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#112: Human Performance - Understanding How and Why People Make Mistakes
487 Plays10 months ago
Meet Rob Fisher, President of Fisher Improvement Technologies. Rob spent almost 10 years in the U.S. Navy before working at the South Texas Nuclear Project for 12 years in various safety and human development roles. Listen along as Rob talks with Jill about how his diverse experiences led to being an expert in human performance and leadership. They discuss the importance of intentional leadership and understanding mental models, the benefits of values-based engagements, and the importance of continuous learning and development in the field of safety.
Rob also shares his story of investigating the 1999 Texas A&M Aggie Bonfire Collapse and how lessons from that investigation still impact his work today.
Fisher Improvement Technologies
Essential Leadership Podcast episode with Jill James
The Field Guide to Understanding 'Human Error' by Sidney Dekker
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Transcript
Introduction to Rob Fisher and the Essential Leadership Cycle podcast
00:00:08
Speaker
This is the Accidental Safety Pro brought to you by HSI. This episode was recorded December 22nd, 2023. My name is Jill James, HSI's chief safety officer. And today my guest is Rob Fisher. Rob is president at Fisher Improvement Technologies. Rob is a human performance expert and is also the host of the Essential Leadership Cycle podcast on which I've recently been a guest. Rob joins us today from his home in North Carolina. Welcome to the show, Rob.
00:00:39
Speaker
Thanks Cheryl, thanks for having me. I'm excited about being here.
Meeting at OHS Leaders Summit and the importance of connections
00:00:42
Speaker
Yeah, so Rob, you and I had the opportunity to meet earlier this year at the OHS Leaders Summit. You were a speaker at the summit. I was facilitating it and I'm so grateful that we were able to meet and that I've been able to be a guest on your podcast too.
00:01:02
Speaker
Yes, it's pretty cool the people you meet at that particular summit. It's a gathering of folks that are at the higher levels in organizations and just looking for that next logical step. I just really appreciated how you facilitated that. I've been to six or seven of those, and it was both really great to meet you and know that we had a common
00:01:27
Speaker
colleague through done safe. So, you know, we just had a lot in common and then I appreciate you volunteering to come on my podcast. It went over great.
00:01:35
Speaker
Yeah, thank you. I loved it too. It was really fun.
Rob's personal journey: Cherokee heritage, tragedy, Navy, and founding his company
00:01:38
Speaker
So Rob, your origin story into this profession, where would you like to start? You know, I was so fascinated by the origin story that you told when you were at OHS Leaders Conference. And I'm wondering which pieces and parts you want to start with today. Well, I think it's easiest probably to start at the beginning. I'm a Native American Cherokee.
00:02:02
Speaker
voting member of the Cherokee Nation. And my dad was born right there with the Cherokee Nation back in the 1930s. Our family was marched on the Trail of Tears. And while about 30 people started, only five made it. And one of them was my great, great grandmother. And I think that started a
00:02:23
Speaker
Way that our family felt and believed and acted that was a bit more Entrepreneurial a bit more self-protective than than than many other people so I learned that from my dad who was a who's an entrepreneur his entire life and so when I was about
00:02:45
Speaker
Seven, we moved to Houston. So maybe 1962, we moved down to Houston and I watched my dad do businesses and grow businesses. And then in 1975, my mother died as the direct result of a medical error. I was 18, I was in college and I had to leave college and go home and raise my two brothers who were six and 12 years younger than me.
00:03:13
Speaker
After my dad came out of that, after a few years, I joined the Navy in the nuclear power program. I was in the Navy on submarines for about 10 years, and then I went to work at a nuclear power plant. During that time, we got in some trouble with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
00:03:32
Speaker
They said we had human performance problems and nobody knew what that was. I didn't like working shift work, so I volunteered to be on any team that would put me on that wasn't on shift work. One of them was the human performance team, one of them was the procedure improvement team, and another one was the business planning team.
00:03:53
Speaker
and i didn't realize that that would really shape my career because we were learning human performance when james reason had written the book human air and nobody knew what that meant so we had to figure out what
00:04:08
Speaker
human error and human error prevention and human error reduction meant to the worker, the supervisor, the manager, and the senior leader. Then we had to make that practically applicable from the theories. I did that for a few years and then one day my wife looked at me and said, I'm pretty sure
00:04:29
Speaker
They pay people to do this and they build it up with somebody else. We started our first company in 1992 and have been doing ... We say that we spent the last 30 years helping organizations and individuals understand how and why people make mistakes. Especially mistakes could be catastrophic.
