actions, that's when everything starts to crumble - when there aren't good, agreed definitions.”- Drew

“You can't just wander into a company and say, ‘I want to study company culture.’ That's like a marine biologist going into the ocean and saying, ‘I want to look at things that live in the ocean’...Be precise, be narrow, be specific about what it is that you actually want to look at.” - Drew

Resources:

Ep.44 What do we mean when we talk about safety culture?

Dov Zohar’s Published Research

The Article - The Risks Of Using ChatGPT to Obtain Common Safety-Related Information and Advice

Ep. 125: Does ChatGPT provide good safety advice?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan, Drew Rae) — Sun, 10 Nov 2024 10:00:00 +0000

From discussing mobile phone use while driving to the challenges of giving advice to older adults at risk of falls, this episode covers ChatGPT’s responses to a wide range of safety topics - identifying biases, inconsistencies, and areas where ChatGPT aligns or falls short of expert advice. The broader implications of relying on ChatGPT for safety advice are examined carefully, especially in workplace settings. While ChatGPT often mirrors general lay understanding, it can overlook critical organizational responsibilities, potentially leading to oversimplified or erroneous advice. This episode underscores the importance of using AI-generated content cautiously, particularly in crafting workplace policies or addressing complex safety topics. By engaging with multiple evidence-based sources and consulting experts, organizations can better navigate the limitations of AI tools.

Discussion Points:

Drew and David discuss their own recent experience with generative AI
The multiple 15 authors are all experts, discussing the methods used
Examining the nine different question scenarios
‘Mobile phone use while driving’ results
Crowd/crush safety advice
Advice for preventing falls in older adults
Analyzing ChatGPT response formats
Exercising outdoors near traffic with asthma
Questioning ChatGPT about how to engage a distressed person who may commit suicide
Safety working ‘under high pressure’ and job demands, burnout prevention
Lack of nuance in ChatGPT
The safety of sharing personal data on fitness apps, how can it be shared safely?
Is it safe to operate heavy machinery when fatigued? Testing several ways to ask this question - sleepy, tired, fatigued
Conclusions and takeaways
The answer to our episode’s question: “AI is not currently a suitable source for writing safety guidelines or advice”
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Quotes:

“This is one of the first papers that I've seen that actually gives us sort of fair test of ChatGPT for a realistic safety application.” - Drew

“I quite like the idea that they chose questions which may be something that a lay person or even a generalist safety practitioner might ask ChatGPT, and then they had an expert in that area to analyze the quality of the answer that was given.” - David

“I really liked the way that this paper published the transcripts of all of those interactions

with ChatGPT. So exactly what question the expert asked it, and exactly the transcript of what ChatGPT provided.”- David

“In case anyone is wondering about the evidence based advice, if you think there is a nearby terrorist attack, chat GPT's answer is consistent with the latest empirical evidence, which is run. There they go on to say that the rest of the items are essentially the standard advice that police and emergency services give.” - Drew

“[ChatGPT] seems to prioritize based on how frequently something appears rather than some sort of logical ordering or consideration of what would make sense.” - Drew

“As a supplement to an expert, it's a good way of maybe finding things that you might not have considered. But as a sole source of advice or a sole source of hazard identification or a sole position on safety, it's not where it needs to be…” - David

Resources:

DisasterCast Episode 54: Stadium Disasters

The Article: Safety Should Be a Performance Driver

Episode 121: Is Safety Good for Business?

Ep. 124 Is safety a key value driver for business?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan, Drew Rae) — Sun, 1 Sep 2024 10:00:00 +0000

We challenge the notion that high injury rates are punished by market forces, as we dig into this article that posits the opposite: that safety should be a performance driver. Our analysis dives deep into the credibility and methodologies of the article, emphasizing the critical role of peer review and the broader body of knowledge.

We'll also scrutinize the use of data as rhetoric versus evidence, focusing on the transparency and rigor of research methods when interviewing executives about safety practices. Is safety merely seen as a compliance issue or a strategic investment? We dissect the methodologies, including participant selection and question framing, to uncover potential biases. Finally, we critique a proposed five-step process aimed at transforming safety into a competitive advantage. From aligning on the meaning of safety to incentivizing employees, we expose significant gaps in academic rigor and alignment with established safety literature.

This conversation serves as a powerful critique of superficial analyses by those outside the safety science domain, offering listeners critical insights into the complexity of safety management and its potential alignment with organizational goals.

Discussion Points:

Re-examining the role of safety as a value driver for business
Comparing contrasting research findings and cautioning about evaluating research
Data as rhetoric in safety
Transparency and methodology are crucial in research, especially when interviewing executives about workplace safety
Executives' perspectives on safety are questioned, research methods are critiqued
Clarifying claims and performance in business
The five-step process for competitive advantage
A study on the effectiveness of safety training methods
Safety management is complex and requires evidence-based strategies, not superficial analysis or reliance on compliance training
Strategic value of workplace safety
Safety's impact on business success is uncertain, but exploring its alignment with organizational goals is important
Takeaways
The answer to our episode’s question: “the short answer is we still don't know!”
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Quotes:

“The trouble is, then we don't know whether what they're referring to is published research that might be somewhere else that we can look for for the details, or work that they did specifically for this article, or other work that they've done that was just never published.” - Drew

“We've got to be really careful…this is using data as rhetoric, not using data as data.” - Drew

“I wouldn't be surprised that most people see safety as both a cost and as an outcome.”- Drew

“So you've got two-thirds of these companies that don't even have any safety metric, like not even an injury metric or anything that they monitor.” - David

“So we kind of assume business performance means financial performance, but that in itself is never clarified.” - David

Resources:

The Paper: Risk as Analysis and Risk as Feelings: Some thoughts about Affect, Reason, Risk and Rationality

Ep. 123: Is risk a science or a feeling?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan, Drew Rae) — Sat, 3 Aug 2024 22:00:00 +0000

From the perceived control in everyday activities like driving, to the dread associated with nuclear accidents, we discuss how emotional responses can sometimes skew our rational assessments of risk. Finally, we explore the ethical and practical challenges of balancing emotional and analytical approaches in risk communication, especially in high-stakes scenarios like terrorism and public safety. The conversation touches on real-world examples, such as the aftermath of the September 11 attacks and the controversial discussions around gun ownership. We emphasize the importance of framing and narrative in conveying risk information effectively, ensuring that it resonates with and is clearly understood by diverse audiences.

Discussion Points:

Understanding risk perception, Paul Slovic's work and how it has shaped safety practices and decisions in everyday life
“Affect heuristic” in decision making, influenced by emotions and past experiences, leading to inconsistencies in risk perception.
Feeling in-control vs. “scary concepts”, risks are perceived differently due to emotions, control, and misunderstandings of probabilities, as seen in driving
Risks are assessed differently based on probabilities, outcomes, framing, and context, influencing decision-making
Other studies, looking at how people see risk, assessing your personal fear or risk from causes of death from cancer to stroke to car accidents to shark attacks vs. your own bathroom
Balance between emotional and analytical risk evaluation
Math and statistical examples of how risk is presented and perceived
Post 9/11 terrorist fears vs. statistics
Ethical considerations in communication, and challenges in conveying risk information
Takeaways
The answer to our episode’s question: “the short answer is both”
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Quotes:

“Risk is analysis where we bring logic, reason, and science or data or facts, and bring it to bear on hazard management.” - David

“There may not be a perfect representation of any risk.” - Drew

“If that's the important bit, then blow it up to the entire slide and get rid of the diagram and just show us the important bit.”- Drew

“It's probably a bit unfair on humans to say that using feeling and emotion isn't a rational thing to do.” - David

“The authors are almost saying here that for some types of risks and situations, risk as a feeling is great.” - David

Resources:

The Paper: No More Bullet Points

Ep. 122: What makes a good presentation?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan, Drew Rae) — Sun, 21 Jul 2024 10:00:00 +0000

The discussion provides an in-depth examination of the principles of multimedia, modality, and redundancy, all of which are crucial for optimizing learning and information retention. The episode also offers a wealth of practical strategies for interactive design and meticulous preparation, aimed at enhancing audience engagement and comprehension. These strategies include the use of visual aids, storytelling techniques, and audience participation elements to create a more dynamic and immersive experience. By adopting these methods, presenters can not only convey their message more effectively but also make the learning process more enjoyable and impactful for their audience.

The Paper’s Abstract

Active training techniques are effective because they engage learners in tasks that promote deep thought, discussion, problem-solving, social interaction, and hands-on learning. Passive training is less effective because learners are relegated to merely listening and watching as an instructor does all of the mental, social, and physical work. Bullet-point lectures may be poorly suited for meaningful training because they usually adopt a model of passive learning and they tend to combine spoken words and displayed text in ways that may actually decrease comprehension. PowerPoint can serve as a tool to promote active learning if we eliminate lengthy bullet lists and use instructional images to guide group discussions, problem-solving activities, and hands-on experiences.

Discussion Points:

Background on the author Mitch Ricketts and the paper
Active vs. passive learning
Constructive and interactive learning
Balancing text and images using multimedia, modality, and redundancy principles
Use of questions on slides to prompt discussion and interaction
Importance of managing cognitive load for audience engagement
Clear, concise content and the value of signaling in presentations
The significance of preparation and creating separate presentations for different needs
Strategies for creating effective slides focused on visuals over text
Moving away from bullet points to use impactful images and labels
Takeaways - What you SHOULD do on your slides
The answer to our episode’s question is, the short answer here is the title of the paper- "No more bullet points."

Quotes:

“This is what you might call an applied literature review. It's someone taking the literature and interpreting that literature for a particular purpose.” - Drew

“There's a lot of research that says that a lot of high school and university teachers rely on fairly outdated and disproven theories about these different modes of learning.” - Drew

“If that's the important bit, then blow it up to the entire slide and get rid of the diagram and just show us the important bit.”- Drew

“if you're a learner and you see a giant pair of goggles on a PowerPoint slide with just the word “goggles”, then all you're going to be doing now is just listening to what the presenter is saying. And hopefully they're saying something about goggles.” - David

“Slides aren't there to look interesting and slides aren't there to carry the weight of the content. Think of them as visual support.” - Drew

Resources:

The Paper: The Tension Between Worker Safety and Organization Survival

Ep. 121 Is safety good for business?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan, Drew Rae) — Sun, 7 Jul 2024 10:00:00 +0000

We examine whether a safe work environment truly enhances productivity and engagement or if it stifles business efficiency. Historical incidents like the Union Carbide disaster and BP's Deepwater Horizon blowout are analyzed to question if neglecting safety can still lead to profitability. Finally, we break down the misconception that good safety practices automatically translate to business profitability. We highlight the tangible benefits such as enhanced publicity, stronger client relationships, and improved employee satisfaction, and stress the importance of complex discussions about the actual costs vs. benefits of safety practices.

The Paper’s Abstract

This research addresses the fundamental question of whether providing a 15 safe workplace improves or hinders organizational survival, because there are conflicting predictions on the relationship between worker safety and organizational performance. The results, based on a unique longitudinal database covering over 100,000 organizations across 25 years in the U.S. state of Oregon, indicate that in general organizations that provide a safe workplace have significantly lower odds and 20 length of survival. Additionally, the organizations that would in general have better survival odds, benefit most from not providing a safe workplace. This suggests that relying on the market does not engender workplace safety.

Discussion Points:

Is safety “good for business”? Examining the relationship between safety and business viability
Bhopal and the costs, Occidental - you can still make money without safety
The backgrounds and qualifications of the paper’s authors
Workplace safety can both benefit and hinder organizational survival due to productivity prioritization and potential risks
Workplace safety and business performance are complexly related, with a study showing a decrease in survival odds and length due to safety prioritization
Safety compliance at the lowest minimal cost may hinder productivity and divert attention from safety, leading to increased risks
Safety is not inherently good for business; instead, it can bring tangible benefits like publicity, client relationships, and employee satisfaction
Strict regulations and upfront investments in safety are necessary for fostering a safer work environment and ensuring business success
Takeaways - Stop claiming safety is “good for business”
The answer to our episode’s question is, “So the short answer is on average, no. At least according to this study, businesses are more likely to survive in the short term and long term if they're hurting more people more seriously.”

Quotes:

“The sorts of things that you do to improve safety are the sorts of things that I thought should also improve productivity and reliability in the long run.” - David

“Which is science, right? That's what it's about. We think we're right until we get a new piece of information and realize that maybe we weren't as right as we thought we were.” - David

“Even though there is a reasonably high volume of research out there, it's really hard to look very directly at the question.”- Drew

“So we know from this data that it's not true that providing a safe workplace makes you more competitive.” - Drew

Resources:

Ep. 120: What does the literature say about safety professionals?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan, Drew Rae) — Sun, 26 May 2024 10:00:00 +0000

David and Drew share insights into Dr. Provan’s PhD research journey, exploring the scarce guidance and fragmented views within academic research on safety practices. They discuss the challenges of painting a clear picture of the day-to-day responsibilities of safety professionals and how this prompted an in-depth investigation into the profession. As we peel back the layers of existing literature, we touch on the difficulty and complexity of condensing a vast array of theories and studies into a cohesive academic narrative.

The varied titles and the global patchwork of research that span numerous fields are explored, and although David’s search through databases and beyond revealed a trove of about 100 relevant articles, more insights may remain hidden. The discussion culminates with a look at the strategies employed by safety professionals to wield influence, foster trust, and align safety objectives with organizational goals. David's firsthand experiences and academic findings paint a vivid picture of the complex identity and influence that safety professionals must navigate in their pivotal roles.

The Paper’s Abstract

Safety professionals have been working within organizations since the early 1900s. During the past 25 years, societal pressure and political intervention concerning the management of safety risks in organizations has driven dramatic change in safety professional practice. What are the factors that influence the role of safety professionals? This paper reviews more than 100 publications. Thematic analysis identified 25 factors in three categories: institutional, relational, and individual. The review highlights a dearth of empirical research into the practice and role of safety professionals, which may result in some ineffectiveness. Practical implications and an empirical research agenda regarding safety professional practice are proposed.

Discussion Points:

Safety professionals - are they a “necessary evil”?
The role and perception of safety professionals, scarcity and fragmentation of literature, and challenges in condensing research. Safety positions have many varying titles globally.
Institutional, organizational, and individual factors, regulatory environments, and professional associations
Safety professionals face challenges when reporting to line managers, limiting their ability to challenge leadership and prioritize protection over workers.
Balancing safety independence and bureaucracy
A construction industry study - testing bureaucracy
Alliance vs. Influence - Safety professionals act as the conscience of the organization, using constructive challenge and alliances to advocate for safety and align goals with broader objectives.
Influence and trust in safety management - relational legitimacy, influence tactics, and symbolic enablers to promote best practices and trust within organizations.
Practical takeaways from the paper
The answer to our episode’s question is, “This is still an area of safety science that is a prime candidate for more PhD and postdoc research.”

Quotes:

“I went into this going, what has been published on the safety profession? And to do that, went to a couple of the key databases and used very deliberate keyword searches…” - David

“That was probably one of the first challenges- is that this role gets called so many different things in one country, let alone globally.” - David

“The included pieces were all in peer-reviewed publications, but there's a range of quality to those publications.”- David

“This connection between the bureaucratic activities of safety professionals and the value that the people who are exposed to the risk see in having a safety team was one of the most stark research findings in the literature.” - David

“Don't learn how to do your job from a TED Talk regardless of how inspirational a new view that talk is.” - Drew

Resources:

The Paper: Bureaucracy, Influence, and Beliefs

The Paper: NASA Near Miss

Ep. 119: Should we ask about contributors rather than causes?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan, Drew Rae) — Sun, 28 Apr 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Today’s paper, “Multiple Systemic Contributors versus Root Cause: Learning from a NASA Near Miss” by Katherine E. Walker et al, examines an incident wherein a NASA astronaut nearly drowned (asphyxiated) during an Extravehicular Activity (EVA 23) on the International Space Station due to spacesuit leakage. The paper introduces us to an innovative and efficient technique developed during Walker’s PhD research.

In this discussion, we reflect on the foundational elements of safety science and how organizations are tirelessly working to unearth better methods for analyzing and learning from safety incidents. We unpack the intricate findings of the investigation committee and discuss how root cause analysis can sometimes lead to the unintended consequence of adding more pressure within a system. A holistic understanding of how systems and individuals manage and adapt to these pressures may provide more meaningful insights for preventing future issues.

Wrapping up, our conversation turns to the merits of the SCAD technique, which champions the analysis of accidents as extensions of normal work. By examining the systemic organizational pressures that shape everyday work adaptations, we can better comprehend how deviations due to constant pressures may lead to incidents. We also critique current accident analysis techniques and emphasize the importance of design improvement recommendations.

Discussion Points:

History and current state of accident investigation
Systemic solutions in safety
Traditional root cause analysis challenged by new perspectives
NASA's 2013 EVA 23 space walk incident examined
Organizational pressures and their impact on safety
SCAD technique for accident analysis efficiency
Shift from tracing causes to understanding work adaptations
Emphasis on normal work analysis for accident prevention
Critique of NASA's administrative processes in safety
Cognitive biases and challenges in accident investigations
Continuous evolution of safety practices
Practical takeaways -how do you go beyond the immediate events to find broader systems and broader learnings?
Canging language away from causes to talk about pressures and contributors
The answer to our episode’s question is, “Yeah, it probably helps, but still doesn't fix the problem that we're facing with trying to get useful system changes out of investigations.”

Quotes:

“We've been doing formal investigations of accidents since the late 1700s early 1800s. Everyone, if they don't do anything else for safety, still gets involved in investigating if there's an incident that happens.” - Drew

“If you didn't have this emphasis on maximising crew time they would have been much more cautious about EVA 23” - Drew

“Saying that there's work pressure is not actually an explanation for accidents, because work pressure is normal, work pressure always exists.” - Drew

“One of the things that is absent from this technique through and they call it an accident analysis method is there is no commentary in the paper at all about how to design improvements and recommendations.” - David

Resources:

The Paper: Blaming Dead Men

Ep. 118 How should we account for technological accidents?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan, Drew Rae) — Sun, 14 Apr 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Using the Waterfall incident as a striking focal point, we dissect the investigation and its aftermath, we share personal reflections on the implementation of safety recommendations and the nuances of assessing systems designed to protect us. From the mechanics of dead man's systems to the critical evaluation of managerial decisions, our dialogue exposes the delicate balance of enforcing safety while maintaining the practicality of operations. Our aim is to contribute to the ongoing conversation about creating safer work environments across industries, recognizing the need for both technological advancements and refined human judgment.

Discussion Points:

Drew loves a paper with a great name
The circumstances surrounding the Waterfall rail accident
How the “dead man system” works on certain trains
Recommended changes from investigation committees
In the field of safety, we seem more certain about our theories
Exploration of narratives and facts in accident investigations
Dead man's system and Waterfall derailment's investigation
Post-accident list of operator failures
Safety theories and organizational fault correlation critiqued
Evolution of railway safety
Discussion on managerial decisions amidst imperfect knowledge
The importance of context in incident investigations
Safety management systems and human judgment
Insights on enhancing organizational safety
Theoretical conclusions
Practical takeaways
The answer to our episode’s question is, “yes, keep it in mind as a digital tool”

Quotes:

“I find that some of the most interesting things in safety don't actually come from people with traditional safety or even traditional safety backgrounds.”- Drew

“Because this is a possible risk scenario, on these trains, we have what's called a ‘dead man system.” - David

“Every time you have an accident, it must have objective physical causes, and those physical causes have to come from objective organisational failures, and I think that's a fairly fair representation of how we think about accidents in safety.” - Drew

“They focused on the dead man pedal because they couldn't find anything wrong with the design of the switch, so they assumed that it must have been the pedal that was the problem” - Drew

Resources:

Ep. 117: Can digital twins help improve the safety of work?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan, Drew Rae, Digital twins) — Sun, 31 Mar 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Using the paper, “Digital Twins in Safety Analysis, Risk Assessment and Emergency Management.” by Zio and Miqueles, published in the technical safety journal, Reliability Engineering and System Safety, we examine intricate simulations that predict traffic flows to emergency management tools that plan safe evacuation routes, and we delve into how these virtual counterparts of physical systems are redefining risk assessments and scenario planning.

As we navigate the world of operational safety, we discuss the diverse array of models—from geometric to sophisticated hybrid simulations—and their groundbreaking applications in forecasting fire spread and optimizing evacuation procedures. These digital twins aren't just theoretical concepts; they're powerful, real-time lifesavers in emergency situations, emblematic of the future of safety science.

Discussion Points:

What are digital twins and how are they used?
Use of digital twins is de rigueur in traffic flow, fire engineering, water flow structure
Identifying all recent papers written on digital twins
Virtual simulations offer advanced risk assessment capabilities
Overview of tasks and functions identified, industries - construction, naval engineering, manufacturing
Technical discussion on digital twin creation and maintenance
Six key challenges of digital twinning
Smart paint innovation improves virtual model accuracy
Cybersecurity risks
Real-time operational safety monitoring
Digital twins promise improved safety and operational efficiency
Emergency management potentially bolstered by real-time simulations
Practical takeaways
Industry practice may surpass academic digital twin findings
The answer to our episode’s question is, “yes, keep it in mind as a digital tool”

Quotes:

"Ideally, a digital twin is a complete virtual copy of a product or service that is an electronic simulation that is completely accurate compared to that real product or service.”- Drew

“One of the first documented digital twins was in the aerospace industry - NASA [used it] during the Apollo 13 program.” - David

“this idea of having a complete digital picture of the thing that you're building is becoming fairly common, so that lends itself very much towards using it for things like digital twins.” - Drew

“we may never quite know exactly how different the digital twin is from the physical object itself. That’s the challenge.” - David

Resources:

The Paper

Paper: Audit masquerade: How audits provide comfort rather than treatment for serious safety problems

Ep 116. Do audits improve the safety of work?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan, Drew Rae) — Sun, 17 Mar 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Ben's expertise guides us through an analysis of audit reports and accident investigations, laying bare the counterfactual reasoning that often skews post-incident narratives. It's an eye-opening examination that calls for a reimagined approach to audits, one that aligns with the genuine complexities of organizational culture and safety. Together, we confront the silent failure of safety audits and management systems, debating the need for a fundamental shift in how these are designed and conducted to truly protect workers. Join us for this critical dialogue that challenges preconceptions and seeks to reforge the link between safety audits and the real work of keeping people safe.

Discussion Points:

Ben’s background and papers authored
The reality of safety audits
Safety plans - often perceived as comfort, not change
Documentation versus actual safety
"Audit masquerade" reveals gaps between theory and practice
Examination of 327 audit corrective actions and their efficacy
Administrative intentions vs. practical safety
The weak connection between audits and physical safety improvements
Concerns about evaluating work practices
Audits can ‘fail silently’, giving false security assurance
Practical steps for ensuring audit effectiveness
A critical examination of safety management systems
Key takeaways
Ben’s answer to our episode’s question is, “Possibly, but it depends.”

Quotes:

"Some audits were very poorly calibrated to actually exploring and eliciting work - day-to-day work and operational risk.." - Ben

“you've got to pick and choose what to pay attention to. So unless something is really standing out as needing attention, then it can be hard to be curious and to notice these weak signals.” - David

“I'm proud to work in safety. I'm proud to call myself a sector professional. What really drove me to understand these systems was my love for safety, and I had just become so disillusioned with the amount of safety work I had to do. It wasn't helping.” - Ben

“Audits, like most activities, are very socio-political. There's a lot of vested power and conflicting interests.” - Ben

Resources:

Paper: How audits fail according to accident investigations: A counterfactual logic analysis
Ben Hutchinson LinkedIn

Ep. 115: Why are subcontractors at higher risk?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan and Drew Rae) — Sun, 3 Mar 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Safety isn't one-size-fits-all, especially for subcontractors who navigate multiple sites with varying rules and equipment. This episode peels back the layers on the practical safety management challenges subcontractors endure, revealing how transient work complicates the integration of safety protocols.

