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!” 
• Like and follow, send us your comments and suggestions!

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 Article: Safety Should Be a Performance Driver

Episode 121: Is Safety Good for Business?

The Safety of Work Podcast

The Safety of Work on LinkedIn

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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” 
• Like and follow, send us your comments and suggestions!

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

The Safety of Work Podcast

The Safety of Work on LinkedIn

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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:

Link to the Paper

The Safety of Work Podcast

The Safety of Work on LinkedIn

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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:

Coroner's Inquest into Dreamworld Incident

Hawkins, S. A., & Hastie, R. (1990). Hindsight: Biased judgments of past events after the outcomes are known. Psychological bulletin, 107(3), 311.

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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:

Feedback@safetyofwork.com

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.

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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.

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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:

Carsten’s Paper on Heinrich

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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

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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.

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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:

Link to the Paper

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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.

Feeback@safetyofwork.com

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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:

Link to the Paper

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Welcome to an introduction to our new podcast, Safety of Work. In this podcast we will discuss how safety works. We aim to provide listeners with examples of safety processes that exist in the real world and how they can use those processes in their own lives.

Topics:

• Safety comes from operational work.
• How safety works at work.
• The goal and the means of safety are different.
• What to expect from each forthcoming episode.
• Our goals for this podcast.
• David is a career safety professional.
• Drew is a computer systems engineer by training.

Quotes:

“We don’t want to be disconnected from the safety of work; we want to be closely linked in…”

“We want to help our listeners demystify, devolve, and declutter safety.”

“...There’s a lot of things that safety people do, which have legitimate purposes, that are not directly geared at safety of work.”

Resources:

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Disastercast

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:

Link to the Paper

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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:

Link to the Paper 

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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:

Link to the Paper 

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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

The Harwood Experiment Episode

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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:

Link to the strategy document

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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:

Link to the paper

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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:

Link to the paper

Humble Inquiry by Edgar Schein

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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: No More Bullet Points

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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:

Link to the paper

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

1. 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.
2. 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:

Link to the paper

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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:

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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:

Disowning Fukushima Paper by John Downer

WASH-1400 Studies

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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:

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

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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:

Karl Weick - Drop Your Tools Paper

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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: 

1. Group decision-making
2. Self-management
3. Leadership training
4. Changing people’s thoughts about stereotypes
5. 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:

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

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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:

Link to the Paper

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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:

Link to the Paper

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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 Paper

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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:

The Paper: The Tension Between Worker Safety and Organization Survival

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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:

Link to the Research Paper

The Safety of Work Podcast

The Safety of Work on LinkedIn

Feedback@safetyofwork.com