00:04:50
Speaker
And there's really only three things you can do with a mistake or an error. You can prevent some, you can reduce their probability, or you can minimize their consequence. It's as simple or as complex as that. So that's kind of my story until I started consulting in about 1992.
Human performance and shifting perspectives on blame culture
00:05:07
Speaker
Rob, when did you make the connection? Once you're introduced to human performance and you think back to your mom and the medical heir, when did you pull those two things together? I mean, did one inform the other? Jill, that's a great question because
00:05:29
Speaker
I spent many, many years, hope I can say this on your podcast, pissed off. Yes. Pissed off with the doctors, pissed off with the nurses, pissed off with the hospital. I was mad at anyone who I could blame for killing my mother. That's the way I thought about it. Yeah. But I didn't understand human success and failure. So when human performance came along,
00:05:58
Speaker
I started understanding that people are doing things for a genuinely good reason most of the time. In other words, they're doing things that make sense to them, not to hurt somebody else, not to hurt, maim, or kill themselves or somebody else. That look allowed me to understand that blame is actually a human nature characteristic.
00:06:24
Speaker
It's not an organizational characteristic. So we hear people talk about blame cultures. I don't think there is one. I think you have an organization full of humans whose natural characteristic is to blame and therefore it is a natural characteristic that can be managed if we understand it.
00:06:43
Speaker
That completely changed the way I approached both the way I looked at how my mother passed, which in the end, if you look back, she underwent about the fourth time that a specific heart surgery had ever been done.
00:07:01
Speaker
So today we would call that an experimental surgery. We would expect there to be some challenges. Back in the 1970s, people didn't think that way. We thought mom was going to go in the hospital, have her surgery, come home, and everything was going to be fine. And now we just understand so much more about human success and failure across all of the industries that humans are involved in.
Consulting experiences: prioritizing human performance across industries
00:07:27
Speaker
And so I think it really took an albatross off of my neck related to my mother's death.
00:07:37
Speaker
Do I now know that she died to save others? Absolutely. Do I ever think that the doctors killed her? I do not. We can carry that into a lot of different things. We sure, we sure can. I mean, the, you know, what you're framing up with the blame and that you can manage the blame. Oh my gosh, Rob, that's just, I think back to all of the fatality investigations
00:08:03
Speaker
serious injury investigations I did when I was with OSHA. And I could always like, within a couple of minutes, categorize the employers I was working with into one of two camps, the blame and the we're gonna make a change. It was always extremely obvious right from the get go. And then you have those that we're gonna blame and yet we're still gonna change.
00:08:32
Speaker
Yes, there was that too. Yes. They make the changes that should have been made systemically and they should have realized them beforehand, but they still wind up blaming very often. Back in the day, they thought so much about the liability that in the end they knew they were going to make systemic changes, but they still blamed the people that were involved.
00:08:57
Speaker
That's very true, very true. Well, I mean, what an interesting origin story and one of healing for yourself and your family with your mom and then you've turned it into your life's work.
Lessons from Texas A&M Bonfire collapse investigation
00:09:16
Speaker
That's really interesting. So you started with human performance and the nuclear industry
00:09:23
Speaker
What other industries informed your journey and what did you learn on the way? Yeah. I started getting farmed out when I was still working at the nuclear power plant. The next place that I was farmed out was utilities. Then I started being farmed out to high-risk manufacturing and air lot.
00:09:48
Speaker
hospitals. And I started to realize that this is more about the humans than it is about the sector. One thing all these things have in common is human frailty, human success, human failure, organizational success, organizational failure. So it's able to start looking at things from a little bit bigger picture. And then in
00:10:12
Speaker
January of 2000, I got a call that really kind of changed my life. In November of 1999, the Texas A&M bonfire collapsed during the building process and killed 12 kids.
00:10:30
Speaker
They were looking for people to work on the investigation team for that collapse. One of the criteria was you couldn't have attended Texas A&M, you couldn't have any ties to them. But I was a Texas boy. I'd lived there most of my life. That investigation really changed my life in so many ways.