We scrutinize the institutional oversights and fragmented safety systems that often overlook the needs of these critical yet vulnerable players in the industry. Our conversation isn't just about identifying problems; it's an urgent call to action for better practices and a safer future for all involved in subcontracting work.

Discussion Points:

The vagaries of subcontracting work
Background on the paper being discussed
Findings presented in the paper
Institutional safety vs. the subcontractor’s work
Expertise in the work does not equal expertise in safety
Communication and safety work activities
Institutional safety mechanisms
Dangerous environments and lack of safety knowledge in that environment
Subcontractors in the mining industry and the many layers and risks
Safety rules are perceived differently by subcontractors
Financial and other burdens to following safety protocols for subcontractors
Key takeaways
The answer to our episode’s question –the short answer in some of it is that there are lots of filtered and missing communication towards contractors' gaps in situational specific expertise that don't get identified and just our broad safety management systems and arrangements that don't work well for the subcontractor context.

Quotes:

"Subcontracting itself is also a fairly undefined term. You can range from anything from large, labour -higher organisations to what we typically think in Australia of a small business with maybe one to four or five employees." - Drew

“All of the normal protections we put in place for safety just don't work as well when there are contract boundaries in place.” - Drew

“the subcontractor may be called in because they've got expertise in a particular type of work, but they're in an environment where they don't have expertise.” - Drew

Resources:

Ep. 114 How do we manage safety for work from home workers?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan and Drew Rae) — Sun, 17 Dec 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Lastly, we delve into the role of leadership in addressing psychosocial hazards, the importance of standardized guidance for remote work, and the challenges faced by line managers in managing remote workers. We wrap up the episode by providing a toolkit for managers to effectively navigate the challenges of remote work, and highlight the need for tailored safety strategies for different work arrangements.

Discussion Points:

Different work-from-home arrangements
Safety needs of work from home
Challenges of remote worker representation
Understanding and managing psychosocial risks
Leadership and managing technical risks
Remote work challenges and physical presence
Practical takeaways and general discussion
Safety strategies for different work arrangements
The answer to our episode’s question – the short answer is that there definitely isn't a short answer. But this paper comes from a larger project and I know that the people who did the work have gathered together a list of existing resources and toolboxes and, they've even created a few prototype tools and training packages

Quotes:

"There's a risk that we're missing important contributions from workers with different needs, neurodiverse workers, workers with mental health issues, workers with particular reasons for working at home and we’re not going to be able to comment on the framework and how it might affect them." - Drew

“When organizations' number of incident reports go up and up and up and we struggle to understand, is that a sign of worsening safety or is that a sign of better reporting?” - David

“They do highlight just how inconsistent organisations approaches are and perhaps the need for just some sort of standardised guidance on what is an organisation responsible for when you ask to work from home, or when they ask you to work from home.” - Drew

“I think a lot of people's response to work from home is let's try to subtly discourage it because we're uncomfortable with it, at the same time as we recognise that it's probably inevitable.” - Drew

Resources:

Ep. 113 When are seemingly impossible goals good for performance?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan, Drew Rae) — Sun, 10 Dec 2023 10:00:00 +0000

The conversation stems from a review of a noteworthy paper from the Academy of Management Review Journal titled "The Paradox of Stretch Goals: Organizations in Pursuit of the Seemingly Impossible," which offers invaluable insights into the world of goal setting in senior management.

Discussion Points:

The concept of seemingly impossible goals in organizations
Controversial nature and impact of ‘zero harm’
The role of stretch goals in promoting innovation
Potential negative effects of setting stretch goals
Psychological effects of ambitious organizational targets
Paradoxical outcomes of setting seemingly impossible goals
The role of emotions in achieving stretch goals
Factors that contribute to the success of stretch goals
Real-world examples of successful stretch goal implementation
Cautions against blind imitation of successful stretch goal strategies
The concept of zero harm in safety initiatives
Need for long-term research on zero harm effectiveness
The answer to our episode’s question – they're good when the organization is currently doing well enough, but stretch goals are not good when the organization is struggling and trying to turn a corner using that stretch goal.

Quotes:

"The basic idea [of ‘zero harm’] is that companies should adopt a visionary goal of having zero accidents. Often that comes along with commitment statements by managers, sometimes by workers as well that everyone is committed to the vision of having no accidents." - Drew

“I think organizations are in this loop, where I know maybe I can't achieve zero, but I can't say anything other than zero because that wouldn't be moral or responsible, because I'd be saying it's okay to hurt people. So I set zero because it's the best thing for me to do.” - David

“The “stretch goal” was credited with the introduction of hybrid cars. You've got to have a whole new way of managing your car to get that seemingly impossible goal of doubling your efficiency.”- Drew

Resources:

Ep 112 How biased are incident investigators?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan, Drew Rae) — Sun, 10 Sep 2023 10:00:00 +0000

You’ll hear David and Drew delve into the often overlooked role of bias in accident investigations. They explore the potential pitfalls of data collection, particularly confirmation bias, and discuss the impacts of other biases such as anchoring bias and hindsight bias. Findings from the paper are examined, revealing insights into confirmation bias and its prevalence in interviews. Strategies for enhancing the quality of incident investigations are also discussed, emphasizing the need to shift focus from blaming individuals to investigating organizational causes. The episode concludes with the introduction of Safety Exchange, a platform for global safety community collaboration.

Discussion Points:

Exploring the role of bias in accident investigations
Confirmation bias in data collection can validate initial assumptions
Review of a study examining confirmation bias among industry practitioners
Anchoring bias and hindsight bias on safety strategies
Recognizing and confronting personal biases
Counterfactuals in steering conversations towards preconceived solutions
Strategies to enhance the quality of incident investigations
Shifting focus from blaming individuals to investigating organizational causes
Safety Exchange - a platform for global safety community
The challenges organizations face when conducting good quality investigations
Standardization, trust, and managing time and production constraints
Confirmation bias in shaping investigation outcomes
Techniques to avoid bias in accident investigations and improve their quality
Safety Exchange - a safe place for open discussion
Six key questions
The answer to our episode’s question – Very, and we all are as human beings. It does mean that we should probably worry more about the data collection phase of our investigations more than the causal analysis methodology and taxonomy that we concern ourselves with

Quotes:

"If we actually don't understand how to get a good data collection process, then it really doesn't matter what happens after that." - David

"The trick is recognizing our biases and separating ourselves from prior experiences to view each incident with fresh eyes." - Drew

"I have heard people in the industry say this to me, that there's no new problems in safety, we've seen them all before." - David

"In talking with people in the industry around this topic, incident investigation and incident investigation quality, 80% of the conversation is around that causal classification taxonomy." - David

Resources:

Ep. 111 Are management walkarounds effective?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan and Drew Rae) — Sun, 6 Aug 2023 10:00:00 +0000

The research paper discussed is by Anita Tucker and Sarah Singer, titled "The Effectiveness of Management by Walking Around: A Randomised Field Study," published in Production and Operations Management.

Discussion Points:

Understanding senior leadership safety visits and management walkarounds
Best practices for safety management programs
How management walkarounds influence staff perception
Research findings comparing intervention and control groups
Consequences of management inaction
Effective implementation of changes
Role of senior managers in prioritizing problems
Impact of patchy implementation
How leadership visits affect staff perception
Investigating management inaction
Effective implementation and consultation
Key Takeaways:
The same general initiative can have very different effectiveness depending on how it's implemented and who's implementing it
When we do any sort of consultation effort, whether it's forums, walkarounds, reporting systems, or learning teams, what do we judge those on? Do we judge them on their success at consulting or do we judge them on their success at generating actions that get taken?
The answer to our episode’s question – Your answer here at the end of our notes is sometimes yes, sometimes no. It depends on the resulting actions.

Quotes:

"I've definitely lived and breathed this sort of a program a lot during my career." - David

"The effectiveness of management walkarounds depends on the resulting actions." - David

"The worst thing you can do is spend lots of time deciding what is a high-value problem." - Drew

"Having the senior manager allocated really means that something serious has been done about it." - Drew

"The individual who walks around with the leader and talks about safety with the leader, thinks a lot better about the organization." - David

Resources:

Ep. 110 Can personality tests predict safety performance?

Sun, 23 Jul 2023 10:00:00 +0000

The paper reviewed in this episode is from the Journal of Applied Psychology entitled, “A meta-analysis of personality and workplace safety: Addressing unanswered questions” by Beus, J. M., Dhanani, L. Y., & McCord, M. A. (2015).

Discussion Points:

Overview of the intersection between psychology and workplace safety
How personality tests may predict safety performance
Accident proneness theory to modern behaviorism
Research on personality and safety performance
Personality traits influencing work behaviors
The influence of institutional logic
Personality tests for safety performance
The need for further research and standardized measurement methods
Examining statistical evidence linking personality to safety performance
Personality traits and their impact on work behavior
Analysis of research findings on personality and safety performance
The practical implications of the research findings
The intriguing yet complex relationship between personality and safety
Takeaways:
While not total bunk, we definitely don't understand the impact of personality on safety nearly enough to use it as a tool to predict who will or won't make a safe employee
There are lots of different ways that we could use personality to get some insights and to make some contributions
We need people using those measurements to find out more about the relationship between personality and behavior in different situations in different contexts with different choices under different organizational influences.
The answer to our episode’s question – Maybe. It depends. Sometimes, in some places not yet. I don't want to say no, but it's not yes yet either.

Quotes:

I have to admit, before I read this, I thought that the entire idea of personality testing for safety was total bunk. Coming out of it, I'm still not convinced, but it's much more mixed or nuanced than I was expecting. - Drew

If there was a systemic trend where some people were genuinely more accident prone, we would expect to see much sharper differences between the number of times one person had an accident and all people who didn't have accidents. - Drew

I think anything that lumps people into four or five categories downplays the uniqueness of each individual. - David

There are good professionals in HR, there's good science in HR, but there is a huge amount of pseudo-science around recruiting practices and every country has its own pseudoscience. - Drew

Resources:

Ep. 109 Do safety performance indicators mean the same thing to different stakeholders?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan and Drew Rae) — Sun, 30 Apr 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Show Notes - The Safety of Work - Ep. 109 Do safety performance indicators mean the same thing to different stakeholders

Dr. Drew Rae and Dr. David Provan

The abstract reads:

Indicators are used by most organizations to track their safety performance. Research attention has been drawn to what makes for a good indicator (specific, proactive, etc.) and the sometimes perverse and unexpected consequences of their introduction. While previous research has demonstrated some of the complexity, uncertainties and debates that surround safety indicators in the scientific community, to date, little attention has been paid to how a safety indicator can act as a boundary object that bridges different social worlds despite being the social groups’ diverse conceptualization. We examine how a safety performance indicator is interpreted and negotiated by different social groups in the context of public procurement of critical services, specifically fixed-wing ambulance services. The different uses that the procurer and service providers have for performance data are investigated, to analyze how a safety performance indicator can act as a boundary object, and with what consequences. Moving beyond the functionality of indicators to explore the meanings ascribed by different actors, allows for greater understanding of how indicators function in and between social groups and organizations, and how safety is more fundamentally conceived and enacted. In some cases, safety has become a proxy for other risks (reputation and financial). Focusing on the symbolic equivocality of outcome indicators and even more tightly defined safety performance indicators ultimately allows a richer understanding of the priorities of each actor within a supply chain and indicates that the imposition of oversimplified indicators may disrupt important work in ways that could be detrimental to safety performance.

Discussion Points:

What we turn into numbers in an organization
Background of how this paper came about
Four main groups - procurement, incoming operator, outgoing operator, pilots
Availability is key for air ambulances
Incentivizing availability
Outgoing operators/providers feel they lost the contract unfairly
The point of view of the incoming operators/providers
Military pilots fill in between providers
Using numbers to show how good/bad the service is
Pilots - caught in the middle
Contracts always require a trade-off
Boundary objects- what does availability mean to different people?
Maximizing core deliverables safely
Problems with measuring availability
Pressure within the system
Putting a number on performance
Takeaways:
Choice of a certain metric that isn’t what you need leads to perverse behavior
Placing indicators on things can make other things invisible
Financial penalties tied to indicators can be counteractive
The answer to our episode’s question – Yes, metrics on the boundaries can communicate in different directions

Quotes:

“The way in which we turn things into numbers reveals a lot about the logic that is driving the way that we act and give meaning to our actions.” - Drew

“You’ve got these different measures of the service that are vastly different, depending on what you’re counting, and what you’re looking for..” - David

“The paper never draws a final conclusion - was the service good, was the service bad?” - Drew

“The pilots are always in this sort of weird, negotiated situation, where ‘doing the right thing’ could be in either direction.” - Drew

“If someone’s promising something better, bigger, faster and cheaper, make sure you take the effort to understand how that company is going to do that….” - David

Resources:

The Harwood Experiment Episode

Ep. 108 Could a 4 day work week improve employee well-being?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan and Drew Rae) — Sun, 9 Apr 2023 10:00:00 +0000

This report details the full findings of the world’s largest four-day working week trial to date, comprising 61 companies and around 2,900 workers, that took place in the UK from June to December 2022. The design of the trial involved two months of preparation for participants, with workshops, coaching, mentoring and peer support, drawing on the experience of companies who had already moved to a shorter working week, as well as leading research and consultancy organisations. The report results draw on administrative data from companies, survey data from employees, alongside a range of interviews conducted over the pilot period, providing measurement points at the beginning, middle, and end of the trial.

Discussion Points:

Background on the five-day workweek
We’ll set out to prove or review two central claims:
Reduce hours worked, and maintain same productivity
Reduced hours will provide benefits to the employees
Digging in to the Autonomy organization and the researchers and authors
Says “trial” but it’s more like a pilot program
61 companies, June to December 2022
Issues with methodology - companies will change in 6 months coming out of Covid- a controlled trial would have been better
The pilot only includes white collar jobs - no physical, operational, high-hazard businesses
The revenue numbers
Analysing the staff numbers- how many filled out the survey? What positions did the respondents hold in the company?
Who experienced positive vs. negative changes in individual results
Interviews from the “shop floor” was actually CEOs and office staff
Eliminating wasted time from the five-day week
What different companies preferred employees to do with their ‘extra time’
Assumption 1: there is a business use case benefit- not true
Assumption 2: benefits for staff - mixed results
Takeaways:
Don’t use averages
Finding shared goals can be good for everyone
Be aware of burden-shifting
The answer to our episode’s question – It’s a promising idea, but results are mixed, and it requires more controlled trial research

Quotes:

“It’s important to note that this is a pre-Covid idea, this isn’t a response to Covid.” - Dr. Drew

“...there's a reason why we like to do controlled trials. That reason is that things change in any company over six months.” - Drew

“ …a lot of the qualitative data sample is very tiny. Only a third of the companies got spoken to, and only one senior representative who was already motivated to participate in the trial, would like to think that anything that their company does is successful.” - David

“I'm pretty sure if you picked any company, you're taking into account things like government subsidies for Covid, grants, and things like that. Everyone had very different business in 2021-2022.” - Drew

“We're not trying to accelerate the pace of work, we're trying to remove all of the unnecessary work.” - Drew

“I think people who plan the battle don't battle the plan. I like collaborative decision-making in general, but I really like it in relation to goal setting and how to achieve those goals.” - David

Resources:

Link to the Pilot Study

Autonomy

Link to the strategy document

Ep. 107 What research is needed to implement the Safework Australia WHS strategy?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan and Drew Rae) — Sun, 12 Mar 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Summary:

The purpose of the Australian Work Health and Safety (WHS) Strategy 2023–2033 (the Strategy) is to outline a national vision for WHS — Safe and healthy work for all — and set the platform for delivering on key WHS improvements. To do this, the Strategy articulates a primary goal supported by national targets, and the enablers, actions and system-wide shifts required to achieve this goal over the next ten years. This Strategy guides the work of Safe Work Australia and its Members, including representatives of governments, employers and workers – but should also contribute to the work and understanding of all in the WHS system including researchers, experts and practitioners who play a role in owning, contributing to and realising the national vision.

Discussion Points:

Background on Safe Work Australia
The strategy includes six goals for reducing:
Worker fatalities caused by traumatic injuries by 30%
The frequency rate of serious claims resulting in one or more weeks off work by 20%
The frequency rate of claims resulting in permanent impairment by 15%
The overall incidence of work-related injury or illness among workers to below 3.5%
The frequency rate of work-related respiratory disease by 20%
No new cases of accelerated silicosis by 2033
The strategy is a great opportunity to set a direction for research and education
Five actions covered by the strategy:
Information and raising awareness
National Coordination
Data and intelligence gathering
Health and safety leadership
Compliance and enforcement
When regulators fund research - they demand tangible results quickly
Many safety documents and corporate safety systems never reach the most vulnerable workers, who don’t have ‘regular’ long-term jobs
Standardization can increase unnecessary work
When and where do organizations access safety information?
Data - AI use for the future
Strategy lacks milestones within the ten-year span
Enforcement - we don’t have evidence-based data on the effects
Takeaways:
The idea of a national strategy? Good.
Balancing safety with innovation, evidence
Answering our episode question: Need research into specific workforces, what is the evidence behind specific industry issues. “Lots of research is needed!”

Quotes:

“The fact is, that in Australia, traumatic injury fatalities - which are the main ones that they are counting - are really quite rare, even if you add the entire country together.” - Drew

“I really see no point in these targets. They are not tangible, they’re not achievable, they’re not even measurable, with the exception of respiratory disease…” - Drew

“These documents are not only an opportunity to set out a strategic direction for research and policy, and industry activity, but also an opportunity to educate.” - David

“When regulators fund research, they tend to demand solutions. They want research that’s going to produce tangible results very quickly.” - Drew

“I would have loved a concrete target for improving education and training- that is something that is really easy to quantify.” - Drew

Resources:

Ep. 106 Is it possible to teach critical thinking?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 19 Feb 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Baron's work focuses primarily on judgment and decision-making, a multi-disciplinary area that applies psychology to problems of ethical decisions and resource allocation in economics, law, business, and public policy.

The paper’s summary:

Recent efforts to teach thinking could be unproductive without a theory of what needs to be taught and why. Analysis of where thinking goes wrong suggests that emphasis is needed on 'actively open-minded thinking'. including the effort to search for reasons why an initial conclusion might be wrong, and on reflection about rules of inference, such as heuristics used for making decisions and judgments. Such instruction has two functions. First. it helps students to think on their own. Second. it helps them to understand the nature of expert knowledge, and, more generally, the nature of academic disciplines. The second function, largely neglected in discussions of thinking instruction. can serve as the basis for thinking instruction in the disciplines. Students should learn how knowledge is obtained through actively open-minded thinking. Such learning will also teach students to recognize false claims to systematic knowledge.

Discussion Points:

Critical thinking and Chat AI
Teaching knowledge vs. critical thinking
Section One: Introduction- critical thinking is a stated goal of many teaching institutions
Section Two: The Current Rationale/What is thinking?
Reading about thinking is quite difficult!
Baron’s “Myside Bias” is today’s confirmation or selection bias
Reflective learning- does it help with learning?
Section Three: Abuses - misapplying thinking in schools and business
Breaking down learning into sub-sections
Section Four: The growth of knowledge - beginning in Medieval times
Section Five: The basis of expertise - what is an ‘expert’? Every field has its own self-critiques
Drew’s brain is hurting just getting through this discussion
Section Six: What the educated person should know
Studying accidents in safety science - student assignments
Takeaways:
Good thinking means being able to make good decisions re: experts
Precision is required around what is necessary for learning
Well-informed self-criticism is necessary
Answering our episode question: Can we teach critical thinking? It was never answered in this paper, but it gave us a lot to think about

Quotes:

“It’s a real stereotype that old high schools were all about rote learning. I don’t think that was ever the case. The best teachers have always tried to inspire their students to do more than just learn the material.” - Drew

“Part of the point he’s making is, is that not everyone who holds themself out to be an expert IS an expert…that’s when we have to have good thinking tools .. who IS an expert and how do we know who to trust?” - Drew

“Baron also says that even good thinking processes won’t necessarily help much when specific knowledge is lacking…” - David

‘The smarter students are, the better they are at using knowledge about cognitive biases to criticize other people’s beliefs, rather than to help themselves think more critically.” - Drew

“Different fields advance by different sorts of criticism..to understand expertise a field you need to understand how that field does its internal critique.” - Drew

Resources:

Ep. 105 How can organisations learn faster?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 5 Feb 2023 10:00:00 +0000

You’ll hear a little about Schein’s early career at Harvard and MIT, including his Ph.D. work – a paper on the experience of POWs during wartime contrasted against the indoctrination of individuals joining an organization for employment. Some of Schein’s 30-year-old concepts that are now common practice and theory in organizations, such as “psychological safety”

Discussion Points:

A brief overview of Schein’s career, at Harvard and MIT’s School of Management and his fascinating Ph.D. on POWs during the Korean War
A bit about the book, Humble Inquiry
Digging into the paper
Three types of learning:
Knowledge acquisition and insight learning
Habits and skills
Emotional conditioning and learned anxiety
Practical examples and the metaphor of Pavlov’s dog
Countering Anxiety I with Anxiety II
Three processes of ‘unfreezing’ an organization or individual to change:
Disconfirmation
Creation of guilt or anxiety
Psychological safety
Mistakes in organizations and how they respond
There are so many useful nuggets in this paper
Schein’s solutions: Steering committees/change teams/groups to lead the organizations and manage each other’s anxiety
Takeaways:
How an organization deals with mistakes will determine how change happens
Assessing levels of fear and anxiety
Know what stands in your way if you want progress
Answering our episode question: How can organizations learn faster? 1) Don't make people afraid to enter the green room. 2) Or make them more afraid to stand on the black platform.

Quotes:

“...a lot of people credit [Schein] with being the granddaddy of organizational culture.” - Drew

“[Schein] says .. in order to learn skills, you've got to be willing to be temporarily incompetent, which is great if you're learning soccer and not so good if you're learning to run a nuclear power plant.” - Drew

“Schein says quite clearly that punishment is very effective in eliminating certain kinds of behavior, but it's also very effective in inducing anxiety when in the presence of the person or the environment that taught you that lesson.” - Drew

“We've said before that we think sometimes in safety, we're about three or four decades behind some of the other fields, and this might be another example of that.” - David

“Though curiosity and innovation are values that are praised in our society, within organizations and particularly large organizations, they're not actually rewarded.” - Drew

Resources:

Humble Inquiry by Edgar Schein

Ep. 104 How can we get better at using measurement?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 22 Jan 2023 10:00:00 +0000

You’ll hear some dismaying statistics around the validity of research papers in general, some comments regarding the peer review process, and then we’ll dissect each of six questions that should be asked BEFORE you design your research.

The paper’s abstract reads:

In this article, we define questionable measurement practices (QMPs) as decisions researchers make that raise doubts about the validity of the measures, and ultimately the validity of study conclusions. Doubts arise for a host of reasons, including a lack of transparency, ignorance, negligence, or misrepresentation of the evidence. We describe the scope of the problem and focus on how transparency is a part of the solution. A lack of measurement transparency makes it impossible to evaluate potential threats to internal, external, statistical-conclusion, and construct validity. We demonstrate that psychology is plagued by a measurement schmeasurement attitude: QMPs are common, hide a stunning source of researcher degrees of freedom, and pose a serious threat to cumulative psychological science, but are largely ignored. We address these challenges by providing a set of questions that researchers and consumers of scientific research can consider to identify and avoid QMPs. Transparent answers to these measurement questions promote rigorous research, allow for thorough evaluations of a study’s inferences, and are necessary for meaningful replication studies.

