Implementing New View Safety Methods and Philosophies

In this episode, Mary Conquest speaks with Moni Hogg, a Senior HSE professional, safety trainer and conference speaker who specializes in the Safety Differently. She focuses on cutting-edge safety approaches to enable creative, innovative and efficient culture transformation.

Moni has literally written a handbook on implementing New View Safety, and she shares the key ideas underpinning this approach while providing practical guidance to EHS professionals looking to build and improve their safety programs.

She tells her story of discovering and exploring New View Safety and outlines the essential paradigm shifts required to embrace these contemporary safety methodologies and philosophies.

Moni introduces us to new concepts, including “weak signals”, “learning teams” and “freedom frameworks”. However, she also highlights challenges, such as measuring success, accountability, leadership buy-in, and the timeframe required to see positive results.

Transitioning to New View Safety is not a quick or simple journey - but it’s exciting, and you will learn so much. This interview is a great starting point!

♪ [music] ♪ - [Mary] My name is Mary Conquest. I'm your host for "Safety Labs by Slice," the podcast where we explore the human side of safety to support safety professionals. We move past regulations and reportables to talk about the core skills of safety leadership, empathy, influence, trust, rapport, in other words, the soft skills that help you do the hard stuff.

♪ [music] ♪ Hi, there. Welcome to "Safety Labs by Slice." We talk a lot about different approaches to safety on this podcast, and the question always arises, how do we implement new ideas?

Today's guest literally wrote the handbook on how to implement new view, sometimes called safety differently in an organization. Her upcoming book is entitled "The New View Safety Handbook: A Step-by-Step Roadmap to Introduce Contemporary Safety Methods." She's here to talk to me about some of the ideas that underpin her approach and her advice on building and improving a safety program.

Moni Hogg is a senior health and safety practitioner with over 20 years experience who specializes in the safety differently or safety II approach. She spent four years working with high-performing teams in New Zealand's innovation sector as the first safety lead for Rocket Lab, and prior to that, Fletcher Building Engineered Housing System, now known as Clever Core.

Moni's approach encompasses strategic and operational safety experience with cutting-edge philosophies and methods to enable creative, innovative, and efficient culture transformation combined with a critical risk approach. Her work has enabled high-risk projects to succeed and compete at international levels by keeping staff injury-free and performing at their best.

Miss Hogg is an experienced conference speaker and guest speaker, and a keen Motorsport enthusiast, and member of Women in Motorsport. That was just too interesting for me to leave out. Moni joins us from Auckland. Welcome.

- [Moni] Hi, Mary. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure.

- Okay. So, let's start with terminology. If there is a succinct way to do so, how do you summarize or define new view safety?

- That's a great question. We're seeing a lot of change in the safety industry right across the globe, and there are so many challenges in looking at what that change actually means to us in our organizations. And, you know, trying to define it is, you know, trying to define a base that's difficult to tame, shall I say.

The preferred definition that I like to work with is really getting an understanding of the fact that we've worked towards better safety leadership in our organizations, but we are now looking to build capacity and resilience, and that's really based on the safety II type of definition. And you mentioned my background in Motorsport.

When I was coached in Motorsport originally, I still remember my fast car chase police trainer saying to me, look, if you want to succeed in Motorsport, you have to be really mindful that when you make a mistake, and, of course, in our workplaces, people make mistakes all the time and human error is part of how we operate in the world and what we learn from, but you can't focus on that.

A.K.A, if you're in a spin, you don't want to look at the wall that you're about to hit. What you need to do is you need to focus on the gap that you need to get into. And drawing more on that analogy in Motorsport, what you need to do then is ask, what do we need to do as organizations to support the people doing the work to be successful at that work and also safe?

Because it's obviously an important part of successful work. And if you keep it that simple, you know, you start to ask really good questions about how you can work closer with your team to co-design your safety management system, because in practice, really it boils down to that. When you understand that your people are smart, intelligent, and very capable, and perhaps better at you than managing safety, then you'll come up with better solutions.

- You were an early adopter of new view or safety differently, and at the time while you had read some theory, you didn't really have a lot of practical examples to draw from. How did you decide that new view was something worth exploring?

- Yeah. Back in think it would've been late 2015, we had Sidney Dekker, obviously over in Australia, came over to New Zealand and did a talk, and also his 2iC academic, Drew Rae, spoke at our national safety conference.

