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NSC Live: "A recovering liberal arts student." with John Dony
71 Plays7 years ago
This episode features John Dony, Director of the Campbell Institute and Director of EH&S at the National Safety Council. He sits down to talk with host and Vivid’s Chief Safety Officer Jill James, live on the Expo floor of the NSC Congress, about the work and research taking place at the Campbell Institute.
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Background
00:00:09
Speaker
Welcome to the Accidental Safety Pro podcast. I'm Jill James, the host of the podcast, and we are here for a special edition of the podcast at the National Safety Council, Congress and Expo here on the floor. And I'm joined today with John Donie with the Campbell Institute, director of the Institute, who has been gracious enough to agree to speak with us and tell your story. Great. Hello. Welcome. Glad to be here. Welcome to the Congress National. Thank you so much. Appreciate it.
Journey to Safety through ISO 9001
00:00:36
Speaker
So the podcast always starts with
00:00:39
Speaker
how did you get into safety? What's your story? What's your winding path that got you here? And ultimately led you to the director of the Camelot Institute. Yeah, it was a winding path. And I used to describe myself as a recovering liberal arts student.
00:00:55
Speaker
I actually have a degree in English and Sociology, and you wouldn't think either of those had too much to do with safety, but the reality is they're both very good communication and statistical background sorts of skills. So coming out of college, had the normal sorts of post-college odd jobs that one does, but one of them that I landed in was at a paper manufacturer, actually paper advertising integrated firms.
00:01:20
Speaker
OK. And I was front office there. I was doing marketing and copywriting and things of that nature that suited my skill set. Sure. Until one day we got an email that said, hey, we've been having all these quality defects. And we're spinning up a team that's going to look at doing an ISO 9001 implementation. And we're going to do a quality management system. And you're like, what's that? Well, right. I was like, what's that? And I also thought, hey, I'm new to this organization. This sounds like a good way to kind of get a leg up and maybe get myself known a bit. So I raised my hand and said, sure, I'll do that. That sounds fine. Being brave.
00:01:48
Speaker
So we had a volunteer group that came together. They were together for a couple weeks and every week we'd start to meet and do some initial planning and the group got smaller and smaller and smaller. People realized how much work this was actually going to be. Work and sort of like the doldrums of all the details. Exactly.
00:02:04
Speaker
So, but it turned out I loved it. I loved systems thinking. I was really starting to get a flavor for it. And it ended up being myself and the few people who stuck it out on that team with our quality manager really began the ISO 9001 implementation.
Role at National Safety Council and Campbell Award
00:02:17
Speaker
And what we found out very quickly
00:02:19
Speaker
as we went and solved the quality issues was almost invariably every time there's a quality issue, there's also safety issues. So we'd have issues with people getting up on ladders doing stuff they shouldn't be doing and it would affect the quality of the print run, but it would also be a huge safety issue. And so really began to kind of be the advocate for the safety thinking on that implementation team. And then right after that, was in the right place at the right time to find a position at the National Safety Council. So this is going back now about 10 years. Wow, okay.
00:02:48
Speaker
We were looking for someone at the time to grow what was called the Robert W. Campbell Award. It still is called the Robert W. Campbell Award. And so it's an award program for systems thinking in EHS. So really recognizing organizations that have integrated management systems and blend them well into their operating structure. So we started that award back in 2004. I came into that process around 2007.
Evolution and Growth of the Campbell Institute
00:03:11
Speaker
with kind of a goal of growing it, you know, maturing the process, learning more about safety certainly through that journey. Yeah. And so about three years after that, we kind of began to have a run up into what's now called the Institute. Okay. As we got gathered more and more organizations who are winners of the award, as well as highly mature thinkers and thought leaders in the space could kind of kind of magnetize and came to us. Yeah, they said we need to build a bigger platform. We need a way to benchmark and network and share information and push it out.
00:03:40
Speaker
So that was really the genesis of the institute and how that all came to be around 2012 or so. And really of just moment the organization from there. And in fact a little bit of a stint as our director of EHS at the council, dealing with our own internal EHS management system and the work on there. So we got to build a little thread back into that as well.
00:03:58
Speaker
It's been an interesting journey. A lot of stops along the way fell into it backwards as most people seem to do. Of course, of course. Sociologists, English. Yeah, wonderful. So the Campbell Institute is kind of a baby yet. It's still sort of in its infancy. Yeah, in many ways. We're about six years in and the background to that probably goes back to maybe 2010. So maybe generously give us eight years. So we're still in grade school.