Discussion Points:

The appeal of the foundational question, “are we measuring what we think we’re measuring?”
Citations of studies - 40-93% of studies lack evidence that the measurement is valid
Psychological research and its lack of defining what measures are used, and the validity of their measurement, etc.
The peer review process - it helps, but can’t stop bad research being published
Why care about this issue? Lack of validity- the research answer may be the opposite
Designing research - like choosing different paths through a garden
The six main questions to avoid questionable measurement practices (QMPs)
What is your construct?
Why/how did you select your measure?
What measure to operationalize the construct?
How did you quantify your measure?
Did you modify the scale? How and why?
Did you create a measure on the fly?
Takeaways:
Expand your methods section in research papers
Ask these questions before you design your research
As research consumers, we can’t take results at face value
Answering our episode question: How can we get better? Transparency is the starting point.

Resources:

Ep. 103 Should we be happy when our people speak out about safety?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 4 Dec 2022 10:00:00 +0000

In concert with the paper, we’ll focus on two major separate but related Boeing 737 accidents:

Lyon Air #610 in October 2018 - The plane took off from Jakarta and crashed 13 mins later, with one of the highest death tolls ever for a 737 crash - 189 souls.
Ethiopian Airlines #30 in March 2019 - This plane took off from Addis Ababba and crashed minutes into takeoff, killing 157.

The paper’s abstract reads:

Following other contributions about the MAX accidents to this journal, this paper explores the role of betrayal and moral injury in safety engineering related to the U.S. federal regulator’s role in approving the Boeing 737MAX—a plane involved in two crashes that together killed 346 people. It discusses the tension between humility and hubris when engineers are faced with complex systems that create ambiguity, uncertain judgements, and equivocal test results from unstructured situations. It considers the relationship between moral injury, principled outrage and rebuke when the technology ends up involved in disasters. It examines the corporate backdrop against which calls for enhanced employee voice are typically made, and argues that when engineers need to rely on various protections and moral inducements to ‘speak up,’ then the ethical essence of engineering—skepticism, testing, checking, and questioning—has already failed.

Discussion Points:

Two separate but related air disasters
The Angle of Attack Sensor
MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System) on the Boeing 737
Criticality rankings
The article - Joe Jacobsen, an engineer/whistleblower who came forward
The claim is that engineers need more moral courage/convictions and training in ethics
Defining moral injury
Engineers - the Challenger accident, the Hyatt collapse
Disaster literacy – check out the old Disastercast podcast
Humility and hubris
Regulatory bodies and their issues
Solutions and remedies
Risk assessments
Other examples outside of Boeing
Takeaways:
Profit vs. risk, technical debt
Don’t romanticize ethics
Internal emails can be your downfall
Rewards, accountability, incentives
Look into the engineering resources
Answering our episode question: In this paper, it's a sign that things are bad.

Quotes:

“When you develop a new system for an aircraft, one of the first safety things you do is you classify them according to their criticality.” - Drew

“Just like we tend to blame accidents on human error, there’s a tendency to push ethics down to that front line.” - Drew

“There’s this lasting psychological/biological behavioral, social or even spiritual impact of either perpetrating, or failing to prevent, or bearing witness to, these acts that transgress our deeply held moral beliefs and expectations.” - David

“Engineers are sort of taught to think in these binaries, instead of complex tradeoffs, particularly when it comes to ethics.” - Drew

“Whenever you have this whistleblower protection, you’re admitting that whistleblowers are vulnerable.” - Drew

“Engineers see themselves as belonging to a company, not to a profession, when they’re working.” - Drew

Resources:

Ep. 102 What's the right strategy when we can't manage safety as well as we'd like to?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Tue, 15 Nov 2022 17:13:42 +0000

The paper’s abstract reads:

Healthcare systems are under stress as never before. An aging population, increasing complexity and comorbidities, continual innovation, the ambition to allow unfettered access to care, and the demands on professionals contrast sharply with the limited capacity of healthcare systems and the realities of financial austerity. This tension inevitably brings new and potentially serious hazards for patients and means that the overall quality of care frequently falls short of the standard expected by both patients and professionals. The early ambition of achieving consistently safe and high-quality care for all has not been realised and patients continue to be placed at risk. In this paper, we ask what strategies we might adopt to protect patients when healthcare systems and organisations are under stress and simply cannot provide the standard of care they aspire to.

Discussion Points:

Extrapolating out from the healthcare focus to other businesses
This paper was published pre-pandemic
Adaptations during times of extreme stress or lack of resources - team responses will vary
People under pressure adapt, and sometimes the new conditions become the new normal
Guided adaptability to maintain safety
Substandard care in French hospitals in the study
The dynamic adjustment for times of crisis vs. long-term solutions
Short-term adaptations can impede development of long-term solutions
Four basic principles in the paper:
Giving up hope of returning to normal
We can never eliminate all risks and threats
Principal focus should be on expected problems
Management of risk requires engagement and action at all managerial levels
Griffith university’s rules on asking for an extension…expected surprises
Middle management liaising between frontlines and executives
Managing operations in “degraded mode” and minimum equipment lists
Absolute safety - we can’t aim for 100% - we need to write in what “second best” covers
Takeaways:
Most industries are facing more pressure today than in the past, focus on the current risks
All industries have constant risks and tradeoffs - how to address at each level
Understand how pressures are being faced by teams, what adaptations are acceptable for short and long term?
For expected conditions and hazards, what does “second best” look like?
Research is needed around “degraded operations”
Answering our episode question: The wrong answer is to only rely on the highest standards which may not be achievable in degraded operations

Quotes:

“I think it’s a good reflection for professionals and organistions to say, “Oh, okay - what if the current state of stress is the ‘new normal’ or what if things become more stressed? Is what we’re doing now the right thing to be doing?” - David

“There is also the moral injury when people who are in a ‘caring’ profession and they can’t provide the standard of care that they believe to be right standard.” - Drew

“None of these authors share how often these improvised solutions have been successful or unsuccessful, and these short-term fixes often impede the development of longer-term solutions.” - David

“We tend to set safety up almost as a standard of perfection that we don’t expect people to achieve all the time, but we expect those deviations to be rare and correctable.” - Drew

Resources:

Disowning Fukushima Paper by John Downer

Ep. 101 When should incidents cause us to question risk assessments?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan and Drew Rae) — Sun, 30 Oct 2022 10:00:00 +0000

The paper’s abstract reads:

This paper reflects on the credibility of nuclear risk assessment in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima meltdown. In democratic states, policymaking around nuclear energy has long been premised on an understanding that experts can objectively and accurately calculate the probability of catastrophic accidents. Yet the Fukushima disaster lends credence to the substantial body of social science research that suggests such calculations are fundamentally unworkable. Nevertheless, the credibility of these assessments appears to have survived the disaster, just as it has resisted the evidence of previous nuclear accidents. This paper looks at why. It argues that public narratives of the Fukushima disaster invariably frame it in ways that allow risk-assessment experts to “disown” it. It concludes that although these narratives are both rhetorically compelling and highly consequential to the governance of nuclear power, they are not entirely credible.

Discussion Points:

Following up on a topic in episode 100 - nuclear safety and risk assessment
The narrative around planes, trains, cars and nuclear - risks vs. safety
Planning for disaster when you’ve promised there’s never going to be a nuclear disaster
The 1975 WASH-1400 Studies
Japanese disasters in the last 100 years
Four tenets of Downer’s paper:
- The risk assessments themselves did not fail
- Relevance Defense: The failure of one assessment is not relevant to the other assessments
- Compliance Defense: The assessments were sound, but people did not behave the way they were supposed to/did not obey the rules
- Redemption Defense: The assessments were flawed, but we fixed them
Theories such as: Fukushima did happen - but not an actual ‘accident/meltdown’ - it basically withstood a tsunami when the country was flattened
Residents of Fukushima - they were told the plant was ‘safe’
The relevance defense, Chernobyl, and 3 Mile Island
Boeing disasters, their risk assessments, and blame
At the time of Fukushima, Japanese regulation and engineering was regarded as superior
This was not a Japanese reactor! It’s a U.S. design
The compliance defense, human error
The redemption defense, regulatory bodies taking all Fukushima elements into account
Downer quotes Peanuts comics in the paper - lessons - Lucy can’t be trusted!
This paper is not about what’s wrong with risk assessments- it’s about how we defend what we do
Takeaways:
Uncertainty is always present in risk assessments
You can never identify all failure modes
Three things always missing: anticipating mistakes, anticipating how complex tech is always changing, anticipating all of the little plastic connectors that can break
Assumptions - be wary, check all the what-if scenarios
Just because a regulator declares something safe, doesn’t mean it is
Answering our episode question: You must question risk assessments CONSTANTLY

Quotes:

“It’s a little bit surprising we don’t scrutinize the ‘control’ every time it fails.” - Drew

“In the case of nuclear power, we’re in this awkward situation where, in order to prepare emergency plans, we have to contradict ourselves.” - Drew

“If systems have got billions of potential ’billion to one’ accidents then it’s only expected that we’re going to see accidents from time to time.” - David

“As the world gets more and more complex, then our parameters for these assessments need to become equally as complex.” - David

“The mistakes that people make in these [risk assessments] are really quite consistent.” - Drew

Resources:

WASH-1400 Studies

The Book – Normal accidents: Living with high-risk technologies

Ep. 100 Can major accidents be prevented?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 9 Oct 2022 10:00:00 +0000

The book explains Perrow’s theory that catastrophic accidents are inevitable in tightly coupled and complex systems. His theory predicts that failures will occur in multiple and unforeseen ways that are virtually impossible to predict.

Charles B. Perrow (1925 – 2019) was an emeritus professor of sociology at Yale University and visiting professor at Stanford University. He authored several books and many articles on organizations and their impact on society. One of his most cited works is Complex Organizations: A Critical Essay, first published in 1972.

Discussion Points:

David and Drew reminisce about the podcast and achieving 100 episodes
Outsiders from sociology, management, and engineering entered the field in the 70s and 80s
Perrow was not a safety scientist, as he positioned himself against the academic establishment
Perrow’s strong bias against nuclear power weakens his writing
The 1979 near-disaster at Three Mile Island - Perrow was asked to write a report, which became the book, “Normal Accidents…”
The main tenets of Perrow’s core arguments:
Start with a ‘complex high-risk technology’ - aircraft, nuclear, etc
Two or more values start the accident
“Interactive Complexity”
787 Boeing failures - failed system + unexpected operator response lead to disaster
There will always be separate individual failures, but can we predict or prevent the ‘perfect storm’ of mulitple failures at once?
Better technology is not the answer
Perrow predicted complex high-risk technology to be a major part of future accidents
Perrow believed nuclear power/nuclear weapons should be abandoned - risks outweigh benefits
Three reasons people may see his theories as wrong:
If you believe the risk assessments of nuclear are correct, then my theories are wrong
If they are contrary to public opinion and values
If safety requires more safe and error-free organizations
If there is a safer way to run the systems outside all of the above
The modern takeaway is a tradeoff between adding more controls, and increased complexity
The hierarchy of designers vs operators
We don’t think nearly enough about the role of power- who decides vs. who actually takes the risks?
There should be incentives to reduce complexity of systems and the uncertainty it creates
To answer this show’s question - not entirely, and we are constantly asking why

Quotes:

“Perrow definitely wouldn’t consider himself a safety scientist, because he deliberately positioned himself against the academic establishment in safety.” - Drew

“For an author whom I agree with an awful lot about, I absolutely HATE the way all of his writing is colored by…a bias against nuclear power.” - Drew

[Perrow] has got a real skepticism of technological power.” - Drew

"Small failures abound in big systems.” - David

“So technology is both potentially a risk control, and a hazard itself, in [Perrow’s] simple language.” - David

Resources:

Karl Weick - Drop Your Tools Paper

Ep.99 When is dropping tools the right thing to do for safety?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 18 Sep 2022 10:00:00 +0000

The paper’s abstract reads:

The failure of 27 wildland firefighters to follow orders to drop their heavy tools so they could move faster and outrun an exploding fire led to their death within sight of safe areas. Possible explanations for this puzzling behavior are developed using guidelines proposed by James D. Thompson, the first editor of the Administrative Science Quarterly. These explanations are then used to show that scholars of organizations are in analogous threatened positions, and they too seem to be keeping their heavy tools and falling behind. ASQ's 40th anniversary provides a pretext to reexamine this potentially dysfunctional tendency and to modify it by reaffirming an updated version of Thompson's original guidelines.

The Mann Gulch fire was a wildfire in Montana where 15 smokejumpers approached the fire to begin fighting it, and unexpected high winds caused the fire to suddenly expand. This "blow-up" of the fire covered 3,000 acres (1,200 ha) in ten minutes, claiming the lives of 13 firefighters, including 12 of the smokejumpers. Only three of the smokejumpers survived.

The South Canyon Fire was a 1994 wildfire that took the lives of 14 wildland firefighters on Storm King Mountain, near Glenwood Springs, Colorado, on July 6, 1994. It is often also referred to as the "Storm King" fire.

Discussion Points:

Some details of the Mann Gulch fire deaths due to refusal to drop their tools
Weich lays out ten reasons why these firefighters may have refused to drop their tools:
Couldn't hear the order
Lack of explanation for order - unusual, counterintuitive
You don’t trust the leader
Control- if you lose your tools, lose capability, not a firefighter
Skill at dropping tools - ie survivor who leaned a shovel against a tree instead of dropping
Skill with replacement activity - it’s an unfamiliar situation
Failure - to drop your tools, as a firefighter, is to fail
Social dynamics - why would I do it if others are not
Consequences - if people believe it won’t make a difference, they won’t drop.These men should have been shown the difference it would make
Identity- being a firefighter, without tools they are throwing away their identity. This was also shortly after WWII, where you are a coward if you throw away your weapons, and would be alienated from your group
Thomson had four principles necessary for research in his publication:
Administrative science should focus on relationships - you can’t understand without structures and people and variables.
Abstract concepts - not on single concrete ideas, but theories that apply to the field
Development of operational definitions that bridge concepts and raw experience - not vague fluffy things with confirmation bias - sadly, we still don’t have all the definitions today
Value of the problem - what do they mean? What is the service researchers are trying to provide?
How Weick applies these principles to the ten reasons, then looks at what it means for researchers
Weick’s list of ten- they are multiple, interdependent reasons – they can all be true at the same time
Thompsons list of four, relating them to Weick’s ten, in today’s organizations
What are the heavy tools that we should get rid of? Weick links heaviest tools with identity
Drew’s thought - getting rid of risk assessments would let us move faster, but people won’t drop them, relating to the ten reasons above
Takeaways:
1) Emotional vs. cognitive (did I hear that, do I know what to do) emotional (trust, failure, etc.) in individuals and teams
2) Understanding group dynamics/first person/others to follow - the pilot diversion story, Piper Alpha oil rig jumpers, first firefighter who drops tools.
Next week is episode 100 - we’ve got a plan!

Quotes:

“Our attachment to our tools is not a simple, rational thing.” - Drew

“It’s really hard to recognize that you’re well past that point where success is not an option at all.” - Drew

“These firefighters were several years since they’d been in a really raging, high-risk fire situation…” - David

“I encourage anyone to read Weick’s papers, they’re always well-written.” - David

“Well, I think according to Weick, the moment you begin to think that dropping your tools is impossible and unthinkable, that might be the moment you actually have to start wondering why you’re not dropping your tools.” - Drew

“The heavier the tool is, the harder it is to drop.” - Drew

Resources:

The Practical Theorist: Life and Work of Kurt Lewin by Alfred Marrow

Ep.98 What can we learn from the Harwood experiments?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 4 Sep 2022 10:00:00 +0000

In 1939, Alfred Marrow, the managing director of the Harwood Manufacturing Corporation factory in Virginia, invited Kurt Lewin (a German-American psychologist, known as one of the modern pioneers of social, organizational, and applied psychology in the U.S.

to come to the textile factory to discuss significant problems with productivity and turnover of employees. The Harwood study is considered the first experiment of group decision-making and self-management in industry and the first example of applied organizational psychology. The Harwood Experiment was part of Lewin's continuing exploration of participatory action research.

In this episode David and Drew discuss the main areas covered by this research:

Group decision-making
Self-management
Leadership training
Changing people’s thoughts about stereotypes
Overcoming resistance to change

It turns out that yes, Lewin identified many areas of the work environment that could be improved and changed with the participation of management and members of the workforce communicating with each other about their needs and wants.This was novel stuff in 1939, but proved to be extremely insightful and organizations now utilize many of this experiment’s tenets 80 years later.

Discussion Points:

Similarities in this study compared to the Chicago Western Electric “Hawthorne experiments”
Organizational science – Lewin’s approach
How Lewin came to be invited to the Virginia factory and the problems they needed to solve
Autocratic vs. democratic - studies of school children’s performance
The setup of the experiment - 30 minute discussions several times a week with four cohorts
The criticisms and nitpicks around the study participants
Group decision making
Self-management and field theory
Harwood leaders were appointed for tech knowledge, not people skills
The experiment held “clinics” where leaders could bring up their issues to discuss
Changing stereotypes - the factory refused to hire women over 30 - but experimented by hiring a group for this study
Presenting data does not work to change beliefs, but stories and discussions do
Resistance to change - changing workers’ tasks without consulting them on the changes created bitterness and lack of confidence
The illusion of choice lowers resistance
The four cohorts:
Control group - received changes as they normally would - just ‘being told’
Group received more detail about the changes, members asked to represeet the group with management
Group c and d participated in voting for the changes, their productivity was the only one that increased– 15%
This was an atypical factory/workforce to begin with, that already had a somewhat participatory approach
Takeaways:
Involvement in the discussion of change vs. no involvement
Self-management - setting own goals
Leadership needs more than technical competence
Stereotypes - give people space to express views, they may join the group majority in voting the other way
Resistance to change - if people can contribute and participate, confidence is increased
Focus on group modifications, not individuals
More collaborative, less autocratic
Doing this kind of research is not that difficult, you don’t need university-trained researchers, just people with a good mind for research ideas/methods

Quotes:

“The experiments themselves were a series of applied research studies done in a single manufacturing facility in the U.S., starting in 1939.” - David

“Lewin’s principal for these studies was…’no research without action, and no action without research,’ and that’s where the idea of action research came from…each study is going to lead to a change in the plant.” - Drew

“It became clear that the same job was done very differently by different people.” - David

“This is just a lesson we need to learn over and over and over again in our organizations, which is that you don’t get very far by telling your workers what to do without listening to them.” - Drew

“With 80 years of hindsight it's really hard to untangle the different explanations for what was actually going on here.” - Drew

“Their theory was that when you include workers in the design of new methods…it increases their confidence…it works by making them feel like they’re experts…they feel more confident in the change.” - Drew

Resources:

Episode 97: Should we link safety performance to bonus pay?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan and Drew Rae) — Sun, 21 Aug 2022 10:00:00 +0000

This was very in-depth research within a single organization, and the survey questions it used were well-structured. With 48 interviews to pull from, it definitely generated enough solid data to inform the paper’s results and make it a valuable study.We’ll be discussing the pros and cons of linking safety performance to monetary bonuses, which can often lead to misreporting, recategorizing, or other “perverse” behaviors regarding safety reporting and metrics, in order to capture that year-end dollar amount, especially among mid-level and senior management.

Discussion Points:

Do these bonuses work as intended?
Oftentimes profit sharing within a company only targets senior management teams, at the expense of the front-line employees
If safety and other measures are tied monetarily to bonuses, organizations need to spend more than a few minutes determining what is being measured
Bonuses – do they really support safety? They don’t prevent accidents
“What gets measured gets managed” OR “What gets measured gets manipulated”
Supervisors and front-line survey respondents did not understand how metrics were used for bonuses
87% replied that the safety measures had limited or negative effect
Nearly half said the bonus structure tied to safety showed that the organization felt safety was a priority
Nothing negative was recorded by the respondents in senior management- did they believe this is a useful tool?
Most organizations have only 5% or less performance tied to safety
David keeps giving examples in the hopes that Drew will agree that at least one of them is a good idea
Drew has “too much faith in humanity” around reporting and measuring safety in these organizations
Try this type of survey in your own organization and see what you find

Quotes:

“I’m really mixed, because I sort of agree on principle, but I disagree on any practical form.” - Drew

“I think there’s a challenge between the ideals here and the practicalities.” - David

“I think sometimes we can really put pretty high stakes on pretty poorly thought out things, we oversimplify what we’re going to measure and reward.” - Drew

“If you look at the general literature on performance bonuses, you see that they cause trouble across the board…they don’t achieve their purposes…they cause senior executives to do behaviors that are quite perverse.” - Drew

“I don’t like the way they’ve written up the analysis I think that there’s some lost opportunity due to a misguided desire to be too statistically methodical about something that doesn’t lend itself to the statistical analysis.” - Drew

“If you are rewarding anything, then my view is that you’ve got to have safety alongside that if you want to signal an importance there.” - David

Resources:

Episode 96: Why should we be cautious about too much clarity?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 31 Jul 2022 10:00:00 +0000

Just because concepts, theories, and opinions are useful and make people feel comfortable, doesn’t mean they are correct. No one so far has come up with an answer in the field of safety that proves, “this is the way we should do it,” and in the work of safety, we must constantly evaluate and update our practices, rules, and recommendations. This of course means we can never feel completely comfortable – and humans don’t like that feeling. We’ll dig into why we should be careful about feeling a sense of “clarity” and mental ease when we think that we understand things completely- because what happens if someone is deliberately making us feel that a problem is “solved”...?

The paper we’re discussing deals with a number of interesting psychological constructs and theories. The abstract reads:

The feeling of clarity can be dangerously seductive. It is the feeling associated with understanding things. And we use that feeling, in the rough-and-tumble of daily life, as a signal that we have investigated a matter sufficiently. The sense of clarity functions as a thought-terminating heuristic. In that case, our use of clarity creates significant cognitive vulnerability, which hostile forces can try to exploit. If an epistemic manipulator can imbue a belief system with an exaggerated sense of clarity, then they can induce us to terminate our inquiries too early — before we spot the flaws in the system. How might the sense of clarity be faked? Let’s first consider the object of imitation: genuine understanding. Genuine understanding grants cognitive facility. When we understand something, we categorize its aspects more easily; we see more connections between its disparate elements; we can generate new explanations; and we can communicate our understanding. In order to encourage us to accept a system of thought, then, an epistemic manipulator will want the system to provide its users with an exaggerated sensation of cognitive facility. The system should provide its users with the feeling that they can easily and powerfully create categorizations, generate explanations, and communicate their understanding. And manipulators have a significant advantage in imbuing their systems with a pleasurable sense of clarity, since they are freed from the burdens of accuracy and reliability. I offer two case studies of seductively clear systems: conspiracy theories; and the standardized, quantified value systems of bureaucracies.

Discussion Points:

This has been our longest break from the podcast
David traveled to the US
Uncertainty can make us risk-averse
Organizations strive for more certainty in the workplace
Scimago for evaluating research papers
A well-written paper, but not peer-evaluated by psychologists
Focus on conspiracy theories and bureaucracy
The Studio C comedy sketch - bank robbers meet a philosopher
Academic evaluations - white men vs. minorities/women
Puzzles and pleasure spikes
Clarity as a thought terminator
Epistemic intimidation and epistemic seduction
Cognitive Fluency, Insight, and Cognitive Facility
Although fascinating, there is no evidence to support the paper’s claims
Echo chambers and thought bubbles
Rush Limbaugh and Fox News - buying into the belief system
Numbers, graphs, charts, grades, tables – all make us feel comfort and control
Takeaways:
Just because it’s useful, doesn’t mean it’s correct
The world is not supposed to make sense, it’s important to live with some cognitive discomfort
Be cautious about feeling safe and comfortable
Constant evaluation of safety practices must be the norm

Resources:

Ep.95 Do Take-5 risk assessments contribute to safe work?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 24 Apr 2022 10:00:00 +0000

Assessing the Influence of “Take 5” Pre-Task Risk Assessments on Safety” by Jop Havinga, Mohammed Ibrahim Shire, and our own Andrew Rae. The paper was just published in “Safety,” - an international, peer-reviewed, open-access journal of industrial and human health safety published quarterly online by MDPI.