And I don't remember a lot from those two talks except for two key points. Sidney talked about the Taylorism of the 20th century and how we needed to evolve from that. And Drew talked about...I quite clearly remember him calling the safety programs that we've got today, essentially the gods of safety, that which we must bow down to, almost as both gods.

And, you know, we need to make appropriate sacrifices too in order to keep them happy. I loved that analogy and it really resonated. And from there, I made a decision quite quickly that I wanted to start trying out those ideas. So, it's been seven years for me now that I've been using the safety differently approach.

I use the safety differently term, and I've worked with probably 30 to 40 organizations, I would say, and I do a lot of teaching around New Zealand and overseas. And what I've come to discover is exactly the same as the very first experiment that I did. I was asked as a consultant to do a paper for the Dairy New Zealand Board.

And obviously, in New Zealand, the dairy industry is a major part of our economy. And doing a board paper for that organization was something that was respected and I decided to use the people are the experts' philosophy. And I won't go into the detail of exactly what we came out with, but I essentially ran what would now be learning teams to answer the question of what were the top and critical risks at that time and what should the board be focusing on going forward?

And what actually happened was the board really appreciated the pragmatism of the recommendations in that board paper. However, they were skeptical about the methodology that I'd use because it was new and they obviously hadn't seen it. And one of the directors apparently in a meeting that I wasn't present at asked how it was that someone from the construction industry could have the expertise to deliver this paper.

And what happened was two farming consultants were hired to peer review my paper, essentially, and they did a several days discovery process. And when they came back, I was actually stunned to find that they had absolutely nothing to add.

They literally said the paper was near on perfect and that they couldn't propose any further thoughts to anything that had been suggested as the way forward, which for me ended up proving the fact that everything that Sidney and Drew were talking about worked. And from there, I was a hundred percent converted and have been ever since.

- I think that's interesting that they said how can someone who's not an expert speak to this and your entire methodology is based on the principle that you aren't the expert.

- Exactly, exactly. It's a challenge for people in safety roles and dare I say for people in the management and leadership roles too. And the reason for that, of course, is that the reason we've gotten to the positions that we have is that we've worked hard to build the knowledge and expertise that we do have. And to let go of that and to become more of a facilitator, even as perhaps a senior leader in an organization to lead, coach, and facilitate instead of, you know, the traditional plan, direct, and control is a challenge.

And that's a key part of the challenge in our journey to evolve into the new view approaches.

- Yeah. And I see that across, across the board in different industries too. How do you measure success when you are adopting a new approach like new view? Are there indicators for you that it either has or hasn't worked?

- That's a great question. Look, one of the things that I think the safety industry and perhaps at the governance level, I think the challenge that those organizations and those people in those roles have is that there's not a clear metric, not a clear way of measuring whether these things have been successful.

It does tend to be, for the most part, anecdotal at this stage. And to draw an example, and I think this is not to be underestimated, I worked with a team recently where after the intervention that we did, I went and had a chat with the junior level manager and he said to me, look, after we did this intervention, what happened is the team have all of a sudden been going around with their chest puffed out, they've been contributing to the decision-making, giving their ideas, and they're just way more confident and way more engaged.

Now, that's not something that can be measured, of course. And dare I say, and I think this is the challenge to all of us is that we are underestimating the value of new view safety in our workplaces simply because of that, because it's hard to quantify. We talk about the results being felt and it's really important that we get away from these quantitative measures and bring in the more qualitative measures.

And there's a quite a bit of science around that, you know, ethnographic type of methodologies, which I'm no expert on. But an actual fact, social science does back that as an approach for measurement. Having said all that, what's really exciting for us is that the due diligence index standard has just hit the streets.

Sidney Dekker, Art of Work, and Clyde & Co [SP], Michael Toma and his team have spent a couple of years researching and designing a more metric approach to measuring, you know, new view safety. And it's not to measure the effectiveness of your interventions, but it's more to give you a good categorized, well-formed understanding of the collective intelligence in your organization, and quite specifically the weak signals that you need to be listening to.

Because one of the key drivers behind shifting to the new view is an understanding of the fact that the current safety management systems that we have are sending us strong signals, A.K. A when things fail or when they nearly fail. But what we need to start to develop is more of an understanding that weak signals exist in our business that are pointing to the fact that something can go wrong and our systems aren't delivering that to us.

So, that due diligence index standard is linked to the six due diligence elements, which are based in New Zealand and Australian legislation, and I'm sure in the UK and America and Canada and so on, there'll be a similar construct around that. So, I highly recommend that anyone would look that up and get a bit of a dive into that and get an understanding of how you can start to build a dashboard and a platform by which your directors are seeing the value from new view safety and the collective intelligence and work signals coming up from your teams.