00:04:22
Speaker
We've matured quite a bit even since then, though. We started with about 18 charter members of the institute. To put that in scale, that's against 15,000 members of the National Safety Council, 18 who are part of this institute at the outset. We're now at 38, so we've more than doubled in six years, which has been really good. That's fabulous. The maturity comes with getting different industry perspectives in the mix, different thinkers in the mix.
00:04:44
Speaker
And we really cross industry. We have about 20 industry sectors in the Institute across those companies. So we're young, but yeah, we're growing. So of your membership of the 38 that you have now, what is their responsibility to the Institute? Like what are you looking for by way of the ideal profile that you want to be part of it?
00:05:03
Speaker
Well, we're certainly looking for organizations that are mature and better than the average organization in the industry. But we really, at the end of the day, want organizations who
Member Profile and Visual Literacy Concept
00:05:11
Speaker
have something to put on the table for other members to gain from and something to take off the table. We want organizations who will use what they learn to mature on their own journey and get better. It's all in the service of the NFC, ultimate vision of eliminating preventable death.
00:05:24
Speaker
And so we hope that organizations that join our group will really be ones who will roll up their sleeves and get down to the problem solving that we need to do to help even those who are at the highest end of the maturity curve take that higher hanging curve. So are you actively recruiting for members at the Congress? Well, it kind of comes to us in some ways. It's a little bit self-selecting. So what we do here is really
00:05:46
Speaker
This is the biggest forum we have to share all the learning that we're generating. So we do research papers about twice to three times a year, webinars, benchmarking, sorts of events. We come here to share what our members are doing and learning so that others can kind of pick up on it and hopefully take something home. By virtue of doing that, which is in service to the mission, we find organizations who come up to us and say, this sounds really interesting. I'd really like to be a part of this.
00:06:11
Speaker
And then they get involved in the application process that we have to become a member. So we actually vet every member coming in. You can't just sign up and join. So yeah, it's a little bit of that. We do do some sort of soft recruiting, I guess. We look for organizations who we maybe don't have representation from. And industry types. Exactly. Yeah, we don't have a whole lot of representation in, say, pharmaceuticals or retail. So we're definitely on the hunt for organizations out there who are interested. Good to know. Right, yeah.
00:06:37
Speaker
And so at the Congress and on the expo floor you have a whole display and experience really on visual literacy. I went through it yesterday. It was such an interesting concept that I...
00:06:51
Speaker
It just made so much sense in my mind. Can you explain to our audience what is visual literacy in the confines of the Campbell Institute and what have you discovered? Yeah, well so I'll kind of go back to a few years ago. We were at the end of one of our events that we do every year called the Campbell Institute Symposium. It happens every February. We were sitting around the fire pit in the hotel at the end of the event
00:07:13
Speaker
We're all the good ideas. Exactly, exactly. And the bad ones too, but this happened to be a good one. So we were sitting around talking to our chair at the time of the Institute, Doug Posler. He was VP of EHS at Owens Corner, one of our member companies. And he said, you know, I've got a bit of a weird idea.
00:07:29
Speaker
And then we all kind of said, okay, Doug, we've been there before. And he said, you know, we're working with this art museum in Toledo, you know, where you wouldn't think there might be a great art museum, but in fact, there's an art museum that's on par with the Met. You know, so fantastic, fantastic facility. And he said, you know, we're starting to look at how some of the things they're doing might interact with hazard recognition or incident investigation.
00:07:52
Speaker
And you're all like... And I said, well, okay, so explain. So he points to sort of a mug that's sitting on the table and says, you know, your brain is looking at that and you're registering maybe 10% of what's actually there, right? You've seen so many coffee mugs before that you glance
Implementing Visual Literacy in Safety Training
00:08:08
Speaker
it and you say, that's a mug. If you turn back around and say, what did it look like? What color was it? What shape was it? You probably don't remember. Your brain just says coffee mug.
00:08:15
Speaker
Right. So, you know, you jump from that to say, OK, there's actually a science and a structure behind how we see and how we learn to train our brain to see better. This is something the art world has been doing for thousands of years. And it's really the primary skill set of art historians and the people who work in that space.
00:08:32
Speaker
Well, seeing things in the context of safety is also pretty darn important. We've seen studies that say potentially up to a quarter of all incidents within an organization might have some sort of visual acuity issue that caused them to happen.
00:08:47
Speaker
So we took that seat idea that we were kind of discussing around the fire pit and said, let's see if we can fit this into an event we're going to do and get those folks out here and talk about why this is important. And as we did that and saw the idea for the first time and really lived through it, we said, okay, this is interesting. This has something that we should go after.