The paper’s abstract reads:

This paper describes and analyses a particular safety practice, the written pre-task risk assessment commonly referred to as a “Take 5”. The paper draws on data from a trial at a major infrastructure construction project. We conducted interviews and field observations during alternating periods of enforced Take 5 usage, optional Take 5 usage, and banned Take 5 usage. These data, along with evidence from other field studies, were analysed using the method of Functional Interrogation. We found no evidence to support any of the purported mechanisms by which Take 5 might be effective in reducing the risk of workplace accidents. Take 5 does not improve the planning of work, enhance worker heedfulness while conducting work, educate workers about hazards, or assist with organisational awareness and management of hazards. Whilst some workers believe that Take 5 may sometimes be effective, this belief is subject to the “Not for Me” effect, where Take 5 is always believed to be helpful for someone else, at some other time. The adoption and use of Take 5 is most likely to be an adaptive response by individuals and organisations to existing structural pressures. Take 5 provides a social defence, creating an auditable trail of safety work that may reduce anxiety in the present, and deflect blame in the future. Take 5 also serves a signalling function, allowing workers and companies to appear diligent about safety.

Discussion Points:

Drew, how are you feeling with just a week of comments and reactions coming in?
If people are complaining that the study is not big enough, great! That means people are interested
Introduction of Jop Havinga, and his top-level framing of the study
Why do we do the ‘on-off’ style of research?
We saw no difference in results when cards were mandatory, or optional, or banned
Perplexingly, some cards are filled out before getting to the job, and some after the job is complete, when there is no need for the card
One way cards may be helpful is simply creating a mindfulness and heedfulness about procedures
The “Not for Me” effect– people believe the cards may be good for others, but not necessary for selves
Research criticisms like, “how can you actually tell people are paying attention or not?”
The Take 5 cards serve as a protective layer for management and workers looking to avoid blame
Main takeaway: Stop using Take 5s in accident investigations, as they provide no real data, and they may even be detrimental– as in “safety clutter”
Send us your suggestions for future episodes, we are actively looking!

Quotes:

“You always get taken by surprise when people find other ways to criticize [the research.] I think my favorite criticism is people who immediately hit back by trying to attack the integrity of the research.” - Dr. Drew

“So this link between behavioral psychology and safety science is sometimes very weak, it’s sometimes just a general idea of applying incentives.” - Dr. Drew

“When someone says, ‘we introduced Take 5’s and we reduced our number of accidents by 50%,’ that is nonsense. There is no [one] safety intervention in the world where you could have that level of change and be able to see it.” - Dr. Drew

“It’s really hard to argue that these Take 5s lead to actual better planning of the work they’re conducting.” - Dr. Jop Havinga

“What we saw is just a total disconnect – the behavior happens without the Take 5s, the Take 5s happen without the behavior. The two NEVER actually happened at the same time.” - Dr. Drew

“Considering that Take 5 cards are very generic, they will rarely contain anything new for somebody.” - Dr. Jop Havinga

“Often the people who are furthest removed from the work are most satisfied with Take 5s and most reluctant to get rid of them.” - Dr. Drew

Resources:

Link to the Research Paper

Ep.94 What makes a quality leadership engagement for safety?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 17 Apr 2022 10:00:00 +0000

The authors’ goal was to produce a scoring protocol for safety-focused leadership engagements that reflects the consensus of a panel of industry experts. Therefore, the authors adopted a multiphased focus group research protocol to address three fundamental questions:

1. What are the characteristics of a high-quality leadership engagement?

2. What is the relative importance of these characteristics?

3. What is the reliability of the scorecard to assess the quality of leadership engagement?

Just like the last episode’s paper, the research has merit, even though it was published in a trade journal and not an academic one. The researchers interviewed 11 safety experts and identified 37 safety protocols to rank. This is a good starting point, but it would be better to also find out what these activities look like when they’re “done well,” and what success looks like when the safety measures, protocols, or attributes “work well.”

The Paper’s Main Research Takeaways:

Safety-focused leadership engagements are important because, if performed well, they can convey company priorities, demonstrate care and reinforce positive safety culture.
A team of 11 safety experts representing the four construction industry sectors identified and prioritized the attributes of an effective leadership engagement.
A scorecard was created to assess the quality of a leadership engagement, and the scorecard was shown to be reliable in independent validation.

Discussion Points:

Dr. Drew and Dr. David’s initial thoughts on the paper
Thoughts on quality vs. quantity
How do the researchers define “leadership safety engagements”
The three key phases:
- Phase 1: Identification of key attributes of excellent engagements
- Phase 2: Determining the relative importance of potential predictors
- Phase 3: Reliability check
The 15 key indicators–some are just common sense, some are relatively creepy
The end product, the checklist, is actually quite useful
The next phase should be evaluating results – do employees actually feel engaged with this approach?
Our key takeaways:
It is possible to design a process that may not actually be valid
The 37 items identified– a good start, but what about asking the people involved: what does it look like when “done well”
No matter what, purposeful safety engagement is very important
Ask what the actual leaders and employees think!
We look forward to the results in the next phase of this research
Send us your suggestions for future episodes, we are actively looking!

Quotes:

“If the measure itself drives a change to the practice, then I think that is helpful as well.” - Dr. David

“I think just the exercise of trying to find those quality metrics gets us to think harder about what are we really trying to achieve by this activity.” - Dr. Drew

“So I love the fact that they’ve said okay, we’re talking specifically about people who aren’t normally on-site, who are coming on-site, and the purpose is specifically a conversation about safety engagement. So it’s not to do an audit or some other activity.” - Dr. Drew

“The goal of this research was to produce a scoring protocol for safety-focused leadership engagements, that reflects the common consensus of a panel of industry experts.” - Dr. David

“We’ve been moving towards genuine physical disconnections between people doing work and the people trying to lead, and so it makes sense that over the next little while, companies are going to make very deliberate conscious efforts to reconnect, and to re-engage.” - Dr. Drew

“I suspect people are going to be begging for tools like this in the next couple of years.” - Dr. Drew

“At least the researchers have put a tentative idea out there now, which can be directly tested in the next phase, hopefully, of their research, or someone else’s research.” - Dr. Drew

Resources:

Ep.93 Do the benefits of Lifesaving rules outweigh the negative consequences?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Wed, 30 Mar 2022 10:00:00 +0000

We will discuss the pros and cons of “Golden Safety Rules” and a punitive safety culture vs. a critical risk management approach, and analyze the limitations of the methods used in this research.

The paper’s abstract introduction reads:

Golden safety rules (GSR) have been in existence for decades across multiple industry sectors – championed by oil and gas – and there is a belief that they have been effective in keeping workers safe. As safety programs advance in the oil and gas sector, can we be sure that GSR have a continued role? ERM surveyed companies across mining, power, rail, construction, manufacturing, chemicals and oil and gas, to examine the latest thinking about GSR challenges and successes. As we embarked on the survey, the level of interest was palpable; from power to mining it was apparent that companies were in the process of reviewing and overhauling their use of GSR. The paper will present key insights from the survey around the questions we postulated. Are GSR associated with a punitive safety culture, and have they outlived their usefulness as company safety cultures mature? Is the role of GSR being displaced as critical control management reaches new pinnacles? Do we comply with our GSR, and how do we know? Do our GSR continue to address the major hazards that our personnel are most at risk from? How do we apply our GSR with contractors, and to what extent do our contractors benefit from that? The paper concludes with some observations of how developments outside of the oil and gas sector provide meaningful considerations for the content and application of GSR for oil and gas companies.

Discussion Points:

There isn’t a lot of good research out there on Golden Rules
Most of the research is statistics on accidents or incidents
Most Golden Rules are conceived without frontline or worker input
Golden Rules are viewed as either guidelines for actions, or a resource for actions
Some scenarios where workers should not/could not follow absolute rules– David’s example of the seatbelt story in the AU outback
If rules cannot be followed, the work should be redesigned
Discussion of the paper from the APPEA Trade Journal
Answering seven questions:
Are life-saving rules associated with punitive safety cultures?
Have life-saving rules outlived their usefulness?
Has the role of life-saving rules been replaced by more mature risk management programs?
Do we actually comply with life-saving rules?
How do we know there is compliance with life-saving rules?
Do life-saving rules continue to address major hazards?
How do we apply life-saving rules to our contractors?
There were 15 companies involved in the research and a one hour interview with a management team member for each company
Our conclusions for each of the questions asked
Key takeaways -
If we’ve got rules that define key roles, they may continue to be relevant
There are a lot of factors that influence the effectiveness of the rules program
It’s difficult, if not impossible, to divorce a life-saving rule program from the development of a punitive safety culture
Critical control management needs to be developed in partnership with your workforce
So the answer to this episode’s question is – this paper cannot answer it
Send us your suggestions for future episodes, we are actively looking!

Quotes:

“People tend to think of rules as constraining. They’re like laws that you stick within that you don’t step outside of.” Dr. Drew

“Often the type of things that are published in trade associations are much closer to the real-world concerns of people at work, and a lot of people working for consultancies are very academically-minded.” - Dr. Drew

“One way to get a name in safety is to be good at safety, another way to get a name in safety is to tell everyone how good you are at safety.” Dr. Drew

“They’re not just talking to people who love Golden Rules [in this paper]. We’ve got some companies that never even wanted them, some companies that tried them and don’t like them, some companies that love them. So that’s a fantastic sample when it comes to, ‘do we have a diverse range of opinions.’” - Dr. Drew

“In many organizations that have done life-saving rules, they saw this critical risk management framework as an evolution, an improvement, in what they’re doing.” Dr. David

“I think that’s the danger of trying to make things too simple is it becomes either too generic or too vague, or just not applicable to so many circumstances.” Dr. Drew

Resources:

Link to the Golden Safety Rules Paper by Fraser and Colgan

Link to the Safety Science Article

Ep.92 How do different career paths affect the roles and training needs of safety practitioners?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan and Drew Rae) — Sun, 13 Mar 2022 10:00:00 +0000

The paper results center on a survey sent to a multitude of French industries, and although the sampling is from only one country, 15 years ago, the findings are very illustrative of common issues among safety professionals within their organizations. David used this paper as a reference for his PhD thesis, and we are going to dig into each section to discuss.

The paper’s abstract introduction reads:

What are the training needs of company preventionists? An apparently straightforward question, but one that will very quickly run into a number of difficulties. The first involves the extreme variability of situations and functions concealed behind the term preventionist and which stretch way beyond the term’s polysemous nature. Moreover, analysis of the literature reveals that very few research papers have endeavoured to analyse the activities associated with prevention practices, especially those of preventionists. This is a fact, even though prevention-related issues and preventionist responsibilities are becoming increasingly important.

Discussion Points:

The paper, reported from French industries, focuses heavily on safety in areas like occupational therapies, ergonomics, pesticides, hygiene, etc.
The downside of any “survey” result is that we can only capture what the respondents “say” or self-report about their experiences
Most of the survey participants were not originally trained as safety professionals
There are three subgroups within the survey:
1. High school grads with little safety training
2. Post high school with two-year tech training program paths to safety work
3. University-educated levels including engineers and managers
There were six main positions isolated within this study:
1. Prevention Specialists - hold a degree in safety, high status in safety management
2. Field Preventionists - lesser status, operations level, closer to front lines
3. Prevention Managers - executive status, senior management, engineers/project managers
4. Preventionist Proxies - may be establishing safety programs, in opposition to the organization, chaotic positions
5. Basic Coordinators - mainly focused on training others
6. Unstructured - no established safety procedures, may have been thrown into this role
So many of the respondents felt isolated and frustrated within the organizations– which continues to be true in the safety profession
There is evidence in this paper and others that a large portion of safety professionals “hate their bosses” and feel ‘great distress’ in their positions
Only 2.5% felt comfortable negotiating safety with management
Takeaways:
1. Safety professionals come from widely diverse backgrounds
2. Training and education are imperative
3. These are complex jobs that often are not on site
4. Role clarity is very low, leading to frustration and job dissatisfaction
5. Send us your suggestions for future episodes, we are actively looking!

Quotes:

“I think this study was quite a coordinated effort across the French industry that involved a lot of different professional associations.” - David

“It might be interesting for our readers/listeners to sort of think about which of these six groups do you fit into and how well do you reckon that is a description of what you do.” - Drew

“I thought it was worth highlighting just how much these different [job] categories are determined by the organization, not by the background or skill of the safety practitioner.” - Drew

“[I read a paper that stated:] There is a significant proportion of safety professionals that hate their bosses …and it was one of the top five professions that hate their bosses and managers.” - David

“You don’t have to go too far in the safety profession to find frustrated professionals.” - David

“There’s a lot to think on and reflect on…it’s one sample in one country 15 years ago, but these are useful reflections as we get to the practical takeaways.” - David

“The activity that I like safety professionals to do is to think about the really important parts of their role that add the most value to the safety of work, and then go and ask questions of their stakeholders of what they think are the most valuable parts of the role, …and work toward alignment.” - David

“Getting that role clarity makes you feel that you’re doing better in your job.” - Drew

Resources:

Ep.91 How can we tell when safety research is C.R.A.A.P?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 27 Feb 2022 10:00:00 +0000

We will go through each letter of the amusing and memorable acronym and give you our thoughts on ways to make sure each point is addressed, and different methodologies to consider when verifying or assuring that each element has been satisfied before you cite the source.

Sarah Blakeslee writes (about her CRAAP guidelines): Sometimes a person needs an acronym that sticks. Take CRAAP for instance. CRAAP is an acronym that most students don’t expect a librarian to be using, let alone using to lead a class. Little do they know that librarians can be crude and/or rude, and do almost anything in order to penetrate their students’ deep memories and satisfy their instructional objectives. So what is CRAAP and how does it relate to libraries? Here begins a long story about a short acronym…

Discussion Points:

The CRAAP guidelines were so named to make them memorable
The five CRAAP areas to consider when using sources for your work are:
Currency- timeliness, how old is too old?
Relevance- who is the audience, does the info answer your questions
Authority- have you googled the author? What does that search show you?
Accuracy- is it verifiable, supported by evidence, free of emotion?
Purpose- is the point of view objective? Or does it seem colored by political, religious, or cultural biases?
Takeaways:
You cannot fully evaluate a source without looking AT the source
Be cautious about second-hand sources– is it the original article, or a press release about the article?
Be cautious of broad categories, there are plenty of peer-reviewed, well-known university articles that aren’t credible
To answer our title question, use the CRAAP guidelines as a basic guide to evaluating your sources, it is a useful tool
Send us your suggestions for future episodes, we are actively looking!

Quotes:

“The first thing I found out is there’s pretty good evidence that teaching students using the [CRAAP] guidelines doesn’t work.” - Dr. Drew

“It turns out that even with the [CRAAP] guidelines right in front of them, students make some pretty glaring mistakes when it comes to evaluating sources.” - Dr. Drew

“Until I was in my mid-twenties, I never swore at all.” - Dr. Drew

“When you’re talking about what someone else said [in your paper], go read what that person said, no matter how old it is.” - Dr. Drew

“The thing to look out for in qualitative research is, how much are the participants being led by the researchers.” - Dr. Drew

“So what I really want to know when I’m reading a qualitative study is not what the participant answered. I want to know what the question was in the first place.” - Dr. Drew

Resources:

Link to the CRAAP Test

Ep.90 Does formal safety management displace operational knowledge?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 13 Feb 2022 10:00:00 +0000

An excerpt from the paper’s abstract reads as follows: The proposition is based on theory about relationships between knowledge and power, complemented by organizational theory on standardization and accountability. We suggest that the increased reliance on self-regulation and international standards in safety management may be drivers for a shift in the distribution of power regarding safety, changing the conception of what is valid and useful knowledge. Case studies from two Norwegian transport sectors, the railway and the maritime sectors, are used to illustrate the proposition. In both sectors, we observe discourses based on generic approaches to safety management and an accompanying disempowerment of the practitioners and their perspectives.

Join us as we delve into the paper and endeavor to answer the question it poses.We will discuss these highlights:

Safety science may contribute to the marginalization of practical knowledge
How “paper trails” and specialists marginalize and devalue experience-based knowledge
An applied science needs to understand the effects it causes, also from a power-perspective
Safety Science should reflect on how our results interact with existing system-specific knowledge
Examples from their case studies in maritime transport and railways

Discussion Points:

David has been traveling in the U.S. for much of January seeing colleagues
This is one of David’s favorite papers
Discussion of the paper’s authors being academics, not scientists
How does an organization create “good safety” and what does that look like?
The rise of homogenous international standards of safety
Can safety professionals transfer their knowledge and work in other industries
The two case studies in this paper: Norwegian railway and maritime systems/industries
The separation between top-down system safety and local, front-line practitioners
Our key takeaways from this paper
Send us your suggestions for future episodes, we are actively looking!

Quotes:

“If you understand safety, then it really shouldn’t matter which industry you’re applying it on.” - Dr. Drew Rae

“I can’t imagine, as a safety professional, how you’re impactful in the first 12 months [on a new job] until you actually understand what it is you’re trying to influence.” - Dr. David Provan

“It feels to me this is what happened here, that they formed this view of what was going on and then actually traced back through their data to try to make sense of it.” - Dr. David Provan

“I have to say I think they genuinely use these case studies to really effectively illustrate and support the argument that they’re making.” - Dr. Drew Rae

“Once we start thinking too hard about a function, we start formalizing it and once we start formalizing it, it starts to become detached from operations and sort of flows from that operational side into the management side.” - Dr. Drew Rae

“I don’t think it's being driven by the academics at all and clearly it’s in the sociology of the profession's literature all the way back to the 1950s and 60s.” - Dr. David Provan

“We’re fighting amongst ourselves as a non-working community about whose [safety] model should be the one to then impose on the genuine front line practitioners.” - Dr. Drew Rae

Resources:

Link to Paper in JSS

Wastell’s Paper: The Fetish of Technique

Ep.89 When is the process more important than the outcome?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 30 Jan 2022 10:00:00 +0000

Wastell, who has a BSc and Ph.D. from Durham University, is Emeritus Professor in Operations Management and Information Systems at Nottingham University in the UK. Professor Wastell began his academic career as a cognitive neuroscientist at Durham, studying the relationships between brain activity and psychological processes. His areas of expertise include neuroscience and social policy: critical perspectives; psychophysiological design of complex human-machine systems; Information systems and public sector reform; design and innovation in the public services; management as design; and human factors design of safe systems in child protection.

Join us as we delve into the statement (summarized so eloquently in Wastell’s well-crafted abstract): “Methodology, whilst masquerading as the epitome of rationality, may thus operate as an irrational ritual, the enactment of which provides designers with a feeling of security and efficiency at the expense of real engagement with the task at hand.”

Discussion Points:

How and when Dr. Rae became aware of this paper
Why this paper has many structural similarities to our paper, ”Safety work versus the safety of work” published in 2019
Organizations’ reliance on top-heavy processes and rituals such as Gantt charts, milestones, gateways, checklists, etc
Thoughts and reaction to Section I: A Cautionary Tale
Section II: Methodology: The Lionization of Technique
Section III: Methodology as a Social Defense
The three elements of social defense against anxiety:
Basic assumption (fight or flight)
Covert coalition (internal organization protection/family/mafia)
Organizational ritual (the focus of this paper)
Section IV: The Psychodynamics of Learning: Teddy Bears and Transitional Objects
Paul Feyerabend and his “Against Method” book
Our key takeaways from this paper and our discussion

Quotes:

“Methodology may not actually drive outcomes.” - David Provan

“A methodology can probably never give us, repeatably, exactly what we’re after.” - David Provan

“We have this proliferation of solutions, but the mere fact that we have so many solutions to that problem suggests that none of the individual solutions actually solve it.” - Drew Rae

“Wastell calls out this large lack of empirical evidence around the structured methods that organizations use, and concludes that they seem to have more qualities of ‘religious convictions’ than scientific truths.” - David Provan

“I love the fact that he calls out the ‘journey’ metaphor, which we use all the time in safety.” - Drew Rae

“You can have transitional objects that don’t serve any of the purposes that they are leading you to.” - Drew Rae

“Turn up to seminars, and just read papers, that are totally outside of your own field.” - Drew Rae

Resources:

Paul Feyerabend (1924-1994)

Book: Against Method by Paul Feyerabend

Our Paper Safety Work vs. The Safety of Work

Ep.88 Why do organisations sometimes make bad decisions?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 16 Jan 2022 10:00:00 +0000

While this paper was written over half a century ago, it is still relevant to us today - particularly in the Safety management industry where we are often responsible for offering solutions to problems, and implementing those solutions, requires decisions to be made by top management.

This is another fascinating piece of work that will broaden your understanding of why organisations often struggle with solving problems that involve making decisions.

Topics:

Introduction to the research paper: A Garbage Can Model of Organisational Choice
Organised anarchies
Phenomena explained by this paper
Examples of the garbage can models
- Standards Committees
- Enforceable undertakings process
How to influence the process
Deciding on who makes decisions
Conclusion - most problems will get solved
Practical takeaways
- Not to get discouraged when your problem isn’t solved in a particular meeting
- Being mindful of where your decision-making energy is spent
- Problems vs Solutions vs Decision-making
- Have multiple solutions ready for problems that may come up - but don’t force them all the time.

Quotes:

“Decisions aren’t made inside people’s heads, decisions are made in meetings, so we’ve got to understand the interplay between people in looking at how decisions are made.” - Dr. Drew Rae

“Incident investigations are a great example of choice opportunities.” - Dr. Drew Rae

“It’s probably a good reflection point for people to just think about how many decisions certain roles in the organization are being asked to be involved in.” - Dr. David Provan

Resources:

The Safety of Work LinkedIn

Administrative Science Quarterly

A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice (Wikipedia Page)

Ep.87 What exactly is Systems Thinking?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 2 Jan 2022 10:00:00 +0000

We will review each section of Leveson’s paper and discuss how she sets each section up by stating a general assumption and then proceeds to break that assumption down.We will discuss her analysis of:

Safety vs. Reliability
Retrospective vs. Prospective Analysis
Three Levels of Accident Causes:
Proximal event chain
Conditions that allowed the event
Systemic factors that contributed to both the conditions and the event

Discussion Points:

Unlike some others, Leveson makes her work openly available on her website
Leveson’s books, SafeWare: System Safety and Computers (1995) and Engineering a Safer World: Systems Thinking Applied to Safety (2011)
Drew describes Leveson as a “prickly character” and once worked for her, and was eventually fired by her
Leveson came to engineering with a psychology background
Many safety professionals express concern regarding how major accidents keep happening and bemoaning - ‘why we can’t learn enough to prevent them?’
The first section of Leveson’s paper: Safety vs. Reliability - sometimes these concepts are at odds, sometimes they are the same thing
How cybernetics used to be ‘the thing’ but the theory of simple feedback loops fell apart
Summing up this section: safety is not the sum of reliability components
The second section of the paper: Retrospective vs. Prospective Accident Analysis
Most safety experts rely on and agree that retrospective accident analysis is still the best way to learn
Example - where technology changes slowly, ie airplanes, it’s acceptable to run a two-year investigation into accident causes
Example - where technology changes quickly, ie the 1999 Mars Climate Orbiter crash vs. Polar Lander crash, there is no way to use retrospective analysis to change the next iteration in time
The third section of the paper: Three Levels of Analysis
Its easiest to find the causes that led to the proximal event chain and the conditions that allowed the event, but identifying the systemic factors is more difficult because it’s not as easy to draw a causal link, it’s too indirect
The “5 Whys” method to analyzing an event or failure
Practical takeaways from Leveson’s paper–
STAMP (System-Theoretic Accident Model and Processes) using the accident causality model based on systems theory
Investigations should focus on fixing the part of the system that changes slowest
The exact front line events of the accident often don’t matter that much in improving safety
Closing question: “What exactly is systems thinking?” It is the adoption of the Rasmussian causation model– that accidents arise from a change in risk over time, and analyzing what causes that change in risk

Quotes:

“Leveson says, ‘If we can get it right some of the time, why can’t we get it right all of the time?’” - Dr. David Provan

“Leveson says, ‘the more complex your system gets, that sort of local autonomy becomes dangerous because the accidents don’t happen at that local level.’” - Dr. Drew Rae

“In linear systems, if you try to model things as chains of events, you just end up in circles.’” - Dr. Drew Rae

“‘Never buy the first model of a new series [of new cars], wait for the subsequent models where the engineers had a chance to iron out all the bugs of that first model!” - Dr. David Provan

“Leveson says the reason systemic factors don’t show up in accident reports is just because its so hard to draw a causal link.’” - Dr. Drew Rae

“A lot of what Leveson is doing is drawing on a deep well of cybernetics theory.” - Dr. Drew Rae

Resources:

Applying Systems Thinking Paper by Leveson

Nancy Leveson– Full List of Publications

Nancy Leveson of MIT

Compute your Erdos Number

Ep.86 Do we have adequate models of accident causation?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 19 Dec 2021 10:00:00 +0000

We will discuss how other safety science researchers have designed theories that use Rasmussen’s concepts, the major takeaways from Rasmussen’s article, and how safety professionals can use these theories to analyze and improve systems in their own organizations today.