00:10:57
Speaker
in the way I looked at things in general. I knew there were rules of analysis, but when there's that much at stake, you don't realize how much the rules tend to frame you in a way that you can get the right answers and make the right calls. For example, yeah, talk more about that.
00:11:23
Speaker
So I'm a pretty fun guy. I like levity. Couldn't smile for a month when we were in College Station because we didn't want anyone to think that we were making light of this tragedy. I interviewed people that held their roommate's hand until they died.
00:11:50
Speaker
I interviewed parents that lost their child in an activity that the parents had done and the grandparents had done because this was a massive tradition. When I went to the job site, as we're all supposed to do in some kind of catastrophic failure analysis, there was a young man standing there that had ridden the bonfire down
00:12:20
Speaker
And his best friend was killed in the collapse. And he looked at us and said, please find out what killed my friend. And every day he would stand out there, even though there were no logs, there was nothing there but a fence. He would go out there to make sure that somebody was paying attention to his need to find out what happened to his friend.
00:12:50
Speaker
Yeah, and they wouldn't be forgotten. Correct. And so I did a lot of incident analysis that was pretty catastrophic, serious injuries, fatalities. And that informed me into, if I don't understand the way organizations and humans succeed and fail, I'll never understand how to fix the problems that drove the events that we then have to analyze.
Incident analysis: managing blame and finding causation
00:13:22
Speaker
And so we have always put those two things together. We kind of use a, a triad of you have to do human performance, human factors, human and organizational performance. We don't care what you call it this week. Um, you have to write effective processes and procedures, and then you have to analyze your problems with an understanding of human and organizational success and failure.
00:13:47
Speaker
Yeah, so how did things end with the Texas A&M case? Were you a cog in that investigative wheel, or were you able to have some closure and influence how things changed in the end, or how did that piece work out?
00:14:06
Speaker
Well, I was a cog in the wheel. I did parts of the investigation and some of them were fairly important parts and I think I learned a strange lesson after the fact because in the end we did discover what the physical failures were and what the organizational failures were and what could be done to minimize the probability. Really, you don't let
00:14:33
Speaker
18-year-olds build a 10-story building without really engineering that. But we also discovered that every major school that we went to had a student-led activity that had fatal risks associated with it.
00:14:51
Speaker
Oh, wow. So this wasn't a Texas A&M thing. Yeah. We went to one school that pushes all the freshmen into a mud pit, and they have to swim to the end. It doesn't matter whether they can swim or not. And they say, well, if somebody goes under and doesn't come back up, we pull them out. Oh, no. And through another school up in the Northeast that cuts a big hole in the ice, shoves all the freshmen in, makes them sing the fight song. And every now and then they've got to treat somebody for hypothermia. But they've got people there to take care of that.
00:15:20
Speaker
You know, so we have another organization, another college that builds bonfires, but they said theirs is engineered so they don't have to worry about it. Oh my gosh. So the extent of condition for that was colleges where you have kids that might drink and have a good time and have parents and grandparents that may have been an alumni, which to me includes most places.
00:15:50
Speaker
Of course it does. I mean, all I keep thinking in my head is like, you know, for every 660 unsafe work practices, you know, there's a fatality as you're talking, you know, like time ran out, time ran out. Yeah. And interestingly, when we, you know, when we got there, because the it collapsed in November, we didn't get there until February.
00:16:13
Speaker
Which as you well know, you got to get on things quick. That's right. But when we started interviewing people from around the world and asking them, why has this bonfire always been safe? The answer was because it always has been. But how many times have you and I heard that in an organization? Every day. Right. So this wasn't a one-off.
00:16:37
Speaker
That doesn't mean it wasn't predictable and manageable if we did something about it. But I remember that after the fact, two things happened. One of them was kind of funny. We were watching the news. We live south of Houston. We were watching news and I was on the news. I'll never forget that my son was sitting there and I'm on the news. He looked at me, he says, hey dad, is it true what they say that the camera adds 10 pounds to you?
00:17:06
Speaker
Thanks, son. I said, yes, that's what they say. Why? He says, well, it looks like they got about four cameras on you. Thank you, Cheryl. That's great. That works for me. I don't know whether that's to keep your friends close and your enemies closer or not. But the other thing that happened was I'll never forget I'm in the Philadelphia airport. And this is the last time I ever read USA Today.