One of the challenges to go with that I would just add is that it's important that you have a transparent culture to go with it because obviously, for work teams to be giving those work signals directly to directors, what you've got is you've got management and organization that tend to, at the moment work with collective intelligence in a way that upholds the hierarchy in which we work within most organizations.

And it's really important that you create a safe environment for people to be able to share the truth and build trust in that process.

- When you talk about weak signals, would an example of that be something like a manufacturing slowdown or something, something that may not seem related to safety but could have implications for it?

- Great. Yeah. That's a great question. I'll think of an example. One of the pieces of work that I've done recently is in our civil construction industry here in New Zealand. We quite regularly get what's called service strikes. And I'm sure sort of language is used overseas where, you know, the services under the ground over a period of time have shifted and moved.

And being able to locate those adequately before you conduct the work that you're doing is a challenge. And it's obviously rife with supposed human error and you can end up with potentially catastrophic incidents there. And it's oftentimes up to the adept teamwork to make sure that that situation's handled really effectively. Now, I did several interventions learning teams specifically across a number of companies in the civil industry in New Zealand and we were discovering a bunch of what, what you would call weak signals.

So, there were times when the resources and the technology weren't available when it should have been. There were situations where the rules and the procedures that people were expected to use weren't appropriate to those particular situations. Or there were situations where the relationship with the client because, of course, those sorts of companies work with councils and other governmental organizations wasn't flowing particularly well and the project management wasn't going well.

So, those sorts of things are everyday operational matters that people deal with and as we say, adapt to the conditions that they're handling on a day-to-day basis. But the reality is those things in and on themselves are no big deal as such, but if we are not paying attention to those weak signals coming through our systems, they will accumulate and lead to much more serious matters.

- Okay. So, it's better organizational listening, really, operational listening.

- Yeah, absolutely. It's not rocket science, right?

- So, I'd like to get into your book because there's lots to ask about in there. Looking at the outline of your upcoming book, it's meant to be a step-by-step guide to implementing new view safety. And one of the first things that I noticed is that you draw influence from indigenous principles. Why do you think that this is an important consideration?

- Thank you. The aspect of my book around this is still shaping up. I must admit it's the last piece to go in. And the reason for that is in New Zealand, the indigenous people are Maori and they're about, well, 15% of the population I think, and absolutely amazing people with a wisdom and knowledge base that I think in some ways is more involved than our European way of thinking.

And I'm working on collaborating with them on how to express this and it's a challenge. It's a challenge to translate indigenous worldviews into the western scientific worldview and the traditions that we've grown up with through.

I'm no expert but Plato, and a lot of the other philosophers that have informed our thinking these days, they understand collective intelligence and how it works far, far better than we do. And they understand that operating within those principles is far more effective. And in Maori language, Tito Maori, they call it Manaakitanga, which is hard to translate into European language to the depth to which the richness of the meaning is there.

And what I can translate it to, I'm trying, is it's care, understanding, generosity, but more than that, a word that's commonly used in New Zealand because we've cooped with some of the languages enhancing another's manner. Now, manner in the Maori language means another person's status, sense of respect, or dignity. And the idea is that whatever you do, you look to enhance another person's manner.

And there's amazing connections between that and safety differently because if we seek to enhance the manner of everybody else that we're working with, be they someone that's lower down the food chain or further up the food chain than us, regardless of that, then what we'll do is we'll create an environment in which everyone's looking out for each other and is far more generative.

And I honestly think going forward, we can really learn from also, you know, Native American philosophies and aboriginal say from Australia, and also African type philosophies, ubuntu. If you look up Desmond Tutu who talks about ubuntu, again, that's based on the concept of the fact that...I think they call it I am because we are, you know, that sense of collectiveness.

And as European thinkers, we've got a lot to learn from that. You can hear that I'm not even sure of my words entirely and it's because our language doesn't necessarily translate across easily and there's an attempt in the new view way of thinking to start to build science behind it.

And I think that's equally relevant to understanding it purely from a philosophical point of view.

- Yeah. It sounds to me like there's one of the ways of understanding that's maybe different and that has to do with new view is that collective information. You could call it institutional knowledge, but that's pretty dry and narrow view. But as opposed to the individualism that's kind of been in the history of European thought, the collective understanding or thinking seems to me like things like learning teams, right?

And, you know, learning from everyone, not just a specific metric, or am I slightly on the right track?