Discussion Points:

Rasmussen’s history of influence, and the parallels to (Paul) Erdős numbers in research paper publishing
How Rasmussen is the “grandfather” of safety science
Rasmussen’s impact across disciplines and organizational categories through the years
The basics of this paper
Why risk management models must never be static
How other theorists and scientists take Rasmussen’s concepts and translate them into their own models and diagrams
The paper’s summary of the evolution of theoretical approaches up until ‘now’ (1997)
Why accident models must use a holistic approach including technology AND people
How organizations are always going to have pressures of resources vs. required results
Employees vs. Management– both push for results with minimal acceptable effort, creating accident risk
Rasmussen identified we need different models that reflect the real world
Takeaways for our listeners from Rasmussen’s work

Quotes:

“That’s the forever challenge in safety, is people have great ideas, but what do you do with them? Eventually, you’ve got to turn it into a method.” - Drew Rae

“These accidental events are shaped by the activity of people. Safety, therefore, depends on the control of people’s work processes.” - David Provan

“There’s always going to be this natural migration of activity towards the boundaries of acceptable performance.” - David Provan

“This is like the most honest look at work I think I’ve seen in any safety paper.” - Drew Rae

“If you’re a safety professional, just how much time are you spending understanding all of these ins and outs and nuances of work, and people’s experience of work? …You actually need to find out from the insiders inside the system. ” - David Provan

“‘You can’t just keep swatting at mosquitos, you actually have to drain the swamp.’ I think that’s the overarching conceptual framework that Rasmussen wanted us to have.” - David Provan

Resources:

Jens Rasmussen’s 1997 Paper

David Woods LinkedIn

Sidney Dekker Website

Nancy Leveson of MIT

Black Line/Blue Line Model

Ep.85 Why does safety get harder as systems get safer?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 28 Nov 2021 10:00:00 +0000

Find out our thoughts on this paper and our key takeaways for the ever-changing world of workplace safety.

Topics:

Introduction to the paper & the Author
“Adding more rules is not going to make your system safer.”
The principles of safety in the paper
Types of safety systems as broken down by the paper
Problems in these “Ultrasafe systems”
The Summary of developments of human error
The psychology of making mistakes
The Efficiency trade-off element in safety
Suggestions in Amalberti’s conclusion
Takeaway messages
Answering the question: Why does safety get harder as systems get safer?

Quotes:

“Systems are good - but they are bad because humans make mistakes” - Dr. Drew Rae

“He doesn’t believe that zero is the optimal number of human errors” - Dr. Drew Rae

“You can’t look at mistakes in isolation of the context” - Dr. Drew Rae

“The context and the system drive the behavior. - Dr. David Provan

“It’s part of the human condition to accept mistakes. It is actually an important part of the way we learn and develop our understanding of things. - Dr. David Provan

Resources:

The Safety of Work LinkedIn

Ep.81 How does simulation training develop Safety II capabilities?

The Paradoxes of Almost Totally Safe Transportation Systems by R. Amalberti

Risk Management in a Dynamic society: a Modeling problem - Jens Rasmussen

The ETTO Principle: Efficiency-Thoroughness Trade-Off: Why Things That Go Right Sometimes Go Wrong - Book by Erik Hollnagel

Navigating safety: Necessary Compromises and Trade-Offs - Theory and Practice - Book by R. Amalberti

Ep.84 How do orgasnisations balance reliable performance and spontaneous innovation?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 31 Oct 2021 10:00:00 +0000

This paper by Daniel Katz was published in 1964 and, scarily still has some very relevant takeaways for today’s safety procedures in organisations. We delve into this research and discover the ideas that Katz initiated all those years ago. The problem is that an organization cannot promote one of these concepts without negatively affecting the other. So how are organizations meant to manage this?

We share some personal thoughts on whether or not the world of safety research has since found an answer to dealing with these two contradictory concepts.

Topics:

Introduction to the paper
Introduction to the Author Daniel Katz
The history of the safety research industry
Three basic behaviors required from employees in all organizations
People’s willingness to stay in an organization
Managing dependable role performance
Spontanious initiative
Favourable attitude
Creating this motivation in employees to follow rules
Cultivating innovative behaviour
How this paper remains relevant in current safety research
No answer to this question of balancing these two behaviours

Quotes:

Katz is really one of the founding fathers in the field of organizational psychology. - Dr. Drew

Rae

It’s not just that you’re physically getting people to stay but getting them to stay and still be willing to be productive. Dr. Drew Rae

“When we promote autonomy, we need to think about what that does to reliable role performance.” - Dr. Drew Rae

Complex situations, clearly need complex solutions. - Dr. David Provan

Resources:

Episode 2

The motivational basis of organizational behavior (Paper)

Ep.83 Does the language used in investigations influence the recommendations?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 17 Oct 2021 10:00:00 +0000

This paper reveals some really interesting findings and it would be valuable for companies to take notice and possibly change the way they implement incident report recoMmendations.

Topics:

Introduction to the paper
The general process of an investigation
The Hypothesis
The differences between the reports and their language
The results of the three reports
Differences in the recommendations on each of the reports
The different ways of interpreting the results
Practical Takeaways
Not sharing lessons learned from incidents - let others learn it for themselves by sharing the report.
Summary and answer to the question

Quotes:

“All of the information in every report is factual, all of the information is about the same real incident that happened.” Drew Rae

“These are plausibly three different reports that are written for that same incident but they’re in very different styles, they highlight different facts and they emphasize different things.” Drew Rae

“Incident reports could be doing so much more for us in terms of broader safety in the organization.” David Provan

“From the same basic facts, what you select to highlight in the report and what story you use to tell seems to be leading us toward a particular recommendation.” - Drew Rae

Resources:

Accident Report Interpretation Paper

Episode 18 - Do Powerpoint Slides count as a safety hazard?

Ep.82 Why do we audit so much?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 26 Sep 2021 10:00:00 +0000

It's Modelling the Micro-Foundations of the Audit Society: Organizations and the Logic of the Audit Trail by Michael Power. This paper gets us thinking about why organizations do audits in the first place seeing as it has been proven to often decrease the efficiency of the actual process being audited. We discuss the negatives as well as the positives of audits - which both help explain why audits continue to be such a big part of safety management in organizations.

Topics:

What kinds of audits are happening
Why is the number of audits increasing?
Why do we keep doing audits when they seemingly do not help productivity.
Academia and publication metrics
The audit society
The foundations of an audit trail
The process model of an audit trail
The problem with audit trails.
Going from push to pull when audits are initiated
Why is it easier for some organizations to adopt auditing processes than others?
Displacement from goals to methods
Audits help different organizations line up their way of thinking
Practical takeaways

Quotes:

“We see that even though audits are supposed to increase efficiency, that in fact, they decrease efficiency through increased bureaucracy. - Drew Rae

“The audit process needs to aggregate multiple pieces of data, and then it has to produce a performance account, so the audit actually needs to deliver a result.” - David Provan

“We become less reflexive about what’s going on in terms of this value subversion - so we stop worrying about are we genuinely creating a safety culture in our business and we worry more about what’s the rating coming out of these audits in terms of the safety culture.” - Drew Rae

“Audits themselves are not improving underlying performance.” - David Provan

Resources:

Research paper: Modelling the Microfoundations of the Audit Society

Ep.81 How does simulation training develop Safety II capabilities?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 12 Sep 2021 10:00:00 +0000

The specific paper found some interesting results from these simulated situations - including that it was found that the debriefing, post-simulation, had a large impact on the amount of learning the participants felt they made. The doctors chat about whether the research was done properly and whether the findings could have been tested against alternative scenarios to better prove the theorized results.

Topics:

Individual and team skills needed to maintain safety.
Safety-I vs Safety-II
Introduction to the research paper
Maritime Safety and human error
Single-loop vs Double-loop learning
Simulator programs help people learn and reflect
Research methods
Results discussion
- Recognizing errors and anomalies
- Shared knowledge to define limits of action
- Operating the system with confidence
Importance of learning by doing and reflecting back afterward
Complexity and uncertainty as a factor in safety strategy.
Practical Takeaways
- Work simulation is an effective learning process
- Half of the learning comes from the debrief
- Read this paper if doing simulation training

Quotes:

“Very few advocates of Safety-II would disagree that it’s important to keep trying to identify those predictable ways that a system can fail and put in place barriers and controls and responses to those predictable ways that a system can fail.” - Dr. David Provan

“It limits claims that you can make about just how effective the program is. Unless you’ve got a comparison, you can’t really draw a conclusion that it’s effective.” - Dr. Drew Rae

“A lot of these scenarios are just things like minor sensor failures or errors in the display which you can imagine in an automated system, those are the things that need human intervention.” - Dr. Drew Rae

“Safety-I is necessary but not sufficient - you need to move on to the resilient solution ” - Dr. Drew Rae

“I don’t really think that situational complexity is what should guide your safety strategy. - Dr. Drew Rae

Resources:

Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Research paper

Episode 79 - How do new employees learn about safety?

Episode 19 - Virtual Reality and Safety training

Ep.80 What is safety clutter?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 29 Aug 2021 10:00:00 +0000

The paper we reference today is our own research paper published in 2018 named; Safety clutter: the accumulation and persistence of ‘safety’ work that does not contribute to operational safety. So we have done ample research when it comes to this particular topic and we’re excited to share this knowledge with you. Hopefully you will take away from this episode a better understanding of where to start looking for (and clear out) clutter in your own workplace.

Topics:

What is safety clutter?
The three C’s
Contribution
Confidence
Consensus
The paper - Safety clutter: the accumulation and persistence of ‘safety’ work that does not contribute to operational safety
Types of duplication in safety tasks
Generalization of safety tasks
Symbolic application of safety tasks
Attempted simplification
Least common denominator
Overspecification
The causes of safety clutter
Why reduce safety clutter?
Ways to deal with safety clutter

Quotes:

“Clutter by duplication - when you literally have two activities that perform the same function, then you know that at least one out of the two is going to be unnecessary. - Drew Rae

“They ended up having to create a hazard on the work site for the manager who was doing the critical controls inspection to check that they had properly managed the hazard.” Drew Rae

“I found a 28 page work page work instruction on how to spray weeds on a concrete pathway with a weedspray that was biodegradable and commercially available at any supermarket.” - David Provan

“It’s harder to remove anything that is there for safety than it is to add something that’s there for safety.” - Drew Rae

“Did you know that some of the things we do in this organization, specifically for safety, may make our organization less safe. - David Provan

Resources:

Research paper

Ep. 79 How do new employees learn about safety?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 8 Aug 2021 10:00:00 +0000

While there may be many reasons for this - this particular research paper looks at how younger workers are inducted into the workplace and how they learn about the safety practices and requirements that are expected. The findings are pretty fascinating - especially for people responsible for hiring new employees.

Topics

Introduction to the research paper
Types of questions researchers asked research subjects
Literature review
How people learn
Learning safe practices
Industries researched
Metalwork
Elderly care
Retail
General inferences
Community of practice
Gradient towards unsafety

Practical Takeaways

There’s a direct link between employment practices and safety
Temporary workers are less likely to follow safety precautions
Awareness of safety and how it relates to labor-hire
Reflective practice
Look at what happens during a new employee’s first week
Are your formal and informal induction and onboarding processes aligned to your safety risk profile of the different roles within your organization

Quotes:

“Learning isn’t about uploading knowledge, it’s about creating a sequence of experiences, and each person in the experience, they reflect on that experience, they learn from that, it leads them on to new experiences.” - Drew Rae

“When we induct workers, it’s not just about knowledge transfer, it’s not just about uploading the knowledge they need, it’s about how do we get them to start taking part in discussions and decisions and arguments and thinking about the way work happens.” - Drew Rae

“The one thing that we maybe can maintain is the formal standards that we communicate in the induction in the hope that creating some of that tension, creates discussion.” - David Provan

“Onboarding a person into the workplace is an investment in the person, so people are maybe likely to invest more if there’s more return.” - David Provan

Resources:

Research Paper Discussed

Episode 78: Do shock tactics work?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 25 Jul 2021 10:00:00 +0000

The reason we are talking about this today, is because this tactic is often used in workplace safety videos and we ask whether or not it works for everyone, how well it works for workplace safety and whether its even ethical in the first place, regardless of its efficacy.

Topics:

Deciding to discuss shock tactics/threat appeals in the podcast
Do they have a place in organization safety management?
Ethics behind using fear tactics
The research paper introduction
About the authors
How does fear connect with persuasion?
Too much fear-mongering
Adaptive vs maladaptive response to the message
General problems with research in fear messaging
Practical takeaways
Six things that determine how people respond to the message:

The severity of the fear
Susceptibility
Relevance
Efficacy
The wear-out effect
The credibility of the message

Quotes:

“Just because something is effective, still doesn’t necessarily make it OK.” - Dr. Drew Rae

“The amount of fear doesn’t seem to determine which path someone goes down, it just determines the likelihood that they are going to hit one of these paths very strongly.” - Dr. Drew Rae

“Communication which gives people an action that they can take right at the time they receive the communication is likely to be quite useful. Communication that just generally conveys a message about safety is not.” - Dr. Drew Rae

Resources:

The role of fear appeals in improving driver safety (Research Paper)

Ep.77 What does good look like?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 11 Jul 2021 10:00:00 +0000

The findings of this research point to the importance of staff buy-in and a team-driven approach to safety.

Topics:

Introduction to research paper Seven features of safety in maternity units
The premise of the study
Understanding the process behind data collection for this study
The Finding of the paper
Six Features/themes of patient safety
Rules & procedures vs social control mechanisms
Patient feedback
Refining the Safety findings

Commitment to safety and improvement
Staff improving working processes
Technical competence supported by formal training and informal learning
Teamwork, cooperation, and positive working relationships
Reinforcing, safe, ethical behaviors
Systems and processes designed for safety -regularly reviewed and optimized.
Effective coordination and the ability to mobilize quickly

Generalization of processes isn’t always helpful

Quotes:

“The forces that create positive conditions for safety in frontline work may be at least partially invisible to those who create them.” - Dr. David Provan

“Unlike last time, we’re now explicitly mentioning patients’ families, so last time it was ‘just do patient feedback’, now we’re talking about families being encouraged to share their experience.” - Dr. Drew Rae

“These seven [Safety Findings] may or may not be relevant for other domains or contexts but the message in the paper is - go and find out for yourself what is relevant and important in your context.” - Dr. David Provan

Resources:

Seven features of safety in maternity units -Research Paper

The Safety Of Work - Episode 14

Episode 75 - How Stop-Work Decisions are Made

Ep.76 What is Due Diligence?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 27 Jun 2021 10:00:00 +0000

Greg makes it very clear how important it is to avoid oversimplifying the term “due diligence”. He shares how this mistake has, unfortunately, led to safety officers and businesses being held liable for incidents at their premises. Today’s conversation with Greg was incredibly insightful to me and he clarified all his examples with real-life examples.

Topics:

Introduction to Greg Smith
Paper Safe
Capacity Index vs incident count safety metrics research paper in epi
What is due diligence?
Misleading due diligence products
Reasonably practicable vs due diligence
The validity of injury rates
Site inspection limitations
The role of health and safety reporting
Learning from incidents
Practical tips from Greg
Advice for safety officers meeting with the board of directors

Quotes:

“I find it fascinating the number of different disciplines, all landing at the same point at about the same time but without any reference to each other, I think it says something about the way that health and safety is managed at the moment.”- Greg Smith

“Due diligence creates a positive obligation on company officers in the same way that the reasonableness elements of WHS create positive obligations on employees.”- Greg Smith

“Injury rates from a legal perspective are not a measure of anything. They don’t demonstrate reasonably practicable, they do not demonstrate due diligence.” - Greg Smith

“ I am not an advocate of moving from complexity to simplicity. I think we need to be careful of that because a lot of what we do in safety is not simple and by making it simple, we’re actually hiding a lot of risk.” - Greg Smit

Resources:

Paper Safe Book - by Greg Smith

Forgeworks - Safety work vs Safety of Work

A capacity index to replace flawed incident-based metrics for worker safety

Deciding to Stop Work or Deciding How Work is Done?

Ep.75 How are stop work decisions made?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 13 Jun 2021 10:00:00 +0000

Together, Jop and I discuss a topic on which Drew and I previously touched: We revisit how stop-work decisions are made and why this is such an interesting topic of research.

Topics:

Jop’s research methods.
How to interpret and explain procedures.
Why rules don’t always lead to a work stoppage.
Why stop-work happens.
The perception vs. reality of stop-work.
Myths and expectations of safety culture.
The main takeaway.

Quotes:

“I think I’ve probably been guilty myself of not fully defining what I’m talking about.”

“Only one case I found where a rule actually led to stopping work.”

“First of all, compared to current interventions we see around stop-work...they all paint this picture of real significant decisions...and well, I found that plenty of stop-work decisions are basically considered insignificant.”

Resources:

A Capacity Index to Replace Flawed Incident-Based Metrics for Worker Safety

Ep.74 Is a capacity index a good replacement for incident-count safety metrics?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 30 May 2021 10:00:00 +0000

This topic interested us mainly because of a paper we encountered. It’s a very new peer-reviewed study that has only just been published online. We will use that paper as the framing device for our conversation.

Join us for this interesting and exciting conversation about the capacity index.

Topics:

The belief in required metrics.
Low injury rates and what they actually mean.
The regulator paradox.
The six capacities.
Due diligence.
The problem with the study’s names for metrics.
Measuring activities.
Practical takeaways.

Quotes:

“Injury rates aren’t predictive of the future, so using them to manage safety, using them as your guide, doesn’t work.”

“And while I think you could always argue that there are different capacities that you could measure, as well, I don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with the capacities that they have suggested.”

“Basically, what we’re doing is we’re measuring activities and all of those things are about measuring activities. Now, unless you already know for sure that those activities provide the capacity that you’re looking for, then measuring the activity doesn’t tell you anything about capacity.”

Resources:

The Effects of “Finger Pointing and Calling” on Cognitive Control Processes in the Task-Switching Paradigm

Ep.73 Does pointing and calling improve action reliability?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 16 May 2021 10:00:00 +0000

As our workplaces become more automated, it becomes the task of human workers to monitor the automated actions. At times, this may require a physical response or action on behalf of the human worker. So, while the physical load of workers has been lessened, their mental and emotional load has increased.

Tune in to hear us define pointing and calling and the ensuing discussion about its efficacy within the workplace.

Topics:

What is pointing and calling?
The lack of research on pointing and calling.
How pointing and calling potentially slows down work.
Measuring mental and physical demands.
Practical takeaways.

Quotes:

“You point your index finger directly at that thing and you say aloud what that thing is currently showing”

“But this pointing gesture also acts as a cue to trigger this attentional shift towards the information.”

“The researchers did not state clearly what their hypotheses were. For those of you out there who are doing research, this is a big no-no when you’re doing an experiment…”

Resources:

Ep.72 How visible is high-vis clothing?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 2 May 2021 10:00:00 +0000

We came across this topic, because of a conversation happening on LinkedIn. Thus, we thought it would be a good idea to dig into this subject and discuss it further.

Listen in as we discuss what actually makes humans most visible in unsafe situations and what some studies have concluded.

Topics:

Why the results between lab and natural environments vary.
How studies determine visibility.
Which colors are best for high visibility.
What makes humans most visible.
Using high-vis colors to identify objects and humans.
Practical takeaways.

Quotes:

“The general goal of this, is they just want to compare a whole heap of different factors.”

“The ability to just spot high-vis and the ability to spot a human wearing high-vis, seem to be actually two different mental tasks.”

“There’s been some suggestion in the research that we should actually standardize a human high-vis color.”

Resources:

The Roles of Garment Design and Scene Complexity in the Daytime Conspicuity of High-Visibility Safety Apparel

Double Checking Medicines: Defence Against Error or Contributory Factor?

Ep.71 Do double checks improve safety?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 18 Apr 2021 10:00:00 +0000

This topic came directly from our Safety of Work portal, which you can locate on our LinkedIn page. Rhys Thomas was good enough to submit this topic and also provided us with some great resources.

Join us as we dive into this topic and decide whether double-check policies help improve safety.

Topics:

What double-checking is.
The difference between a practice and mandatory policy.
Armitage and his history of papers regarding the medical field.
Deference to authority.
Formal risk assessment and internal risk assessment.
Independent checking.
What the evidence shows.
Practical takeaways.

Quotes:

“How do you know whether an error has happened, if no one notices it?”

“I think you’re doing a good job of qualitative research, if readers want to then go and actually read the raw data.”

“And I am completely unwilling to say, ‘This is a bad practice, we should get rid of it’ until we’ve got the evidence.”

Resources:

Safety of Work on LinkedIn

Ep.70 Is OHS management a profession?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 4 Apr 2021 10:00:00 +0000

So, on today’s episode, we discuss Occupational Health and Safety management and if it can be considered a profession.

We’d love to hear from our international listeners if our findings match their experiences.

Topics:

Making generalizations about work across Australia.
Collecting and defining OHS knowledge.
Three broad criteria for defining a profession.
Defining a role and career path.
The OHS body of knowledge.
Claim over decisions.
Technical problems and social problems.
How to define a professional organization and determine which is the premiere org for your profession.
Do you need to be part of a professional organization?
Why there need to be professional education programs.
Practical takeaways.

Quotes:

“A profession should have an established hierarchy, it should have some consistency in role titles, and it should have a career path.”

“We’ve got this wonderful project called the body of knowledge, but in the professional sense, we don’t have a stable body of knowledge; we have a really contested body of knowledge…”

“Either you put up barriers to entry and say ‘safety work should only be done by recognized professionals’. Or you say ‘we want to grow as an organization and anyone can be a recognized professional, just send us the cash’. And either way, you end up diluting what it means to be recognized as a safety professional.”

Resources:

The Emergence of the Occupational Health and Safety Profession in Australia

Russell McMullan on LinkedIn

Ep.69 Do safety in design processes change the design?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan, Russell McMullan) — Sun, 21 Mar 2021 10:00:00 +0000

Russell is a safety practitioner based in New Zealand. He joins us to tell us about his work and together we wonder if safety and design processes change the design itself.

Topics:

Is safety and design effective?
Risk shuffling.
Russell’s key findings.
The hierarchy of controls.
The proper use of safety and design.
Evaluating design to minimize risk.
Practical advice from Russell.

Quotes:

“We don’t always have opportunities in safety science to get some objective artifacts…”

“I’ve never heard of a designer saying they’ve got plenty of time and a ton of budget, so let’s, you know, get down and optimize for safety.”

“And if we start by listing the operations before we list the hazards or risks, then we’re going to be in a much better place.”

Resources:

Safety Cases: An Impending Crisis?

Ep. 68 Are safety cases an impending crisis?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 7 Mar 2021 10:00:00 +0000

Today, we plan to discuss whether safety cases are headed towards an impending crisis.

Join us as we figure out if the work safety community is headed for disaster.