00:17:32
Speaker
USA Today headline the day after the report was published, and the report is available online. You can type in Texas A&M Bonfire Report and you can read it. The headline in USA Today said, Texas A&M Bonfire Report released. A month overdue, a million over budget fails to find blame.
The power of storytelling in safety and organizational challenges
00:17:55
Speaker
I remember I got emotional sitting in the Philadelphia Airport reading that.
00:18:01
Speaker
Then I read the article and all three of those things were debunked in the article. They were using the headline and I thought, how many times does that come into play? Think of your position in OSHA. You read that and you say, holy cows, this is something we ought to dig into. That's right.
00:18:23
Speaker
The proof was actually in the pudding. The proof was in the article. We weren't a month late. We came in the day we said that we would provide the report. We weren't a million dollars over budget. It cost a million dollars to do the investigation. So if your budget was zero, I guess we were a million over it. And we weren't there to find blame. We were there to find causation and correlation.
00:18:49
Speaker
and correction. And I think that's what we're there to do when something bad happens. We want to find how this went down. What made it happen? We should ask questions. I call them Ted's questions. So instead of asking people why they did something,
00:19:08
Speaker
They should say, tell me, explain to me, describe to me, and show me. Open-ended questions that get you the why without asking the why, because when you ask somebody why, you're really blaming them. Of course, yeah. And their human nature is going to take over. Yeah, absolutely.
00:19:30
Speaker
Wow, thank you for the work on that and on so many others and God dang headlines. That's so disappointing. That's so disappointing. Yeah. Anyway, yes, interesting. Thank you for all of that. I'm just thinking, I'm thinking back to, you know, all of the cases that I've been, I've investigated in my life too and how each of them I think of as hallowed ground.
00:20:00
Speaker
That's a great way to think about it, Jill. I haven't thought, I haven't used that term, but what a great term to use for us wanting to and being able to learn from something that you and I had no control over the generation of, but we have a lot of influence over where it goes from here. That's right.
00:20:27
Speaker
to pass the learnings from those stories and to not forget in a way to honor what was lost. I live in a part of Minnesota and I've unfortunately investigated many, many deaths in a large region of my state. And so when I go anywhere, I drive past hallowed ground.
00:20:55
Speaker
And so I'm thinking about that, about those cases, about those people, about those families, about what I learned, about hopefully what I passed on to other people every time I'm going by them. And that's 30 years worth of stuff. And so there's a lot there. And you have the same thing, Rob. Yeah. And, you know, we try, we try to inform people through our stories, certainly without, without,
00:21:22
Speaker
doing dishonor to the people or talking about the companies or the people that were involved. But we try to honor those. And we do that in our company. We call that teaching by storying around. Oh, yeah. Talk more about that. Again, we don't want to be able to tie someone where they can say, oh, that was here. That was this person. But we want to be able to tell the stories
00:21:50
Speaker
in a way that people can relate to them. But we have a challenge today in the way we collectively use stories in that more and more we tell stories that are a little bit older. We talk about
00:22:14
Speaker
The Texan Bonfire Collapse, 1999. Challenger, 1986. Three Mile Island, 1979. But the people that are alive today and coming into the safety world and coming into the work world, they didn't live through those things. So us telling them sometimes almost seems like a, you know, I had to walk to school in the snow barefoot.
00:22:42
Speaker
Yes. Uphill both ways. Really, Grandpa? Yep. Well, I take a bus to school or mom always drops me off so that story doesn't apply. We have to make sure that the stories that we use would be active today.
Addressing workplace fatalities and accessible safety training initiatives
00:22:59
Speaker
Yes, for sure. For sure. Yeah, I think about that myself. Same thing. You know, it's like,
00:23:08
Speaker
I think about you're talking about historical things and immediately I thought of the triangle shirt waste fire. And when I talk about that conflagration,
00:23:20
Speaker
I talk about Frances Perkins standing on the sidewalk, looking at all of these people jumping to their death, and then she becomes, you know, Labor Secretary. And when I make a connection, hopefully for people, I talk about, you know how we have exit signs in buildings?