00:09:07
Speaker
And we actually devoted some research space to going in and saying, is anyone else doing this? What does this look like? Let's tease out the concept. So our angle on this has been, we're looking at this from a research perspective. We think this is potentially valuable practice to bring to people. So let's push that out. And we're now involved in a multi-year research study where our members are going out and piloting visual literacy implementation in their facilities and seeing
00:09:32
Speaker
What does that look like? What is the efficacy of this approach? So come in, Owen's Corning and some others are doing these studies and we're right alongside them saying what's actually happening in the field and how can others benefit? Yeah, that's a bit about how it came to be and it's one of those great ideas that as you said, until you see it, you kind of wonder how could no one have ever thought of this
Cross-Cultural Benefits and Incident Investigation
00:09:52
Speaker
before? It's so immediately obvious once you've gone through it, but it just takes that leap of faith.
00:09:56
Speaker
Right, and so for our audience, we don't have the visuals to be able to share with them in here. Do you have some of that on your website, a little bit of that? Yes, we do. Absolutely. If you go to thecambelinstitute.org slash research, you'll actually find both of our visual literacy papers. You can download those to free. You can also go to Cove's website. So Cove is actually part of the Toledo Museum of Art that's known as the Center of Visual Expertise that is our direct partner in bringing this to life. So their website is covectr.com. Go there and get a whole ton of resources. Thank you.
00:10:26
Speaker
Thank you. Yeah, it's hard to draw a picture on it, but what struck me, and so you're taking on this experience where you're looking at art and you're invited to look at, was it lines, shapes, and color? Color, texture, space, there's all sorts of these elements of art. And so you're looking at this art and you're seeing it and then you turn and you look at an industrial setting and you ask your brain to identify lines and shapes and sizes and textures.
00:10:53
Speaker
and then it becomes apparent what's missing or what's there. Exactly, it gives you a framework by which you can just quickly, all of a sudden, you're seeing all these things, analyzing them and understanding them in a way you wouldn't have been able to five minutes before. I just think it's so, you know, people ask all the time, how can I teach hazard recognition skills? How can I learn hazard recognition skills? And I've been in my field of practice for 23 years, spent 10 years with OSHA where, you know, you walk into a facility and my eye has to figure out
00:11:21
Speaker
Absolutely. How am I going to move through the facility? How am I going to try to see everything? And I thought, gosh, if I would have had that, I would have been so much more efficient than deciding, OK, I'm going to do perimeter here. I'm going to go here and I'm going to look for this and, you know, in this space. And it takes the.
00:11:38
Speaker
You don't have to have the professional acuity of your eye of knowing the regulations. That's right. If you just know what to see what's missing or what's there. And both, certainly both aspects that are helpful, you necessarily won't necessarily go in with no training and be able to see everything.
00:11:53
Speaker
But it certainly gives you a leg up. And the other thing is, is it also applies really well to how you describe things. So if you do the back to back drawing exercise that Cobe does, after you go through that, so to describe it a little bit, you know, one person is sitting there with a pen and paper with their back to someone else. That person is describing an object that they can't see. And you know, the other person is just drawing whatever they hear and kind of trying to make sense of it.
00:12:17
Speaker
You go through that and after you do it a few times, you realize I've gotten a lot better at both describing something and being able to draw it in space. And then if you apply that to the next time I look at an incident report or write a JSA or go out there and do something,
00:12:33
Speaker
My language skills, my descriptive skills, just a lot better, even on the back of 10 minutes of practice. So organizations are seeing that when they look at the data that they're collecting and they look at the qualitative side of their incident reports, they're seeing all these, you know, these language pieces that they've never seen before that are a common currency for people to use to describe something. They're measurable. Right. It gives them so much more validity, so much more ability to accurately describe the cause. It's a fantastic tool there.
00:12:59
Speaker
And it takes a lot of the, they didn't do X out of the equation. Exactly. And then if you even extrapolate it further and you think about when you're doing incident investigation, one of the other exercises that COVID has done is taking a piece of art, for instance, and giving everyone a little piece of that puzzle and then asking them to describe what they think they see.
00:13:20
Speaker
And then as you bring those pieces together, you start to see a clear picture. Well, in incident investigation, very often, the first person to look at the investigation is going to have a point of view on what happened. And they're going to maybe make some assumptions that become the story about what happened in that event. Based on their own experience. Exactly. And so it really helps you be patient in an incident investigation and teaches them those skills that are necessary to really get to systemic reforms.
00:13:44
Speaker
Just fascinating how something an art museum has been doing for thousands of years translates so directly to an industrial application. And it's just, again, you need to take a little bit of a leap of faith that I think once you've done that. It's so fit. Yeah, it's just amazing. Absolutely.