Topics:

Shifting the burden of proof.
The notion of “anti-safety”.
Making the implicit, explicit.
Trends of the past.
Impediments to research.
Variant and process theories.
Disrupting beliefs and ideas to create a more favorable outcome.
Why collaboration matters.

Quotes:

“...It’s a little bit paradoxical: Because why do we try to identify hazards, if not making the implicit claim that by trying to identify hazards and control them, we are making our system safer?”

“People don’t share their safety case data with anyone they don’t have to share it with.”

“And if we can turn the reasons why people do things into theories, and then test those theories, then we’ve got good potential for changing how people do things…”

Resources:

Ep.67 How to constructively resolve an argument about safety theory?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 21 Feb 2021 10:00:00 +0000

You may find that this conversation makes us look hypocritical, when discussing how to argue. We just want the best outcomes for all discussions regarding safety. Ultimately, this topic came out of some recent intense arguments in the safety field and we wanted to address how to constructively handle disagreements in person and online.

Topics:

Finding original sources.
Figuring out what the original source says.
Understanding context.
Looking for the overall position of a paper or book.
Design vs. behavior.
Why new and old ideas aren’t mutually exclusive.
The line between sharing and evangelizing.
Knowledge and evidence that moves the debate forward.

Quotes:

“Unless an entire field is genuinely pseudoscience, it’s always very, very dangerous to dismiss an entire field.”

“A lot of the time that there is a disagreement with Safety II, it’s basically people saying we shouldn’t be throwing out everything to do with Safety I. What we actually need is some kind of middle-ground between Safety I and Safety II.”

“A lot of the time, when we argue, there’s an implicit assumption that we can only agree with one of the theories, because they’re somehow mutually exclusive.”

Resources:

Ep.66 What is the full story of just culture (part 3)?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 14 Feb 2021 10:00:00 +0000

The final chapters cover such issues as creating functional reporting systems and the pitfalls in creating such systems.

Topics:

Creating a solid reporting system.
At what point does something become an incident?
Voluntary vs. mandatory reporting.
When your organization is facing prosecution.
How reporting gets stifled.
The problem with penalties.
Looking after all parties involved in incidents.
The outcomes safety professionals want.
Practical takeaways.

Quotes:

“I think this is the struggle with those sort of systems, is that if they are used frequently, then it becomes a very normal thing...but that means that people are using that channel instead of using the line management as their channel…”

“I think unless we work for a regulator, we need to remind ourselves that it’s not actually our job, either, to run the prosecution or even to help the prosecution.”

“If you think your system is fair, then you should be proud of explaining to people exactly how it works.”

Resources:

Just Culture

Ep.65 What is the full story of just culture (part 2)?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 7 Feb 2021 10:00:00 +0000

In this installment, we cover more chapters from Sidney Dekker’s book about just culture. Last week we covered the core ideas of just culture. This week, we go over retributive and restorative culture and the impetus behind rule-breaking.

Topics:

The problem with rewarding good behavior.
How a retributive system functions.
The standard for risk assessment.
How restorative culture functions.
Why sharing experiences is key.
What is expected under a solid restorative justice system.
Understanding rule-breakers.
How the book fails to properly dissect rule-breaking.
Practical takeaways.

Quotes:

“If our purpose is to make a better workplace, then we need a system that for most people, most of the time, it’s doing a good job.”

“When we talk about safety, we’re not talking about elements of a typical criminal offense; we’re talking about things that in the criminal courts would be talking about negligence. Which is all about meeting acceptable standards.”

“Sidney emphasizes a lot the importance of all stakeholders to share their stories with each other.”

Resources:

Just Culture

Ep, 64 What is the full story of just culture (part 1)?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 31 Jan 2021 10:00:00 +0000

For the next few weeks, we are going to cover ‘just culture’ and focus mainly on Sidney Dekker’s book of the same name.

The laws currently on the books encourage businesses to focus on liability instead of actual safety. By focusing on culpability for an accident, this is a way for businesses to get out of compensating the worker for injury. This is just some of what we will discuss today.

Topics:

Safety theory vs. safety practice.
Safety culture and the Swiss Cheese Model.
Updates in the third edition.
The definition of just culture.
To whom you apply the process and why it’s important.
Listening and actually hearing.
Systemic and individual action.
Can an individual be too much of a danger?
Preventing unnecessary blame.
What to expect from this series of episodes.
Practical takeaways.

Quotes:

“We both know that Dekker a bit of a problem...a bit of a habit of being pretty harsh about how he characterizes some of the older safety practices.”

“The ability of people to tell their stories and have those stories heard by all the other stakeholders, is a key part of restorative justice.”

“We’re all in the same boat, we’re all, after that accident, have an individual responsibility to stop this happening again by making the system better.”

Resources:

Just Culture

Risk Perceptions & Decision-Making in the Water Industry

Ep. 63 How subjective is technical risk assessment?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 24 Jan 2021 10:00:00 +0000

As risk assessment is such a central topic in the world of safety science, we thought we would dedicate another episode to discussing a facet of this subject. We loop back to risk matrices and determine how to score risks.

Join us as we try to determine the subjectivity of risk assessment and the pitfalls of such an endeavor.

Topics:

Risk matrices.
Why the paper we reference is a trustworthy source.
Scoring risks.
How objective are we?
How to interpret risk scores.
What the risk-rating is dependent upon.
Practical takeaways.

Quotes:

“The difference between an enumeration and a quantitative value is that enumeration has an order attached to it. So it let’s us say that ‘this thing is more than that thing.’ “

“I think this was a good way of seeing whether the differences or alignment happened in familiar activities or unfamiliar activities. Because then you can sort of get an idea into the process, as well as the shared knowledge of the group…”

“So, what we see is, if you stick to a single organization and eliminate the outliers, you’ve still got a wide spread of scores on every project.”

“We’re already trying pretty hard and if we’re still not converging on a common answer, then I think we need to rethink the original assumption that there is a common answer that can be found…”

Resources:

Are We Objective?

The Application and Benefits of Job Safety Analysis

Ep.62 What are the benefits of job safety analysis?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 17 Jan 2021 10:00:00 +0000

It’s difficult to give an introduction to this topic, given that a JSA is such an amorphous topic. Generally speaking, we’re talking about job or task-hazard analysis; the idea behind task-hazard analysis is that you break the task down into steps and figure out what controls are necessary to keep the task safe.

Tune in to hear us clarify the idea of and benefits from job safety analysis.

Topics:

The lack of standard terminology.
Why some claims from JSA’s are implausible.
The structure of the study covered in the paper.
Why the analysis in the study is more of a comparison.
The overconfident optimism of the researchers.
How JSA’s clarify worker’s duties.
Who makes the decisions.
Hazard awareness.
Loss prevention.
Practical takeaways.

Quotes:

“I think it would be fair to say that I’ve never yet met a method of risk assessment that I fell in love with.”

“The researchers are too optimistic about how much the documented JSA’s reflect what actually went on.”

“Ultimately, in high risk work, the immediate hazard awareness of people is important for safety.”

Resources:

Feedback@safetyofwork.com

Ep.61 Is Swiss cheese helpful for understanding accident causation?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 10 Jan 2021 10:00:00 +0000

The article we reference provides a historical account of the “Swiss Cheese Model”. Since there are many versions of this same diagram, we thought it best to look back through time and see the evolution of this particular safety model.

Topics:

Why the model represents the presence of folklore in safety.
The methods used in Good and Bad Reasons.
The cognitive processes that lead to errors.
Whether the model represents accident causation appropriately.
A defense of the model.

Quotes:

“He’s just trying to understand this broad range of errors and sort of work with the assumption that there must be different cognitive processes.”

“It was initially, sort of, only published once in a medical journal as an oversimplification of his own diagram.”

“The other critique is that the model lacks guidance.”

“ ‘I never intended to produce a scientific model’ is the worst excuse possible that an academic can give in defense of their own model.”

Resources:

Good and Bad Reasons: The Swiss Cheese Model and its Critics

Safety II Professionals

Ep.60 How does Safety II reimagine the role of a safety professional?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 3 Jan 2021 10:00:00 +0000

Every ten episodes or so, we like to indulge ourselves and cover some of our own research. This is one of those episodes. Since it is relevant to our last three episodes, we discuss the final paper that David wrote when pursuing his Ph.D.

Topics:

Defining a safety professional and other key terms.
Two modes of safety: Centralized control and guided adaptability.
Thematic analysis of different safety theories.
The peer-review response to David’s paper.
Understanding which resources people draw upon.
Listening to technical specialists beyond the front line.
Improving operational scenarios.
Facilitating learning.
Practical takeaways.
What we’d love to hear from our listeners.

Quotes:

“Centralized control is the big, main idea that pervades, I suppose, our current and traditional... approach to safety, which is about trying to reduce the variability of work…”

“We’ve got all of these people complaining that Safety II doesn’t give you any sort of practical implementation. So you...submit a draft of this paper and the immediate response is ‘Oh, this isn’t offering anything new’, when it was answering the exact thing that people are constantly complaining about.”

“And then secondly...to understand the issues and uncertainties being grappled with by technical specialists. And try to look for where the organization might be discounting emerging information.”

Resources:

Safety I and Safety II: The Past and Future of Safety Management

Ep. 59 What is the full story behind safety I and safety II (Part 3)?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 27 Dec 2020 10:00:00 +0000

We dive into the final chapters of the book and analyze Hollnagel’s intent and offer our commentary on his ideas. Though our ideas don’t necessarily jibe with all of Hollnagel’s, we appreciate our time dissecting this seminal book.

Tune in to hear our thoughts on the final four chapters. Make sure to let us know if you also read the book and your thoughts on the content.

We hope you enjoyed our little end-of-year deep-dive. Have a happy and healthy New Year!

Topics:

A recap of the chapters we’ve covered thus far.
Chapter 6
Dealing with complexity,
The role of resilience.
Chapter 7
Correct and incorrect functions.
Determining the cause of accidents in complex systems.
The faulty definition of Safety II.
The purpose of Safety II.
Chapter 8
Recognizing, monitoring, and controlling performance variability.
Why Hollnagel criticizes Safety I.
Methods and techniques.
Chapter 9
Hollnagel’s predictions about the creation of Safety III.
Practical takeaways from the book.

Quotes:

“So you think of Safety I just as it protects against lots of specific things, but it doesn’t protect against generic things that we haven’t specifically protected against.”

“The fact is...we can make some fairly reliable and valid conclusions about what happened leading up to something going wrong.”

“I think all theorists we should take seriously and not literally.”

Resources:

Safety I and Safety II: The Past and Future of Safety Management

Ep.58 What is the full story behind safety I and safety II (Part 2)?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 20 Dec 2020 10:00:00 +0000

Picking up where we left off, we begin our discussion with chapter three. Over the course of this episode, we talk about Hollnagel’s definition of Safety I, the myths of safety, and causality (among other things). Tune in for part two of our in-depth look at this important book.

Topics:

Chapter 3.

Habituation.
Preoccupation with failure.
Work as imagined vs. work as actually performed.
A definition of Safety I.

Chapter 4.

The four myths of Safety I.
Causality.
Misinterpreting Heinrich.
Human error.

Chapter 5.

Deconstruction.
Linear and non-linear systems.
Cause and effect.
General takeaways from chapters 3-5.

Quotes:

“...I think this one particular idea of work as imagined/work as done has been thought about a lot in the time since this book was published…”

“What is this measure of successful work? What is this way that we would categorize something as successful, if it’s not, not having accidents?”

“It’s a misinterpretation of Heinrich to apply the ratios.”

“And that sort of criticism of the old to explain the new, I think is never as firm a foundation as clearly explaining what you’re sort of underlying ideas and principles are and then building on top of them.”

Resources:

Safety I and Safety II: The Past and Future of Safety Management

Ep.57 What is the full story behind safety I and safety II (Part 1)?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 13 Dec 2020 10:00:00 +0000

For this episode, we are breaking away from the standard formula for this show. We thought it best to split this topic into three episodes, as we don’t want to oversimplify our breakdown of this seminal, two-hundred page book.

We encourage all of our listeners to follow along and read the book with us. Join us as we dig into this influential book by Erik Hollnagel.

Topics:

Interpretations of new theories.
Hollnagel being the direct intellectual descendant of Professor Rasmussen.
Chapter 1: The Issues.
The denominator problem.
The regulator paradox.
The problems with defining safety.
Overall thoughts on Chapter 1.
What to skim and what to read closely.

Quotes:

“Most theories are billed as critiques of other theories. So, any new theory implicitly, and usually, explicitly criticizes a lot of existing stuff. And it’s important to separate those two things out.”

“He says that success and failure are not opposites.”

“It means that every single data point, then, has a lot of uncertainty attached around to it, because they’re such isolated examples, such extraordinary events…”

Resources:

How Deregulation can Become Overregulation

Ep.56 Does Goal Based Regulation increase bureaucracy?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 6 Dec 2020 10:00:00 +0000

Ultimately, we want to help everyone understand the role of organizations and individuals when it comes to safety regulation.

Topics:

Why regulators are often spoken of negatively.
The two forms of deregulation.
Goal-based and rule-based frameworks.
The progressive pulling-back of Government involvement in safety.
Why overregulation occurs.
What is actually being regulated.
Conclusions from our conversation.

Quotes:

“So, the intention of this goal-based regulatory strategy is for organizations to understand their broad obligations to adopt a risk-based management strategy and to set their own safety management requirements inside their own organization.”

“The second theme that came out of the analysis was that overregulation is because of liability management and management insecurity.”

“The next important question to ask is are we regulating safety work or regulating safety of work?”

Resources:

Seeing Like a State

The Statistical Invalidity of TRIR as a Measure of Safety Performance

Ep.55 Are injury rates statistically invalid?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 29 Nov 2020 10:00:00 +0000

The paper we use to frame our discussion is one that has been making the rounds on social media recently. We thought it was important to seize on the opportunity to discuss a work safety issue while it’s top of mind for the public.

Topics:

What it means when something isn’t peer-reviewed.
Why statistics are ever popular.
How many workers hours to decimal places.
Using a model that weighs underlying variables and randomness.
How this study is another nail in the coffin for this question.
Practical takeaways.

Quotes:

“I’ve noticed in Australia, at least, there’s an increasing move to have safety statistics included in annual reports, at least for publicly traded companies.”

“And their conclusion was: Almost all of it was explained by randomness.”

“If recordable injury rates are used to record performance, then we’re actually rewarding random variation.”

Resources:

The Effects of an Informational Safety Campaign in the Shipbuilding Industry.

Ep.54 Do safety communication campaigns reduce injuries?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 22 Nov 2020 10:00:00 +0000

We dig into how safety promotion is used and its effectiveness within an organization. Often, safety communication is about large-scale behaviors and societal problems. So, we found a paper that focused on workplace safety, which was hard to find. The Effects of an Informational Safety Campaign in the Shipbuilding Industry helps us frame our conversation about the efficacy of safety communication and injury reduction.

Tune in to join the conversation!

Topics:

What we mean by “safety communication campaigns”.
Surveying the efficacy of communication campaigns.
‘70s-era seat belt campaigns.
‘80s-era home safety campaigns.
The conclusions from the communication campaign studies.
What makes a communication campaign successful.
Why the best safety research is often outside the workplace.
Message retention rates.
Practical takeaways.

Quotes:

“It doesn’t have to be a poster, it could be broadcast communications, video clips, stuff on a website, even a podcast. But it’s a verbal or written message from the organization…”

“Most of this research is conducted on very large scale behaviors, which are things that people generally agree are bad behaviors. So, many of the campaigns that are most effective and are being studied are to do with things like drink driving or cigarette smoking.”

“There could well be some more diffuse, more long-term effect here on the climate that our measurements just aren’t capturing…”

Resources:

Parachute Use to Prevent Death and Major Trauma Related to Gravitational Challenge

Ep.53 Do parachutes prevent injuries and deaths?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 15 Nov 2020 10:00:00 +0000

Given that the last two episodes were about theories, we wanted to get back to something more concrete in nature. Hence, the topic of parachutes. We find they are often used in military operations, but are rarely required for civilian aviation. Let’s look at this discrepancy and discuss whether parachutes are actually used to prevent injury or death.

Join us for this interesting and somewhat surprising discussion.

Topics:

Are parachutes for life-risking activities or a life-saving tool?
Measuring the usefulness of parachutes.
The arguments against evidence-based medicine.
When and why you only need a small sample size.
Why it’s hard to design an experiment to translate to real-world results.
Why we need more experiments on events with direct causal mechanisms.
Practical takeaways.

Quotes:

“...They hide a few key considerations. One of the big ones is, that it’s not really a choice between at the point you have to jump out of a plane, whether to wear a parachute or not; it’s things like, do we make laws that all planes should carry parachutes just in case?”

“So it’s not just that more research is needed, it’s that more research is almost guaranteed to reverse the result of this bad study.”

“Very often, when it’s come to the practicality of how do we investigate this within an organization, we’ve decided that an experiment is not the best use of our time and resources.”

Resources:

Does Usage of a Parachute in Contrast to Free Fall Prevent Major Trauma?

Parachute Use to Prevent Death and Major Trauma When Jumping From Aircraft

Safety Climate and Injuries: An Examination of Theoretical and Empirical Relationships

Ep.52 What is the relationship between safety climate and injuries?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 8 Nov 2020 10:00:00 +0000

We frame our conversation around the paper, Safety Climate and Injuries: An Examination of Theoretical and Empirical Relationships.

Tune in to hear us talk about retrospective studies, the perception of safety vs. actual safety, and the influence of injuries on safety climate.

Topics:

Retrospective studies.
Organizational and psychological safety climates.
Perception of safety and actual safety.
Designing research to answer your question.
Influence of injuries on safety climate.
Contamination.
Practical takeaways

Quotes:

“People who say that they think their company cares about safety, those people generally are safer.”

“Most safety climate research assumes that safety climate is a good measure, because it is a predictor of injuries.”

“Not enough of these studies measure the strength of climate.”

Resources:

Fuzzy Boundaries: Simulation and Expertise in Bush Fire Management

Ep.51 How do experts manage fuzzy role boundaries?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 1 Nov 2020 10:00:00 +0000

Dr. Neale is a Senior Research Fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute at Deakin University. There, he studies human geography and cultural anthropology. We use his paper, Fuzzy Boundaries: Simulation and Expertise in Bush Fire Management, to help frame our discussion.

Tune in to hear our insights about the safety community and Dr. Neale’s thoughts on bush fire management.

Topics:

Dr. Neale’s PhD thesis.
How he gained access to the F-band community.
The tension between people in front-line occupations and safety professionals.
Improvising and standardizing.
The tension between individuals and bureaucracy.
How to be an effective communicator.
What happens after a big fire season.
Becoming a fire behavior analyst.

Quotes:

“When you’re interacting with somebody, what is your expertise based in?”

“There’s no one way of doing it right and any attempt to wrangle these people, these professionals into being all one type of person, they will resist it.”

“The theme that expresses itself in a particular part of people’s work, expresses itself in many other parts of their work; it’s not a contained problem…”

Resources:

Safety Work Versus the Safety of Work

Ep. 50 What is the relationship between safety work and the safety of work

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 25 Oct 2020 10:00:00 +0000

A huge thank you to our listeners who have made this podcast such a success. We started this show with the hope that we could impact the safety of work in our community and beyond. To all who have shared this podcast, you are helping us reach people and potentially improve safety culture.

Topics:

The struggle to articulate what it means when we say a safety practice “works”.
How we titled our paper.
Putting together our own peer review.
Risk assessment.
The goal in writing their paper.
Categorizing safety work.
Why certain safety rules and requirements exist.
Casting a critical eye on your own organization.
Practical takeaways.

Quotes:

“...I could see that people put far more attention in real life on doing assessment and assurance activities, than they spend on insurance activities.”

“Social safety is very much conceptual work. It’s aimed at making safety be a value in the organization and letting the organization believe that it is a champion of safety.”

“We’re fairly sure that lots of the stuff we do in the name of safety...has some impact on the safety of work, but we don’t know which bits…”

Resources:

Ep.49 What exactly is a peer reviewed journal paper?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 18 Oct 2020 10:00:00 +0000

This topic was a request from one of our listeners. Join us as we dig into this frequently asked question and let you know all about academic journals and what you can take away from findings therein.

Topics:

Explaining academic journals.
The ease of accessing journals in the Internet age.
What makes a reputable journal.
The peer-review process.
Why some peer-reviews take longer than others.
Qualitative vs. quantitative research.
Why submission numbers are going up.
Journal shopping and its risks.
Practical takeaways.

Quotes:

“I still sort of think fondly...of doing my PhD and...you could look up the catalogues online. So, you could sit at your desk and find a reference to the paper, but then you’d need to wander the shelves and find the right volume and pull it down and take it to the photocopy machine.”

“Sometimes if a paper hasn’t advanced satisfactorily between reviews, then the editor will just make a call…”

“You know that you’re going to get peer reviewers that think that research is quantitative.”

Resources:

What is Learning? A Review of the Safety Literature to Define Learning from Incidents, Accidents, and Disasters

Ep.48 What are the missing links between investigating incidents and learning from incidents?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 11 Oct 2020 10:00:00 +0000

This discussion is building off last week’s episode where we focused on blame. We thought we would dig a little deeper into how people learn from incidents.

We use the paper, What is Learning? A Review of the Safety Literature to Define Learning from Incidents, Accidents, and Disasters, in order to frame our chat.

Topics:

Single and double-loop learning.
Incident learning models.
The least effective method of learning.
How to make a safety bulletin effective.
Why organizational trust is a factor in learning.
Why management is important to creating a culture of safety.
Lessons Learned About Lessons Learned Systems.
Practical takeaways.

Quotes:

“Learning from accidents is pretty much the oldest type of safety work that exists...and almost from the very start, people have been complaining after accidents about people’s failure to learn from previous accidents.”

“This paper really confirms the answer that we gave last week to our question about, ‘does blame sort of get in the way of learning?’ “

“You’ve got to admit that you are wrong now in order to become correct in the future.”

Resources:

A Review of Literature: Individual Blame vs. Organizational Function logics in Accident Analysis

Ep. 47 Does individual blame lessen the ability to learn from failure?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 4 Oct 2020 10:00:00 +0000

This is a particularly controversial topic, so we are going to attempt to be as neutral as possible. We refer to the sources, A Review of Literature: Individual Blame vs. Organizational Function logics in Accident Analysis and Antecedents and Consequences of Organizational Silence to help frame our discussion.

Topics:

Accountability in regards to safety in the workplace.
The papers referenced are commentaries, instead of studies.
Policy shifting to no-blame reporting systems.
A Tale of Two Stories gives two narrative perspectives on one incident.
Employee voice.
A climate of voice vs. a climate of silence.
Creating communication opportunities.
How blame can be a default.
Practical takeaways from the discussion.

Quotes:

“ ‘Employee voice’ covers a whole range of behaviors that people can do in organizations that are discretionary.”

“Ironically, when they spoke to a number of managers...as part of the study, managers believed they were encouraging employees to speak up, but on the other hand, they’re employing all sorts of informal tactics to silence this dissent.”

“There’s so many broader forces in their organization that are seeking resolution...that if you enable an approach where an individual can be blamed, then I think that will be the dominant logic in your investigation…”

Resources:

Antecedents and Consequences of Organizational Silence

Bicycle Helmets and Risky Behaviour: A Systematic Review

Ep.46 Is risk compensation a real thing?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 27 Sep 2020 10:00:10 +0000

We are fortunate to have a few resources we can reference for today’s topic. Please see below for links to the papers we mentioned in our conversation.

Topics:

Defining risk compensation.
Risk compensation in road traffic.
Argument by analogy.
What causes people to believe in risk compensation.
Why robust data equals a real effect.
Practical takeaways.

Quotes:

“...I think this is the sort of phenomenon that causes people to believe in risk compensation.”

“Basically, what they’re saying is, if there was a real effect, it would be robust regardless of how you crunched the data.”

“Just because someone does lots of citing of literature or quotes from scientific literature, doesn’t mean that their interpretation of that literature is rigorous and scientific.”