00:23:41
Speaker
You know how we have doors that need to stay unlocked in buildings today? Like that's why. That's where that came from. The origin story impacts us today. And you're right, like with recency, you know, talking about, gosh, how many people have we lost in the line of work in the generation since we started counting? And then how many do we still lose today? How many did we lose this month? You know?
00:24:07
Speaker
and trying to make those connections. I agree with you with Story. It's got to connect to people right where they are. Well, I was actually kind of shocked that the numbers went up this year. And they went up pretty substantially. I think 5% or 6% workplace fatalities increased in the US this year. Yeah, tell me more about that because I know you're part of this SIF committee. So tell me about that and what you're doing with that. And what do you make of these numbers?
00:24:37
Speaker
It seems like that probably 10 years ago, we were doing some things that were directly related to serious injuries and fatalities. We had studied them more. We found out they happened for reasons that are different than some of the small things that happened. We had discovered that
00:24:55
Speaker
this focus on zero cut fingers. There's things out there that'll cut your finger and things out there that'll kill you. If I take away all the cut your fingers, I don't take away the kill yous. We have to approach serious injuries and fatalities differently.
00:25:11
Speaker
That led to people specifically reviewing for what they call PSIFs, potential serious injuries and fatalities. They got the workforce looking at those things differently. It actually got a lot of organizations to pay really less attention to the cut finger or the stubbed toe than they do to the potential for serious injury and fatality.
00:25:41
Speaker
But I think that one of the reasons, and look, this is completely non-academic, I just think people feel like we're on autopilot related to serious injuries and fatalities. But I think what really is happening is, you and I had this conversation before. In the US and Canada, probably 75 to 80% of the fatalities in the workplace happen in organizations under 100 people.
00:26:09
Speaker
So all these big organizations are focusing on serious injuries and fatalities. The smaller organizations, I don't know how to say this politically correct, but large organizations sell their risk to the lowest bidder.
00:26:28
Speaker
Got it. Smaller organizations, maybe mom and pop shops, maybe a small organization. Two or three people get together, they retire, they go out and buy a bucket truck, and then they farm themselves as a subcontractor to a utility. They've only got 10 or 12 people that work for them. They work very safely right up until they don't. That's right. Seen it so many times.
00:26:57
Speaker
As I shared with you, we started paying attention to that in our organization, especially during COVID, because we said, look, nobody's paying attention to these workers that are at risk. They're being subject to risks that are really owned, should be owned by the big major corporations, but they farmed that risk out to the lowest bidder.
00:27:21
Speaker
And these organizations, they can't afford what the big organizations can afford to do in training, in serious injuries and fatalities, in prevention.
00:27:34
Speaker
So during COVID, we at Fisher Improvement Technologies said, look, we either fold the company because we were consultant-based and you and I know very well, nobody was having consultants come to them during COVID. And that COVID lasted from March of 2020 to some people still aren't having meetings in-house. And so we sat back and said, look, we can either fold the company
00:28:04
Speaker
or we can pivot to make these kinds of things available to the organizations that need it, large or small. And so we formed Fit Online and
00:28:20
Speaker
We have probably 300 videos on there. Most of them are free. So somebody can go on and learn about human frailty, human success, human failure, hop, human performance, human factors. And they don't have to shell out a bunch of money to do it. And then we created some paid courses as well. So even a company that wants to go dig a little bit deeper,
00:28:44
Speaker
the courses are cheap enough that they can do it based on the size of their organization. This isn't a commercial Jill.
Intentional leadership and creating psychologically safe environments
00:28:50
Speaker
I was just kind of telling you how we pivoted because if we believe our Cherokee values, we want to improve companies and lives. And I remember my daughter saying, when we say improve companies and lives, we don't say improve the companies and lives of the people that can afford us. That's right. That's not in our mission.
00:29:12
Speaker
Yeah. And you figured out a way to scale up and down for the small company you're describing and the larger. Correct. Yeah. Rob, tell me about, you know, we've been, thank you for this journey. I wanted to go back just a second to the CIF committee you're on. Tell us about that. What is it? What are you learning? That's informed all of these things that you've been talking about as well.
00:29:39
Speaker
Well, the CIF committee is kind of dissolved at this point. There are some that have formed up, the National Safety Council, Executive Business Forum, some of those, they're having CIF meetings.