00:13:59
Speaker
So have you heard from the people who are working in that experience this week? Yeah, like what are people saying who are experiencing it? Yeah, we've heard so many great things. I think there's a skepticism going in and then immediately coming out saying we need to do something with this, right? And the great thing is there's actually a tangible applied action you can go and do right after. So yeah, we've been hearing so much great feedback. I think the early numbers, and I'm not sure if I should be quoted on this yet,
00:14:25
Speaker
But there's been more folks through the NSC Resource Center this year, just on Monday, than there was in the entire year last year. So the experience I've seen that has really had some great benefit in giving people something to come and do while they're at the Congress and Expo on the floor and something to engage in.
00:14:43
Speaker
Is part of visual literacy, has the group at all looked at how it can transfer between languages and where there's language barriers as well? Are you seeing some benefit to that? Yeah, we've been doing it. There's a few different languages that they've been working in, and Spanish is being one of them. But I think what they found is that you're teaching a methodology and a framework, and although the words may be different, the idea crosses languages. It crosses cultures to some degree.
00:15:11
Speaker
Yeah, it seems agnostic in a way just by if you learn the practice. Right. And we've actually even talked about that from the perspective of what about for folks who may have colorblindness or visual impairment, there's still differentiation there and it still works regardless. So that's the beauty of it. It's very much something that you don't need to do anything to stand off the edges. It fits just about any purpose. So it's one of those concepts and I'm really glad we were in the right place at the right time to break to the table.
00:15:40
Speaker
I see more and more of this coming up in the next five years or so as people get more embedded in the technology side. It's really important to remember that those human skills that we have, seeing and feeling and sensing, are still just as important. That gives all safety professionals out there a bit of confidence that we're not going anywhere anytime soon. This is something that really speaks to human value and the human experience.
00:16:03
Speaker
Yeah, right. I can see safety professionals once they learn the method to be able to teach their supervisors, their managers, their safety committees, to arm more eyes, to see more. And you don't need to do too much. I mean, these are tools that fit into your existing toolbox.
00:16:20
Speaker
You know, you bring in two minutes or five minutes, right? You bring two or five minutes into your daily huddle in the morning, or you do it as a refresher training. And the other thing is, it's fun. I mean, it's engaging, it's interactive, and there's not a whole lot of safety training out there that I think everyone would say, yeah, we think that's fine. So that's another, yeah, there's a morale component there as well, so it's just, yeah.
00:16:39
Speaker
Oh, that's so great. That's so great. As a recovering little art student, I'm really happy to see the value of art and the value of the soft sciences and skills really come before. To pull it together. That's right. Oh, that's so fun.
00:16:55
Speaker
What else is happening here at the Expo for the Campbell Institute?
Campbell Institute's Role at NSC Congress
00:17:00
Speaker
We have a presence in the broader NSC booth as well. As usual, we bring many of our services and products to the table for the NSC Resource Center. But our bigger involvement is probably through the educational sessions and technical sessions that we do in the convention center and the hotel surrounding.
00:17:18
Speaker
So just yesterday we ran two major events, our executive forum and summit, which focused on one of them was industry 4.0, the other was leadership and transition. So kind of covering the gamut of different topics. And today we're doing two workshops that are digging into the technology side as well. So we do a lot on the educational, you know, pushing our research and knowledge from our members down to the audience here. An application of 21st century technology practices and how do we
00:17:43
Speaker
How do we blend it into safety? Exactly. It's a challenge. Yeah, it absolutely is. And so many organizations are kind of wondering, if I go and invest in this, how do I know what's going to work? Who's been there and done it? And we're the early adopters. We need those case studies and those examples to show the efficacy of these efforts, because it's a big leap as well. Yeah, it is. And then teach safety professionals to sell it to their organizations. That's right. That's part of it, too.
00:18:08
Speaker
And you need to not get distracted by the shiny object. There's so much out there. Having a strategy for digitization and technology is so, so important. And organizations are just kind of starting to come to terms with that. And for EHS, if we don't get a seat at the table now, it's operations and engineers who are going to drive that. And we're going to need to plug in after. And that's a whole lot tougher than being there.
00:18:32
Speaker
it's so important to learn how to how to ask for that seat at the table and be part of it and be part of it well and visual literacy definitely transferable to all of those areas for people to join in on thank you so much for talking with us and sharing your story today about visual literacy and the Campbell Institute and the resources too yeah thank you so much thank you everyone for joining in this special edition of the accidental safety pro podcast
Conclusion and Acknowledgments
00:18:59
Speaker
If you'd like to follow the podcast, you can find us in any podcast player of your choosing. If you'd like to send us an email, you certainly can do that at social at vividlearningsystems.com. Thank you for the work that you do to send your employees home safely every day. And thanks for joining. Until next time.