Resources:

Risk Compensation Literature - The Theory and Evidence

Driver Approach Behaviour at an Unprotected Railway Crossing Before and After Enhancement of Lateral Sight Distance

The Effects of Automobile Safety Regulation

The Theory of Risk Homeostasis

Analysing Human Factors and Non-Technical Skills in Offshore Drilling Operations Using FRAM

Ep.45 Why do we need complex models to explain simple work?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 20 Sep 2020 10:00:20 +0000

We use the paper, Analysing Human Factors and Non-Technical Skills in Offshore Drilling Operations Using FRAM, in order to frame our discussion of this topic.

Please let us know if you have any experience with FRAM or similar models. We’d love to hear your feedback.

Topics:

Using FRAM.
Vulnerable Systems Syndrome.
STAMP diagrams.
How the researchers collected their data.
Functions that are common and functions that are outliers.
The benefits of implementing a FRAM model.
Conclusions drawn by the research paper.

Quotes:

“Every function of a system is a hexagon and every vertex of that hexagon stands for a different way that, you know, this function can be connected with the next function.”

“The authors say that the interviews had just one question, which was ‘how do you perform your job?”

“What I like about the use of a FRAM model would be, I think it will allow organizations to narrow that gap between work as imagined and work as done.”

Resources:

What We Talk About When We Talk About HSE and Culture

Ep.44 What do we mean when we talk about safety culture?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 13 Sep 2020 10:00:00 +0000

To frame our discussion, we reference the paper What We Talk About When We Talk About HSE and Culture.

Please send us your further questions of safety culture, so we can dig into more specifics in later episodes.

Topics:

How “safety culture” came about in the 1970’s.
What Chernobyl has to do with safety culture.
Safety culture vs. safety climate.
What the paper studied and what it concluded.
The factors that influence the definition of safety culture.
Who studies and talks about safety culture the least.
Types of studies done on safety culture.
Practical takeaways.

Quotes:

“The argument is, really, that culture only matters, because it influences climate. And climate’s what we measure and what we try to change.”

“42% of the papers are by engineering authors. 30% of them are by psychology authors. 14% from the health sciences. 10% from the social sciences. 3% from business. Which I find remarkable, given that organizational culture comes out of social science of organizations.”

“...That’s remarkable that 30% of the papers weren’t empirical in any sense. They were just people talking about safety culture as if they knew about it or summarizing other people who had talked about it.”

Resources:

Six Ways of Understanding Leadership Development

Ep 43: How is leadership development experienced?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 6 Sep 2020 10:00:00 +0000

We reference the paper Six Ways of Understanding Leadership Development in order to frame our study.

Tune in to hear our discussion and more about this paper.

Topics:

Defining leadership development.
The idea of taking on the mantle of “leader”.
The six different ways of understanding leadership.
Developing leaders who further the goals of the organization.
Stretching people’s views of leadership.
Practical take-aways.

Quotes:

“...And in some sense, they’re almost like stages that leaders go through in their evolution of thinking about themselves like a leader.”

“People didn’t fall in a category. THe researchers were just trying to see how far they could stretch people’s views of what leadership [is] and where they stopped.”

“Unless you can have an aligned and good understanding of those things, the researchers suggest...there’s not much point in getting started with leadership development activities.”

Resources:

Examining Attitudes, Norms, and Control Toward Safety Behaviors as Mediators in the Leadership-Safety Motivation Relationship

Ep.42 How do safety leadership behaviours influence worker motivation for safety?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 30 Aug 2020 10:00:00 +0000

We had trouble finding a suitable paper for this topic. Measuring and studying safety leadership often proves difficult. However, we use the paper Examining Attitudes, Norms, and Control Toward Safety Behaviors as Mediators in the Leadership-Safety Motivation Relationship.

As an aside, we offer a big “thank you” to those who shared our podcast with others. Our followers and listenership has grown considerably and we greatly appreciate it!

Topics:

The two ways to improve safety.
Why this is a reasonable model for studying the influence of safety.
The theory of planned behavior.
What you should never claim in your study.
The reality of survey research.
What mediators are and how they function.
Takeaways from the study.

Quotes:

“They were lamenting in their systematic review that lots of attempts to intervene in behavior change weren’t based on theories.”

“So, what they’re really saying is, ‘ok, we know these might be different types of behaviors, but is it sufficient to lump them all together?’ And statistically, yes it is.”

“When we say that something ‘mediates’, we’re basically saying it’s like a multiplier in the middle.”

Resources:

Basic Personal Counselling: A Training Manual for Counsellors

Ep.41 How do ethnographic interviews work?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 23 Aug 2020 10:00:08 +0000

We have had a couple of requests for this topic, so even though we couldn’t find a completely suitable paper, we decided to forge ahead anyway.

Topics:

Explaining Ethnography.
Why safety can be politically motivated.
Starting your conversations with a personal connection.
Why the setting of your conversation matters.
How to keep your subjects talking.
Setting boundaries.
How to react when the interviewee is wrong.

Quotes:

“...Reflect on all these one-on-one conversations that they had everyday in their workplace and how they could utilize these one-on-one engagements to get better insights and better information that they can use to improve the safety of work in their own organization.”

“The second main principle is to get the interviewee talking and to keep them talking.”

“I can’t think of another skill that is more useful, Drew, in your role as a safety professional than knowing how to ask good questions.”

Resources:

Qualitative Organizational Research: Core Methods and Current Challenges

Forecasts or Fortune-Telling

Ep.40 When should we trust expert opinions about risk?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 16 Aug 2020 10:00:03 +0000

To frame our conversation, we use one of Drew’s papers to discuss this issue. This paper, Forecasts or Fortune-Telling,was borne out of deep frustration.

Tune in to hear our discussion about when or if it is appropriate to listen to experts.

Topics:

The two questions the paper sought to answer.
What we mean by “expertise”.
Forecasting.
Determining the value of a given expert.
Biases in reporting and researching.
Super-forecasting.
Wisdom of crowds.
Better ways to get better answers.
Why mathematical models aren’t as helpful as we think.
Practical takeaways.

Quotes:

“Is it best to grab ten oncologists and take the average of their opinions?”

“But there is this possibility that there are some people who are better at managing their own cognitive biases than others. And it’s not to do with domain expertise, it’s to do with a particular set of skills that they call ‘super-forecasting’.”

“As far as I understand it, most organizations do not use complicated ways of combining expert opinions.”

Resources:

Our Current Approach to Root Cause Analysis

Ep.39 Do accident investigations actually find the root causes?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 9 Aug 2020 10:00:00 +0000

To frame our chat, we reference the papers, Our Current Approach to Root Cause Analysis and What-You-Look-for-is-What-You-Find.

Tune in to hear our thoughts on this matter.

Topics:

Determining root causes of accidents.
Why investigations are social processes.
An explainer on editorials.
What “process change” really means.
Applying the Swiss Cheese Model.
Confirmation bias in research.
Only finding what you can fix.
The difference between internal and external investigations.
Practical takeaways from the studies.

Quotes:

“What they suggested was that we should always have a very strong evaluation process around any corrective action to test and check whether it actually addresses the things that we’re trying to address.”

“To really understand how the investigation has happened, you’ve got to talk to the investigators as they’re doing the investigation…”

“I can’t imagine a safety person taking to the board a recommendation that they weren’t sure themselves, they could fix.”

Resources:

What-You-Look-for-is-What-You-Find

Observation and Assessment of Crossing Situations Between Pleasure Craft and a Small Passenger Ferry

Ep.38 Can we get ready for automation by studying non-automated systems?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 2 Aug 2020 10:00:00 +0000

We use the paper, Observation and Assessment of Crossing Situations Between Pleasure Craft and a Small Passenger Ferry, in order to frame our discussion.

Topics:

The small ferry referenced in the paper and the plans to replace it with an automated craft.
Why commercial vessels get priority in the water.
Incorporating human factors into the study of boats.
What you lose by automating this particular ferry.
Strategizing the right of way in the water.
Interpreting Norwegian navigation rules.
Why replacing the captain with an autonomous system could prove disastrous.

Quotes:

“So, the rationale for a lot of the waterway rules, is about what different vessels are capable of.”

“Even if the automation can solve for the navigation, can it actually solve for the rest of the system properties, as well?”

“...When I look at a system like this, that we’ve explained, in a dynamic environment...I’m just not sure if it’s a system that you could automate.”

Resources:

Send us your experiences with automation and its unintended consequences to Feedback@safetyofwork.com

Ep.37 How do audits influence intentions to improve practice?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan and Drew Rae) — Sun, 26 Jul 2020 10:00:10 +0000

To help frame our conversation, we use the paper How Does Audit and Feedback Influence Intentions of Health Professionals to Improve Practice?

Topics:

Our feelings about audits.
Feedback from the audit process.
The format of a cluster-randomized trial.
Lab vs. field results.
How to act on audit results.
Analyzing the study’s results.
Final takeaways.

Quotes:

“...The two parts of this study that we’re going to talk about now, are really trying to address that first part of it, which is the information to intention gap…”

“In the field, there’s obviously other information, which is going to affect the decision, other than this particular report.”

“If there’s no data, professionals really want to see the data, before committing to whether or not they need to improve.”

Resources:

How Does Audit and Feedback Influence Intentions of Health Professionals to Improve Practice?

Ep.36 How do we tell the difference between theories and fads in safety?

djprovan@gmail.com (Drew Rae, David Provan) — Sun, 19 Jul 2020 10:00:02 +0000

In order to frame our discussion, we use the paper Fads and Fashions in Management Practices.

Topics:

Recent changes in the spread of ideas.
Where new management techniques come from.
How innovations get labeled.
How messages often get broadcast.
Six Sigma training.
The acceleration and deceleration of broadcasting.
Why general ideas are more diffuse.
Be conscious of the differences between academics, promotors, and researchers.

Quotes:

“Interestingly, when we get into the literature, you may, um, look at those books with a little bit of skepticism, when you see how books on management get published.”

“The fads start off with small groups of innovators solving problems within their own companies. But those initial innovations aren’t able to spread by themselves.”

“But now that industries...not really having the uptake in behavioral safety practices they were maybe twenty years ago, you don’t see much broadcasting in the market for, you know, behavioral safety practices.”

Resources:

Piazza, A., & Abrahamson, E. (2020). Fads and Fashions in Management Practices: Taking Stock and Looking Forward. International Journal of Management Reviews.

Ep. 35 What is the relationship between leading and lagging indicators?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 12 Jul 2020 10:00:06 +0000

The paper we use to frame today’s discussion is Leading or Lagging? Temporal Analysis of Safety Indicators on a Large Infrastructure Construction Project.

Topics:

Similarities between Economists and safety professionals.
Definitions of performance measures.
The researchers methods for this study.
What the data showed about this particular organization.
Errors in human reporting.
Practical takeaways from the study.

Quotes:

“One definition of a performance measure or indicator should be...the metric used to measure the organization’s ability to control the risk of accidents.”

“There’s lots of things in nature that aren’t supposed to generate bell curves.”

“Safety is performed by humans, who react to the things that they see.”

Resources:

Lingard, H., Hallowell, M., Salas, R., & Pirzadeh, P. (2017). Leading or lagging? Temporal analysis of safety indicators on a large infrastructure construction project. Safety science, 91, 206-220.

Ep. 34 How can practitioners find and access research?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan, Drew Rae) — Sun, 5 Jul 2020 10:00:01 +0000

Tune in to hear our discussion and insights.

Topics:

Journals and how content gets submitted.
Using Google Scholar instead of Google.
Search tips.
How to request copies of papers.
University access to research papers.
How to determine what is being measured in a paper.
Internal and external validity.
The difference between papers and books.
Why you shouldn’t pay for papers.

Quotes:

“The basic rule for what is legal and what is not, is authors own the text until they submit it to a publisher.”

“Anyone who’s got even just a student account at a university, shares in the subscription. So if they log in, while they’re on campus, then they have free access to a lot of stuff which is paywalled, when they’re off campus.”

“Internal validity is how much within the scope of the paper it has correctly answered the question.”

Resources:

Ep.33 Can institutional logics help us move beyond safety culture?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 28 Jun 2020 10:00:01 +0000

We use the paper How Logical is Safety? to frame our discussion.

Topics:

On what institutional logic focuses.
Why institutional logic gives us a fresh start.
Local rationalities.
How the authors of the paper compiled their research.
The seven logics.
Understanding institutional logics.
Why it’s hard to change institutional logics.

Quotes:

“There’s some real challenges with the way that we’ve applied organizational culture and safety culture in our organizations.”

“They tried to look at how the participants were explaining or justifying their own behavior, to see if these explanations matched with the logics.”

“[Institutional logics] not something that you capture on a survey at a single point in time. It’s not something you change with a cultural intervention program.”

Resources:

Ep.32 If safety emerges from frontline work, then what are the regulators supposed to do?

djprovan@gmail.com (Drew Rae, David Provan) — Sun, 21 Jun 2020 10:00:00 +0000

We use the paper, How Institutions Enhance Mindfulness, to help frame our discussion.

Topics:

Mindful organizing.
How the researchers conducted their survey and how it affected results.
When the regulators are from the government.
Four key activities that enhance safety.
Why the org in the study leaned towards punishment rather than education.
The two disparate views within the paper.
How to create an environment that supports good decisions.
Shifting blind reinforcement to reasonable reinforcement.

Quotes:

“So, they talked about this collective mindfulness as emerging out of the five principles of high-reliability organization theory.”

“I was trying to interpret how much of this was down to national culture and how much of it was down to the research itself. And it certainly appears that in this situation, the primary regulator...the government regulator is the police.”

“Initially operators must learn and follow the rules. But to function effectively as operators, they can’t mindlessly follow the rules, because the rules are sometimes irrelevant or unhelpful, leading to unnecessary violations.”

Resources:

Kudesia, R. S., Lang, T., & Reb, J. (2020). How Institutions Enhance Mindfulness: Interactions between external regulators and front-line operators around safety rules. Safety science, 122, 104511.

Ep.31 Do pre-surgery checklists improve patient safety outcomes?

djprovan@gmail.com (Drew Rae, David Provan) — Sun, 14 Jun 2020 10:00:00 +0000

We use the papers to frame our discussion: A Systematic Review of the Effectiveness, Compliance, and Critical Factors for Implementation of Safety Checklists in Surgery; Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of the Effect of the World Health Organization Surgical Safety Checklist on Post-Operative Complications; and The Effects of Safety Checklists in Medicine.

Tune in to hear our thoughts on this potentially life or death issue.

Topics:

The good reputation of checklists.
Equipment Failure.
The decrease of information loss.
Do checklists slow things down?
How closely checklists are followed.
The rhyme of reason for checklists.

Quotes:

“Checklists are one of those things that have been associated with safety for a long time and associated in a way that gives them quite a good name.”

“Lots of stuff being recorded as positively improving with the introduction of a checklist.”

“If you can’t convince a multidisciplinary team that this belongs on the checklist, because they all agree there is a clear link between this item and a particular accident that they all know about, then you don’t get to put it on the checklist.”

Resources:

Borchard, A., Schwappach, D.L., Barbir, A., & Bezzola, P. (2012).A Systematic Review of the Effectiveness, Compliance, and Critical Factors for Implementation of Safety Checklists in Surgery Annals of Surgery, 256, 925–933.

Bergs, J., Hellings, J., Cleemput, I., Zurel, Ö., De Troyer, V., Van Hiel, M., ... & Vandijck, D. (2014). Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of the Effect of the World Health Organization Surgical Safety Checklist on Post-Operative Complications. British Journal of Surgery, 101(3), 150-158.

Thomassen, Ø., Storesund, A., Søfteland, E., & Brattebø, G. (2014). The Effects of Safety Checklists in Medicine: a systematic review. Acta Anaesthesiologica Scandinavica, 58(1), 5-18.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsr.2018.05.005

Ep.30 What do safety professionals believe about themselves?

djprovan@gmail.com (Drew Rae, David Provan) — Sun, 7 Jun 2020 10:00:00 +0000

We use David’s paper, Benefactor or Burden, to frame our discussion today.

Topics:

The distinction between role and identity.
The stereotypes about the safety profession.
Saturation.
What to consider when hiring safety employees.
Tertiary education.
Change and the journey of safety.
The values of safety professionals.
What is important to talk about, when talking about safety professionals.

Quotes:

“Very few safety people describe themselves as bureaucrats.”

“...Just that word, ‘Professional’. It tended to be the case that people who had tertiary education thought of that as being important as part of being a professional.”

“We value belonging and involvement, but we also require authority to do some of our role.”

Resources:

Provan, D. J., Dekker, S. W., & Rae, A. J. (2018). Benefactor or Burden: Exploring the professional identity of safety professionals. Journal of safety research, 66, 21-32.

Ep.29 Does manual handling training work?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 31 May 2020 10:00:12 +0000

We use the paper, What Constitutes Effective Manual Handling Training, in order to frame our discussion. The paper is a systematic review that looks at fifty three intervention studies performed over a number of years.

Topics:

Why training is the cornerstone of the workplace.
Why it’s important to evaluate training.
The results of the various studies discussed within today’s paper.
The varying qualities of studies.
Finding what type of manual training is effective.

Quotes:

“The idea of having some sort of formalized weighting system, is it gets around the accusation of researcher bias.”

“There’s maybe something to say that some of that training was actually counter to the way that we now understand, maybe, that people can exert safe and maximal force.”

“If you do have residual risk leftover...person-task-fit is directly relevant around this residual risk…”

Resources:

Ep.28 How does coordination work in incident response teams?

djprovan@gmail.com (Drew Rae, David Provan, Dr. Laura Maguire) — Sun, 24 May 2020 10:00:00 +0000

Dave is joined by special guest, Dr. Laura Maguire, a researcher at the Cognitive Systems Engineering Lab at Ohio State University. Her recent research pertains to the topic at hand. Tune in to hear our informative discussion.

Topics:

● Dr. Maguire’s personal relationship to safety.

● Exploring coordinated joint activity in the tech industry.

● The difficulty of doing research in the natural laboratory.

● What Dr. Maguire noticed during her research.

● Why breakdowns in common ground occur.

● Why a phone call can involve effortful cognitive work.

Quotes:

“In cognitive systems engineering, we’re most interested in what are the generalized patterns of cognition and of interpreting the world…”

“Doing research in what we call the ‘natural laboratory’ or trying to examine cognition in the wild, is really, really hard.”

“Tooling is never going to solve all of the problems, right?”

Resources:

Ep.27 What Makes Teams Effective?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan, Drew Rae) — Sun, 17 May 2020 10:00:13 +0000

We use the paper, Embracing Complexity, to frame our discussion. Tune in to hear our chat about this important issue.

Topics:

The definition of a team.
What unit to study when researching teams.
Compositional and structural features.
Mediating mechanisms.
Average member attributes and how they contribute to performance.
How diversity affects teams.
Fault lines.
How to measure a team’s success.
The positive effect of innovation.

Quotes:

“A topic that comes up a lot in the research is virtual teams. Who would have guessed that teams meeting over Zoom was going to be a topical and relevant hot-button topic?”

“...The research suggests that functional diversity, as well as individual educational diversity have positive relationships with team performance.”

“There were some studies that said if there is a general climate in the organization around innovation, then the team will display more innovative characteristics and things like that.”

Resources:

Mathieu, J. E., Gallagher, P. T., Domingo, M. A., & Klock, E. A. (2019). Embracing Complexity: Reviewing the past decade of team effectiveness research. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 6, 17-46.

Ep.26 Is good safety leadership just good leadership?

djprovan@gmail.com (Drew Rae, David Provan) — Sun, 10 May 2020 10:00:47 +0000

We use the following papers to frame our discussion: Development and Test of a Model Linking Safety Specific Transformational Leadership and Occupational Safety and Contrasting the Nature and Effects of Environmentally Specific and General Transformational Leadership.

Topics:

How leadership is studied.
The two-part study conducted in Development and Test.
Are environmentally specific and general transformational leadership two different things?
How the study in Contrasting the Nature and Effects was conducted.
Safety leadership vs. leadership/
Why good leadership leads to good safety practices.

Quotes:

“How much do these things vary and how much do our explanations for these things explain why they vary? And the answer is, they don’t.”

“Don’t start measuring and tinkering with the statistical relationships between things until you’ve actually pinned down what those things are.”

“I strongly believe that we can’t easily change the values that people hold.”

Resources:

Barling, J., Loughlin, C., & Kelloway, E. K. (2002). Development and Test of a Model Linking Safety Specific Transformational Leadership and Occupational Safety. Journal of applied psychology, 87(3), 488. DOI: 10.1037//0021-9010.87.3.488

Robertson, J. L., & Barling, J. (2017). Contrasting the Nature and Effects of Environmentally Specific and General Transformational Leadership. Leadership & Organization Development Journal.

Ep.25 Why don't workers use reporting systems?

djprovan@gmail.com (Drew Rae, Tanya Hewitt) — Sun, 3 May 2020 10:00:00 +0000

Dave isn’t here today. Instead, Drew speaks directly with the author of the paper we intended to use to frame our discussion. Tune in to hear his discussion with Tanya Hewitt.

Topics:

Discomfort with non-technical topics.
Why some people are seasoned users of reporting systems.
Pride in being a fixer.
Feedback loops in reporting systems.
Questioning the value of given instructions.
Why qualitative data can be helpful.

Quotes:

“If people were very seasoned users of the reporting system, we’d want to really understand, ‘how did they become seasoned users?’ ”

“A lot of professionals: That’s where they derive their professional pride, from being able to fix problems.”

“[Reporting systems] are complex sociotechnical constructs.”

Resources:

Hewitt, T. A., & Chreim, S. (2015). Fix and forget or fix and report: a qualitative study of tensions at the front line of incident reporting. BMJ Qual Saf, 24(5), 303-310.

Ep.24 How did David Woods discover the theory of graceful extensibility?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Woods, David Provan) — Sat, 25 Apr 2020 22:00:00 +0000

Drew isn’t here today and in his stead is Professor David Woods. Tune in to hear his discussion of graceful extensibility and how it applies to the current battle with Covid19.

Topics:

Unwittingly developing theories.
Building resilience in organizations.
Framing his theory in terms of current events.
How the brain deals with changes.
What the data from Covid19 will tell us.
Net adaptive value.
Saturation and decompensation.
Proactive learning.
Reciprocity.

Quotes:

“The simple idea is that we are always vulnerable to surprise. Surprise is ongoing.”

“[The death rate] is going to be correlated with who anticipated...they will have better outcomes for patients.”

“I have to generate, mobilize, and deploy new ways of working, as I start to run out of the capacity to continue.”

“Decompensation in our current case is happening at a society level, at large scale jurisdiction levels; it’s happening at hospital systems levels…”

Resources:

Woods, D. D. (2018). The theory of graceful extensibility: basic rules that govern adaptive systems. Environment Systems and Decisions, 38(4), 433-457.

Ep.23 How do safety professionals influence?

djprovan@gmail.com (Drew Rae, David Provan) — Sun, 19 Apr 2020 10:00:01 +0000

We use the following articles to frame our discussion: In Their Profession’s Service and Influencing Organizational Decision-Makers.

Topics:

The constant frustration of being a safety professional.
Rational persuasion and other forms of influence.
Publishing outside traditional safety journals.
Why it can be hard to define a safety professional’s role.
The optics of good connections.
Adaptive framing.
Why “by any means necessary” is not the key to success.
Playing the long game.

Quotes:

“If you survey CEO’s...they want safety practitioners to have these communication skills, ability to build relationships…”

“There is no pattern between these companies and their economic performance and their safety performance…”

“There’s some really good advice there...for safety professionals to think about the long game.”

Resources:

Daudigeos, T. (2013). In their profession's service: how staff professionals exert influence in their organization. Journal of Management Studies, 50(5), 722-749.

Madigan, C., Way, K., Capra, M., & Johnstone, K. (2020). Influencing organizational decision-makers–What influence tactics are OHS professionals using?. Safety Science, 121, 496-506.