00:29:54
Speaker
But the original work was done back by Mercer ORC, who I think you know, Steve Newell in that group, back in probably 10 or 11 years ago. So all the data was collected. We know what we need to know about what drives serious injuries and fatalities. We have things like the hazard wheel that identify the 12 most significant hazards.
00:30:20
Speaker
It's about getting it into organizations in a way that they'll pay attention to those hazards and they'll let the workers tell them, here's what we need to do to reduce the probability that that hazard will impact us.
00:30:35
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Rob, you talked about how we saw an increase in death in the last year, and you've also shared, you know, the small employers and the impact there. What else are you seeing or learning in the work that you do that you think may be contributing to this increase in the last year?
00:31:00
Speaker
unless this is a bounce back from COVID yet. I mean, you and I are talking at the very end of 2023 and all I know is like every one of my friends around every corner is ill right now and is it because we're just with one another more and that's also part of 2023, we're just working more. Well, I think that we got used to
00:31:29
Speaker
a significant reduction in oversight that may reveal vulnerabilities. That is going to play out over time. There's some things I really don't know how to say them in a nice way. When we created
00:31:52
Speaker
the belief that safety people were not, what do we call them?
00:32:01
Speaker
And what do we call the type of people that were needed and not needed? Oh, sure. The essential workers. Thank you. Thank you. When we decided that safety people in the field were non-essential, you're going to sit at home on your computer, and the way you're going to audit is maybe some of them were advanced, and they audited by watching somebody on their cell phone. But the majority of them just stopped having a presence in the field.
00:32:32
Speaker
And now we decided that we don't need certain things to work and go in the office.
00:32:47
Speaker
So I think one of the worst things COVID did was draw a line between essential and non-essential personnel that made the people who we deemed essential believe that some of the people that we called non-essential truly were.
00:33:04
Speaker
Exactly. I mean, it's just, oh, man. I mean, I get the intentionality behind, you know, we need a way to turn the lights on and flush the toilets and all of that stuff. I get it. And at the same time, I come from a personal belief system that every person's contribution is the same importance. Yeah. You know, all human all human work is
00:33:32
Speaker
is important work. Yeah, well, we could talk about we could wax philosophical all day on that, Rob, couldn't we? You know, yeah, I know that one of the things that that you believe in, and I think this is what we've been talking about is is a need for intentionality. Do you want to speak more about that? Or do you feel like we flush that out already?
00:33:58
Speaker
I think that's very important because a lot of times, take the new phrase, the new train people are on psychological safety. Yes. Well, psychological safety is an outcome.
00:34:12
Speaker
there are some things you have to do along the way intentionally, as an individual, as an organization, as a leader, gain the outcomes that someone would call psychological safety. So we focus more on intentional leadership. What does a leader need to know and say and do to create the conditions under which psychological safety can exist?
00:34:42
Speaker
And too many organizations out there are saying, we're going to create a psychologically safe work environment. No, you're not. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Or companies like mine get a phone call. Hey, do you have a course on psychological safety? As if you can like, oh, here, take this course and now you'll be good.
00:35:03
Speaker
And I think that was one of the things that you and I bonded over a little bit at the OHS Leaders Summit. My talk was psychological safety needs to be developed, not demanded. That's right. In other words, there's a process for psychological safety. But if you listen to a bunch of thought leaders, I'd say, oh, we don't need processes anymore. We just need the workers to tell us how the work needs to be done. No, you need an eloquent mix of those things. That's right. That's right.
00:35:30
Speaker
So our focus now is trying to put intentional leadership into the leadership programs that these places have. So take diversity and inclusion.
Values-based engagements and safety culture transformation
00:35:50
Speaker
Leave equity off to the side for a second because again, that's an outcome. But we say diversity is a fact. It's a condition.
00:36:00
Speaker
It exists. Inclusion is an act. It's a decision. That's something you have to do with intentionality. I could put a bunch of diverse people in the room, but then I have to use them. I have to include them in a way that we get the best out of those individuals. Those are different things. They keep getting crammed together. If you do those well, equity becomes a little simpler.