Cialdini, R. B., & Cialdini, R. B. (1993). Influence: The psychology of persuasion. Harper Business.

Cohen, A. R., & Bradford, D. L. (2011). Influence without authority. John Wiley & Sons.

Ep.22 Are facts or stories more effective for changing attitudes?

djprovan@gmail.com (Drew Rae, David Provan) — Sun, 12 Apr 2020 10:00:00 +0000

Topics:

Drew’s recently published paper and how it relates to this topic.
Vaccinations and the current wave of anti-vaccination bias.
Testing the effects of stories vs. facts.
Alternative beliefs.
Why we think certain claims are nonsense.

Quotes:

“They found that the one that has a story of someone whose child has had measles along with the photo with the measles, had a very strong effect on attitude change…”

“Typically, as safety professionals, we often want to influence a change in what people are doing in the organization, be it managers or workers.”

“I would ask what sort of workplace are you running that the difference between whether people are working at heights safely...is a tiny increment in how scared they are of working at heights?”

Resources:

Horne, Z., Powell, D., Hummel, J. E., & Holyoak, K. J. (2015). Countering antivaccination attitudes. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(33), 10321-10324.

Coroner's Inquest into Dreamworld Incident

Ep.21 How foreseeable was the Dreamworld accident?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan, Drew Rae) — Sun, 5 Apr 2020 10:00:00 +0000

Topics:

Divulging our potential conflicts of interest.
Hindsight bias.
The four different mental processes used in assessing accidents.
How the raft ride worked on a good day.
The first river raft fatality on record.
Various river raft incidents on record.
The factors that lead to the accident at Dreamworld.
Potential conclusions from this case.

Quotes:

“When I was reflecting after this incident, I don’t remember a lot of safety conversation at all.”

“There was a number of operational incidents associated with these rides; to do with, kind of, like, spacing and separation of rafts on the ride.”

“I think in this particular case, we can almost see the way that hindsight bias is causing the selectivity.”

Resources:

Hawkins, S. A., & Hastie, R. (1990). Hindsight: Biased judgments of past events after the outcomes are known. Psychological bulletin, 107(3), 311.

Ep.20 What is reality-based safety science?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 29 Mar 2020 10:00:01 +0000

We have just co-authored a paper with two other researchers and it examines the big picture of safety science. We don’t usually like to plug ourselves, but we’re very excited about this particular accomplishment. We use his paper, A Manifesto for Reality-Based Safety Science, to frame our discussion.

Topics:

Why practitioners shouldn’t tune out this podcast.
Evidence-based medicine as a reform movement.
Studying work, not accidents.
Investigate and theorize before measuring.
The lag in safety science.
Forecasting theories.
How safety knowledge is not fixed.

Quotes:

“There was a strong perception that there was a lot of evidence about what worked and didn’t work, that wasn’t making its way into practice.”

“When you study an accident, all of the analysis that you do is necessarily driven by counterfactual reasoning and hindsight bias.”

“If the researchers are influencing it, if the researchers are controlling it, if the researchers are doing it, it stops being a case study and it becomes action research…”

Resources:

Ep.19 Is virtual reality safety training more effective?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan, Drew Rae) — Sat, 21 Mar 2020 22:00:00 +0000

We chose to use two papers to frame our discussion. Those papers are Construction Safety Training Using Immersive Virtual Reality and Comparing Immersive Virtual Reality and PowerPoint as Methods for Delivering Safety Training.

Let us know if and how you are using Virtual Reality in your business.

Topics:

VR research is a mixed bag.
How VR training works.
Advantages to VR training.
How VR training can be used more effectively.
Outsiders publishing in safety journals.

Quotes:

“It was fairly targeted towards the outcome they want from normal types of training.”

“It does suggest that if we are going to spend more money on this...then the way to follow up is down that idea of simulating particular work tasks…”

“It’s like watching the Phantom Menace and then watching the Phantom Menace with 3D goggles and deciding that 3D goggles are no good, because they didn’t make it into a better movie.”

Resources:

Sacks, R., Perlman, A., & Barak, R. (2013). Construction safety training using immersive virtual reality. Construction Management and Economics, 31(9), 1005-1017.

Leder, J., Horlitz, T., Puschmann, P., Wittstock, V., & Schütz, A. (2019). Comparing immersive virtual reality and powerpoint as methods for delivering safety training: Impacts on risk perception, learning, and decision making. Safety science, 111, 271-286.

Ep.18 Do Powerpoint slides count as a safety hazard?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 15 Mar 2020 10:00:00 +0000

We use the paper When Redundant On-Screen Text in Multimedia Technical Instruction can Interfere with Learning to frame our discussion.

Topics:

This problem existed before Microsoft.
Do presentation slides help you communicate?
Text on slides serving as a distraction.
What the cognitive load theory tells us.
Changing one’s approach to presentations.

Quotes:

“I think people genuinely think it’s a good way to convey information.”

“The cognitive load theory is suggesting, in this case, that the worst thing to do is to give them text...and audio at the same time.”

“It definitely doesn’t apply that diagrams plus audio is bad.”

Resources:

Kalyuga, S., Chandler, P., & Sweller, J. (2004). When redundant on-screen text in multimedia technical instruction can interfere with learning. Human factors, 46(3), 567-581.

Carsten’s Paper on Heinrich

Ep. 17 What did Heinrich really say?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sat, 7 Mar 2020 22:00:00 +0000

Tune in to hear Carsten discuss his research into Heinrich’s work.

Topics:

The impetus behind Carsten’s paper.
What his paper covered.
Why Heinrich’s ratio is so important.
Why capable workers are the most important factor in safety.
How corporations use Heinrich’s ratio in testing.
Heinrich’s overall impact and legacy.

Quotes:

“It’s interesting the way you go on to say that he wasn’t actually saying that you have to manage the three-hundred to prevent the one…”

“I think he would have liked to see himself, first and foremost, as a management advisor, because that is the audience for his book…”

“There’s a lot of talk about the Swiss Cheese model being linear...and it isn’t!”

Resources:

Feedback@Safetyofwork.com

Ep.16 What can we learn from the Brady report?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 1 Mar 2020 10:00:14 +0000

Tune in to hear us discuss the lessons learned from this important report.

Topics:

Why the Brady Report was made.
The pros and cons of this type of study.
Malcolm Jones’ paper about grief cycles in business.
Why fatalities aren’t extraordinary events.
HRO theories and programs.
Why LTI’s aren’t relevant.
Why reported incidents aren’t a negative indicator.
How fatalities could have possibly been avoided.
Practical takeaways from our conversation.

Quotes:

“The report contains, like, a couple of hundred pages of graphs and nowhere is there any sort of test to see what model best fits the graph.”

“It’s not new for big investigation reports...for people to get hold of one particular theory of safety and think that it provides all of the answers.”

“This definitely shows the naivete, if you think you can’t hide hospitalizable injuries.”

Resources:

The Brady Report

Ep. 15 Should we give prizes for safety?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan) — Sun, 23 Feb 2020 10:00:00 +0000

To frame our discussion, we use the papers. Motivating the Workforce and The Demotivating Effect (and Unintended Message) of Awards. Tune in to hear our discussion about whether prizes encourage further safety or are just a silly pat-on-the-back.

Topics:

Are prizes a marketing exercise or encouraging actual safety?
What is the motivation behind your organization’s awards for safety?
Behavioral economics
Industries that often have safety awards.
When celebrating safety takes away from practicing safety.
Can attendance awards motivate students?
The signaling effect.

Quotes:

“It’s definitely the case that some of these site visits are almost like information exchange…”

“Some of our brightest researchers got diverted from research to prepare the awards nominations, to show how good the department was at gender equity.”

“In this second study, they were testing specifically this idea that the award tells people what the school expects of them.”

Resources:

Tait, R., & Walker, D. (2000). Motivating the workforce: the value of external health and safety awards. Journal of Safety Research, 31(4), 243-251.

Robinson, C. D., Gallus, J., Lee, M. G., & Rogers, T. (2019). The demotivating effect (and unintended message) of awards. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.

Feedback@safetyorwork.com

Ep.14 What are the characteristics of a High Reliability Healthcare Organisation?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan, Drew Rae) — Sun, 16 Feb 2020 10:00:00 +0000

To frame our discussion, we use the common High Reliability Organization Theory. A few people have authored papers on this topic and we will use their work during our chat.

Topics:

What defines an HRO’s modus operandi.
Why it was revolutionary to study successful organizations.
Being transparent about research methods.
The difficult job of figuring out who the “expert” is, in a given situation.
The things that can encourage safety on a team.

Quotes:

“A number of organizations and industries have been linked to HRO theory over the years for maintaining somewhat error free operations over an extended period of time.”

“The technical name we use when talking about the position of the researcher, compared to the research they’re doing, is ‘reflexivity’.”

“It’s what model lets us make use of the local expertise and the professional expertise...as we’ve shifted to the model that gave primacy to the physicians, we lost that teamwork…”

Resources:

Roberts, K. H., Madsen, P., Desai, V., & Van Stralen, D. (2005). A case of the birth and death of a high reliability healthcare organisation. BMJ Quality & Safety, 14(3), 216-220.

Ep. 13 Are there more accidents on friday the thirteenth?

djprovan@gmail.com (Drew Rae, David Provan) — Sun, 9 Feb 2020 10:00:21 +0000

To frame our discussion, we decided to reference a few papers. The papers we use are Females Do Not Have More Road Accidents on Friday the 13th, Much Ado About the Full Moon, and Moon Phases and Nighttime Road Crashes Involving Pedestrians. Tune in to hear our chat!

Topics:

Calendar effects.
Gendered calendar effects.
The full moon effect.
Contradictory studies.
Superstitious safety practitioners.

Quotes:

“The idea is that if it’s a robust result, it should apply regardless of the decisions you make…”

“It’s becoming increasingly common now for researchers to publish their raw data alongside their publications, so that other authors can actually make their own assessment of the papers…”

“We’re pretty sure that accident-proneness is really a symptom of confirmation bias or statistical artifacts.”

Resources:

Näyhä, S. (2002). Traffic deaths and superstition on Friday the 13th. American Journal of Psychiatry, 159(12), 2110-2111.

Radun, I., & Summala, H. (2004). Females do not have more injury road accidents on Friday the 13th. BMC public health, 4(1), 54.

Redelmeier, D. A., & Shafir, E. (2017). The full moon and motorcycle related mortality: population based double control study. bmj, 359.

Rotton, J., & Kelly, I. W. (1985). Much ado about the full moon: A meta-analysis of lunar-lunacy research. Psychological bulletin, 97(2), 286.

Ep.12 Is adopting a zero harm policy good for safety?

djprovan@gmail.com (Drew Rae, David Provan) — Sat, 1 Feb 2020 22:00:00 +0000

We use the papers, Zero Accident, Vision-Based Strategies in Organizations; Zero Vision, Enlightenment, and Religion; and UK Construction Safety: A Zero Paradox to frame our discussion. Tune in to hear what we think!

Topics:

The concept of zero-harm.
The pros and cons of a zero-harm approach.
When management makes safety-focused decisions.
Can zero-harm lead to distorted reporting?
Can you accurately compare zero and non-zero groups in a study?

Quotes:

“Yes: Every individual accident, there’s ways that we can find that it could have been avoided, but do we think that we can run a national road network and never kill anyone?”

“I think we have to keep in mind that if you’re not going to do quantitative evaluation research, then the conclusions that you draw can’t be quantitatively evaluated conclusions.”

“Over the study period, the zero group had four fatalities and the non-zero group had no fatalities.”

Resources:

Zwetsloot, G. I., Kines, P., Wybo, J. L., Ruotsala, R., Drupsteen, L., & Bezemer, R. A. (2017). Zero Accident Vision based strategies in organisations: Innovative perspectives. Safety science, 91, 260-268.

Dekker, S. (2017). Zero commitment: commentary on Zwetsloot et al., and Sherratt and Dainty. Policy and Practice in Health and Safety, 15(2), 124-130.

Zwetsloot, G. (2017). Vision Zero: promising perspectives and implementation failures. A commentary on the papers by Sherratt and Dainty, and Dekker. Policy and Practice in Health and Safety, 15(2), 120-123.

Sherratt, F., & Dainty, A. R. (2017). UK construction safety: a zero paradox?. Policy and Practice in Health and Safety, 15(2), 108-116.

Sherratt, F., & Dainty, A. R. (2017). Responses to the vision zero articles. Policy and Practice in Health and Safety, 15(2), 117-119.

Dekker, S. W., Long, R., & Wybo, J. L. (2016). Zero vision and a Western salvation narrative. Safety science, 88, 219-223.

Dekker, S. (2017). Zero Vision: enlightenment and new religion. Policy and Practice in Health and Safety, 15(2), 101-107.

Ep.11 How are trade off decisions made between production and safety?

djprovan@gmail.com (Drew Rae, David Provan) — Sun, 26 Jan 2020 10:00:00 +0000

We use the paper, Articulating the Differences Between Safety and Resilience, in order to frame our chat.

Topics:

How to navigate competing operational goals.
Why there isn’t a lot of great theory about goal conflicts.
Exploring how people make decisions.
How dealing with risk gives you expertise.
Piece-rate contracting strategies.
Why simulations can hurt or help.

Quotes:

“So, you’re constantly in this fuzzy boundary of, well, we’ve made the trade-off for safety, but how do we know that we had to make it?”

“Step one was to do what we suggested is necessary for a lot of safety research; which is to get out there and to at least spend some time watching it correctly in context.”

“We need to be very mindful of piece-rate contracting strategies...which is that contractors don’t get paid if the work doesn’t get done.”

Resources:

Morel, G., Amalberti, R., & Chauvin, C. (2008). Articulating the differences between safety and resilience: the decision-making process of professional sea-fishing skippers. Human factors, 50(1), 1-16.

Ep.10 What helps and hinders stopping work for safety?

djprovan@gmail.com (Drew Rae, David Provan) — Sun, 19 Jan 2020 10:00:00 +0000

The paper we use to frame today’s discussion is We Can Stop Work, but Then Nothing Gets Done.

Topics:

Why do workers not stop when risk is obvious?
The purpose of focus groups as a data collection method.
The pitfalls of the focus group method.
Turning focus groups transcripts into research findings.
How supervisors can support workers in making good decisions.
Why it’s hard for workers to turn down unsafe work.+

Quotes:

“You can see the finished product, but you don’t see how the sausage is made.”

“What matters with those immediate supervisors and the co-workers, is not what they say they’ll do, but what they’ll...actually do.”

“You help local management be able to have these conversations with their workforce, so that they can...understand that people have different views of what’s safe and what’s unsafe…”

Resources:

Weber, D. E., MacGregor, S. C., Provan, D. J., & Rae, A. (2018). “We can stop work, but then nothing gets done.” Factors that support and hinder a workforce to discontinue work for safety. Safety science, 108, 149-160.

Ep.9 Is there safety in numbers?

djprovan@gmail.com (Drew Rae, David Provan) — Sun, 12 Jan 2020 12:00:00 +0000

We use the 2019 paper, Safety in Numbers, to frame this week’s discussion.

Topics:

The amount of exposure increases the amount of risk.
Safety in Numbers is a 2019 update to a 2017 paper of the same name.
Why you should get down and dirty with the numbers.
Be careful about what stats do and don’t tell you.
How volume affects risk potential.
Rate vs. raw number.
How our systems encourage familiarity with risk.

Quotes:

“A lot of statistically dodgy stuff gets published in some very, very good journals and some otherwise very good authors.”

“When something is psuedo-science, you tend to find that there are some studies that say that it works...until the very best studies show that the effect doesn’t work at all.”

“Whenever you use a concept of a rate instead of a raw number, you are assuming a linear relationship.”

Resources:

Elvik, R., & Goel, R. (2019). Safety-in-numbers: An updated meta-analysis of estimates. Accident Analysis & Prevention, 129, 136-147.

Ep.8 Do risk matrices help us make better decisions?

djprovan@gmail.com (Drew Rae, David Provan) — Sun, 5 Jan 2020 10:00:00 +0000

In order to guide our discussion, we will use the paper Further Thoughts on the Utilities of Risk Matrices.

Topics:

The risk matrix was something to use to determine expected values.
Today, the risk matrix is a table, not just an equation.
Risk matrices can prove helpful in decision making.
There are a few types of papers that discuss the efficacy of risk matrices.
The Loss of Information idea.
Cox’s coloring rules for matrices.
How formal decision making processes can be damaging.
How risk matrices are often used in organizations

Quotes:

“The assumption is that we use risk matrices, because they help us, in some way, to make decisions.”

“...What you’re representing on the matrix is less information than you started with: It’s either less precision than you had or its not representing the full range of uncertainty…”

“We’ve got a lot of tools in safety and risk management...and it’s worth knowing how those tools are being used and how effective people find them…”

Resources:

Ball, D. J., & Watt, J. (2013). Further thoughts on the utility of risk matrices. Risk analysis, 33(11), 2068-2078.

Anthony (Tony) Cox Jr, L. (2008). What's wrong with risk matrices?. Risk Analysis: An International Journal, 28(2), 497-512.

Ep.7 What is the relationship between safety leadership beliefs and practices?

djprovan@gmail.com (Drew Rae, David Provan) — Sun, 29 Dec 2019 10:00:00 +0000

Tune in to hear us discuss the paper Site Managers and Safety Leadership in the Offshore Gas and Oil Industry and its survey’s findings.

Topics:

Leadership is something everyone agrees is key to workplace safety.
The paper we reference is Site Managers and Safety Leadership in the Offshore Gas and Oil Industry.
Matching the research question to a survey is quite difficult.
This research paper had a uniquely large sample size.
Understanding what people think good leadership and safety look like.
The methods by which the survey was produced and why they worked.
The results of the massive survey.

Quotes:

“If we think about the effort it would take now to try to actually get thirty-six organizations to, at the same time, want to do the same research project, may be near-on impossible.”

“I don’t think there is any particular reason to believe that people’s attribution of accidents changes with experience and leadership style.”

“Once we try to fix problems with safety by putting in systems and procedures...it’s not a case of being able to just easily build back in good leadership…”

Resources:

O'Dea, A., & Flin, R. (2001). Site managers and safety leadership in the offshore oil and gas industry. Safety Science, 37(1), 39-57.

Ep.6 What is the cost of accepting the cheapest tender?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan, Drew Rae) — Sun, 22 Dec 2019 10:00:00 +0000

Tune in to hear us talk about how the drive to reduce costs can negatively impact safety. We frame this week’s discussion around the paper, An Industry Structured for Unsafety.

Topics:

When you submit a low bid for a tender, what does that end up doing to safety?
How to work with and understand your contractors.
Fixed and direct costs.
Marginal cost pricing.
The effect of cost-cutting on protective equipment.
What you can do about cost-cutting.

Quotes:

“I think this is going to be a really important question for many of our listeners.”

“The important thing here is that it’s all equipment that meets the technical minimum standards, but that means it’s cheap in other ways.”

“I still have only seen a handful of times in my career, where an organization has genuinely dismissed a tender because of safety performance…”

Resources:

Oswald, D., Ahiaga-Dagbui, D. D., Sherratt, F., & Smith, S. D. (2020). An industry structured for unsafety? An exploration of the cost-safety conundrum in construction project delivery. Safety science, 122, 104535.

Ep. 5 Can increasing uncertainty improve safety?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan, Drew Rae) — Sun, 15 Dec 2019 10:00:00 +0000

Tune in to hear us talk about this topic in the context of the paper we chose to reference this week.

Topics:

Our safety practices are always about reducing uncertainty.
The paper we’ve chosen to use for today’s discussion is Promoting Safety by Increasing Uncertainty.
The paper uses major accidents to frame its arguments.
Differences of opinion is a type of uncertainty.
Increasing uncertainty in practice.
Feeling uncomfortable with increasing uncertainty.
Encouraging people to speak out.

Quotes:

“If you don’t understand the question or you don’t understand the problem well enough, then you’ve got very little chance of coming up with a good solution.”

“We need to take action that deliberately encourages introduction of contradictory information...breaking consensus, not forming consensus.”

“The responsibility is on the organization to provide the right psychological environment for people to speak up.”

Resources:

Grote, G. (2015). Promoting safety by increasing uncertainty–Implications for risk management. Safety science, 71, 71-79.

Ep.4 What is the relationship between trust and safety?

djprovan@gmail.com (Drew Rae, David Provan) — Sun, 8 Dec 2019 10:00:00 +0000

Topics:

The relationship between safety and trust is harder to define than one would expect.
We use the works of one doctor to help us understand this topic.
Trust doesn’t necessarily lead to safer work environments.
However, too much distrust can lead to an unhealthy workplace.
One of the papers is about how to create trust.

Quotes:

“...It’s not as simple as ‘trust is a good thing’ and ‘distrust is a bad thing’...when we trust people too much, we take their word for things, even when we shouldn’t.”

“The happy medium...you get good communication and you get good checking behavior.

“We actually can’t really make predictions about what these findings mean in real-world organizational settings, once all of those variables become reintroduced.”

Resources:

Conchie, S. M., & Burns, C. (2008). Trust and risk communication in high‐risk organizations: A test of principles from social risk research. Risk Analysis: An International Journal, 28(1), 141-149.

Conchie, S. M., & Donald, I. J. (2008). The functions and development of safety-specific trust and distrust. Safety Science, 46(1), 92-103.

Ep.3 How do you know if your safety team is a positive influence on your safety climate?

djprovan@gmail.com (David Provan, Drew Rae) — Sun, 1 Dec 2019 10:00:00 +0000

Topics:

We often talk about how leaders affect safety, but we never think of the team.
Using the research paper Improving Safety Culture Through the Health and Safety Organization as a framework for this discussion.
Getting a baseline measure before making any changes.
What makes a good quantitative experiment.
The findings of the research paper and what it tells us.
How to be a role model for safety interactions.

Quotes:

“We heavily rely on and almost solely rely on line managers in the organization to influence, create change and affect the organizational safety climate.”

“It’s really tempting to reduce safety to measurable indicators…”

“I think there are some things that we can, practically, learn from this [study].”

Resources:

Nielsen, K. J. (2014). Improving safety culture through the health and safety organization: A case study. Journal of safety research, 48, 7-17.

Ep. 2 Why do people break rules?

djprovan@gmail.com (Drew Rae, David Provan) — Sun, 24 Nov 2019 10:00:00 +0000

Topics:

How to figure out which rules will be effective.
We use the paper Catching Them at It as a framework for our discussion.
Why rules are broken.
Who to interview to get to the heart of the matter.
Self-efficacy.
Balancing the need for compliance with decision-making.
How certain rules can be contradictory or problematic.

Quotes:

“In all safety-critical environments, there are endless possibilities for individuals actions to influence the work outcomes.”

“There are a lot of safety academics who don’t even like that construction of thinking about safety in terms of rule…”

“If you give people freedom, sometimes you’re not going to like where they take that freedom.”

Resources:

Iszatt-White, M. (2007). Catching them at it: An ethnography of rule violation. Ethnography, 8(4), 445-465.

Ep. 1 When do behavioural safety interventions work?

djprovan@gmail.com (Drew Rae, David Provan) — Mon, 18 Nov 2019 01:05:20 +0000

Tune in to hear us discuss whether behavioral safety interventions are effective and worthwhile.

Topics:

We purposely picked a broad topic for this episode.
Studies on behavioral safety interventions and how they were structured.
Only one of the studies was done within a more traditional framework.
Why it’s difficult to track safety in the workplace.
Getting good evidence by looking more closely at the factors at play.

Quotes:

“Human behavior change is absolutely a science, but behavior-based safety is probably mostly nonsense.”

“In a randomized control trial, every individual is either given or not given the behavioral training…”

“Interventions that are based on theory tend to be more successful.”

Resources:

Mullan, B., Smith, L., Sainsbury, K., Allom, V., Paterson, H., & Lopez, A. L. (2015). Active behaviour change safety interventions in the construction industry: A systematic review. Safety science, 79, 139-148.