00:36:31
Speaker
Oh, man, that's beautifully said. That's beautiful. Oh, I mean, it really is. It makes so much sense. So when you meet with leaders, is that part of what you're teaching right now? When you're talking, yeah. It is. We actually use a model that starts with convincing them that everything they're going to do to improve starts with leader knowledge, leader language, and leader behaviors.
00:36:58
Speaker
There's no direct drive to workforce language and behaviors. There's a belt there, and they have to manage that belt of engagement. Once they get that, once they see that, you and I had to talk about Sidney Decker. Sidney wrote a book called The Field Guide to Understanding Human Air. He wrote it in the 1990s, and it's still one of the best books you can read to understand human success and failure.
00:37:25
Speaker
and it's still available today, but Sydney and I were sitting out in Brisbane a few years ago and we were talking and he said, you know, we're influencers of leaders, but we've got to remember that if you want to change somebody's paradigm, you've got to give them a paradigm more powerful than the one you're asking them to leave. And that's our job. It's not their job.
00:37:54
Speaker
Yeah, and when you're able to do that, Rob, what does the leaders, I'm just imagining light bulbs coming on. Do you get to see that as you're doing your work? You get to see it big time. And look, I spend almost all of my time with senior leaders. I'm an executive mentor. I do senior leader workshops. I give speeches, as you saw. All of my time is spent working on the business.
00:38:23
Speaker
with senior leaders, helping them understand that element and that if they walk out of the room with a little more knowledge,
00:38:33
Speaker
saying a few different things and doing a few different things, they will see results immediately. And I can't remember the last time I didn't get an email or a phone call within a week after doing a senior leader workshop saying, you're not going to believe this, but. Oh, that's awesome. What did you think I stood up there in front of you and told you to meet before?
00:38:56
Speaker
We use something that really is a game changer called values-based engagements. Values-based engagements are a conversation with people that isn't about work. Yeah, same work. There's no need for a senior leader to go out and watch work. Number one, they don't like it.
00:39:18
Speaker
They don't like the interactions, but number two, I'm an ex-operator. I hated when a senior leader came out when I knew right, wrong, or indifferent, they were going to tell me that something I was doing was wrong and here's how it should be done even though they don't know how to do my job. That's what's in my brain. But if they go out to engage, have a conversation about values,
00:39:46
Speaker
What is it about our life-saving rules that keeps you safe, Jill?
00:39:56
Speaker
Well, they don't. Okay. Tell me more about that. We spent a lot of time, a lot of money on these things. We call them life saving rules. I believe as an executive that that's what they're doing, but you as the workforce, you don't think they do. Tell me more about that. Help me understand why if I want to help save your life, the thing that I've put in place won't do that. And guess what? They'll tell you.
00:40:27
Speaker
Every time. Every time. And so we adopted some of the work from the guys down in New Zealand called the four D's. I talked about Ted's earlier. Tell me, explain to me, describe me, show me. The four D's are a leader can walk out and say, hey, what's the dumbest thing we're asking you to do today?
00:40:48
Speaker
Oh, everybody wants to answer that question. These are dumb, different, difficult, and dangerous. And if you ask them in that order, you'll get all of this rich information from the people doing the work that you don't get any other way. That's an engagement, not an observation. And then the key is your leader behavior is you do something with that information.
00:41:15
Speaker
Beautiful. All of those things we call leading with intentionality.
Characteristics of change-receptive leaders and paradigm shifts
00:41:21
Speaker
Yeah. Rob, what makes, have you observed, I'm thinking of the leaders that you're coaching. What makes a leader that's open to this message? Are there attributes that you've recognized or is it all over the board?
00:41:42
Speaker
That's a very interesting question because I think both you and I have the luxury of by the time we get to a leader, they're already open. They invited us. That's different from standing on the stage of the OHS leaders summit and looking out and seeing a whole bunch of people nod their heads and then cherry picking what you said and saying, well, I can do that without any help.
00:42:13
Speaker
The people that respect what you and I say, they're already open to doing something different. The question then becomes, I think through our podcasts, we open some people's minds. If they've listened this long, maybe. Then they say, well, I want to learn a little bit more about that.
00:42:40
Speaker
But there's a converse to that.
00:42:43
Speaker
And that is, I'll go in and talk to a leadership team. And we just had this happen. It's very, very rare. Go in and talk to a leadership team. They're excited. They're doing things different. The senior leaders are doing things different. They decide that they're going to deploy at a plant. And the plant says, yay, Verily, we will deploy. But in the plant manager's eyes, all they're doing is checking a box. The plant manager never shows up to a workshop.
00:43:11
Speaker
They never change their knowledge, language, and behaviors, but they tell a corporate, yep, we did our training. Every now and then that happens, but usually if you can get them in the room, they'll change because you and I develop the methods that help them shift their paradigms. That's what we're good at. Changing hearts and minds. Yeah, for sure.
Exploring mental models and human error in Rob's book
00:43:40
Speaker
Yeah, that's the life's work. Yeah. Oh, man. Rob, you've also authored a book. Tell us about your book. So I wrote a book called Understanding Mental Models, and really it's about how do we understand our brain in a way that helps us make better decisions and helps us understand when we're vulnerable to making a mistake.
00:44:08
Speaker
And it's based on a lot of James Reason's work on the general error modeling system and Rasmussen and Jensen's work on skill-based, rule-based, and knowledge-based performance modes. But it's very practically applicable. It's the stuff that we teach the workforce in how do they recognize a vulnerability that isn't a physical vulnerability
00:44:34
Speaker
but it's a vulnerability to the probability of making an error. So you've got two different types of hazards, physical hazards, and we're doing pretty well with those. But you also have performance hazards, and we're not doing very well with those. So the book tells stories, tells you about the science, talks about the myths,
00:44:58
Speaker
of these performance modes and then tells you how to analyze what mental model of those three somebody was in so you can make effective corrective actions. Oh, fascinating. Yeah. Well, I'd love to put a link to the book in the show notes. I think that would be great. And maybe does Sydney Decker's work as well as you were talking about that. Maybe you'll be able to supply a link for us to put a show note to that. That'd be wonderful.
00:45:25
Speaker
Yeah, Rob, what else?
Introduction to Fit Online: learning about success and failure
00:45:29
Speaker
The audience here at the Accidental Safety Pro is broad. We have people who are just getting started. We have people who are seasoned professionals like yourself and I. What would you like to share with the audience? Well, I think that, again, we put together this fit online
00:45:48
Speaker
to help people learn at their own pace. Every video we put on there is between two and five minutes long, plus all of our webinars, all of our speeches. I think that when people become a student of the game of human and organizational success and failure, they are increasing their personal worth
00:46:11
Speaker
to their families and to their organizations. Because all the stuff we're talking about, it's about homework and play. It's not just about work. You can't make these things that you're trying to help people with something you're doing to them.
00:46:28
Speaker
It has to be something that we do to get better. So I so appreciate that I'm the last of the year because maybe people listening into the new year will create some kind of intentionality behind going and seeing a two to three minute video on essential leadership cycle or a two to three minute video on what HSI can do for them or a five minute video on performance modes.
00:46:58
Speaker
and then be able to do something about that without having to be all in on deploying a massive, you know, element into their organization. Right. Start with intentionality. Yeah, absolutely. Beautiful.
Conclusion and the importance of the safety profession
00:47:20
Speaker
Rob, thank you so much. This is a beautiful and rich conversation.
00:47:26
Speaker
Values-based engagements. Gosh, I love it. I love it. And I'm so grateful that you and I got to meet this year.
00:47:33
Speaker
I am too, and I hope that you and I carry on this relationship because I think that it's valuable to the organizations that we serve, and I think it's valuable to the field that we serve. Something's got to change to get the respect of the people back for safety professionals, whether accidental or not, and I think that we can have a big piece of that.
00:48:03
Speaker
agree, and I look forward to the continuation. Thank you so much. And thank you all for spending your time listening today. And more importantly, thank you for your contribution toward the common good.
00:48:15
Speaker
May our employees and those we influence know that our profession cares deeply about human wellbeing, which is at the core of our practice. If you aren't subscribed and want to hear past and future episodes, you can subscribe in iTunes, the Apple Podcast app, or any other podcast player you'd like. We'd love it if you could leave a rating and review us on iTunes. It really helps us connect the show with more and more professionals like Rob and I. Special thanks to Emily Gould, our podcast producer. And until next time, thanks for listening.