- Yeah, absolutely. So, with a learning team, essentially what it is is a discreet specific topic-based exercise and yeah, drawing on that collective intelligence. And it's incredible how effective learning teams are if they're done well. I do spend a lot of time mentoring people and doing training around it. So, I do a lot of learning teams.

And what we tend to find, all other things being equal, is that there's a known problem that you start out with and if you use the appreciative inquiry approach, which is to say, hey, let's get away from deficit thinking and looking at who's wrong or what's wrong and what needs to be fixed. And we say, okay, let's make the assumption that people are doing the best they can, you know, both work teams and management and how are we creating success already?

Then we start to draw quite a different picture out. And what we tend to find is that known problem is simply a symptom of deep issues as Sidney Dekker kindly puts it, and we end up getting to the root cause of the problem. And it fascinates me that for some years, you know, we've taught root cause analysis, but it's not until you use an appreciative inquiry style of methodology that you actually get to the root cause.

And it can be anything, you know. One thing that...coming back again actually to that civil industry challenge, what fascinated me was that I would run more or less the same learning team because it was the same known problem in different organizations. And I would find that the deeper issues were different, same symptom, but different problems. And so it's always context-specific and the new view movement talks a lot about that.

And it's really important that you as an organization experience what learning teams and safety differently generally means within your context with the people that you are working with and within the existing systems that you've got and to build success from there.

- Let's talk about baselines. You mentioned this in the book. How would a safety practitioner go about finding a baseline, which I guess is the beginning of context, right?

- Yeah, absolutely. Really with your baseline, look, I think...and this is the basis that I work on, that given that it's a challenge to build metrics around this and again that you do want to head off into that due diligence type of frame for it, really when you're looking at your baseline, rather than sort of going down the avenue of culture surveys and climate surveys, which the safety scientists have proven aren't really all that effective, just a snapshot in time.

What you really need to do there is really make sure that your critical risk management is up to reasonable standards. And I say that because if you're going to let go of control and build more trust and ownership of your teams, you need to have the basics in place. So, Todd Conklin speaks beautifully about, you know, the shit that can kill you, if I can say that.

And it's important that you have good verification in place and ensure that, you know, the teams are supported with the basic resources that they need to keep themselves safe. So, as long as you are continuing that critical risk management program and you're drawing on all the appropriate external expertise around that and making sure that you're benchmarking and getting peer reviews regularly, then you can be pretty sure you've got a good baseline in place.

And having said that, one of the challenges that I do hear from those that aren't as confident with moving into new view as perhaps others is they say, well, we've got to make sure we get that in place before we try the new view. And I want to suggest that that's a bit chicken and egg, and I will draw on my experience working in the aerospace industry and also at Fletcher when I was setting up an engineered...helping on a team setting up an engineered housing system.

In the innovation sector, you're in a situation where obviously your critical risk management isn't to a complete standard because you're building a startup and obviously, everything isn't complete in terms of your development as yet. So, then by that argument, you would have to say, well, then we have to use the safety I approach and build all that first and then switch over to safety II.

And I can offer that if you start using safety II to build your critical risk management, which is to build collaborative means by which to achieve those ends, you'll get a better result because people will be far more engaged. And if you give authority, even better, not just collaboration but authority to come up with their own decisions and make sure you resource that, then you will actually...it'll be far more agile, far more effective and people will take ownership for ensuring that your program is as effective as possible.

So, while it might seem that is one before the other, in actual fact, the two go hand in hand. And I think that's a challenge for us in more entrenched organizations is to understand you want to keep the baby but throw out the bath water and which is which.

- Yeah. And which is which, that's key. You write about readying the organization for change. How important is this step and what can a practitioner do to ready an organization for change?

- Sure. Whenever I work with people, I find that people are keen to engage with the new view approaches and interested in how it's going to go for them. And usually, they've either got leadership on board or attempted to. What we find is the challenge generally is that, you know, leadership might be less confident in it because at the moment, there's not a clearly defined evidence base.

And I can talk to that there's a reason for it, but at the same time, it involves a far more, I want to say different approach...the use of power within organizations. The hierarchical approach that we use at the moment is based on what I would call power over rather than power with, and developing and evolving into the new view approaches because it's not and/or, it involves basically using a bit more of the power with.

And that can be a challenge and that's because we don't understand what that's going to mean for us until we get into it. And naturally, there's resistance to that. So, the challenge for us is to have an understanding at the beginning of how ready we are. And generally, my suggestion is that you need to test that out. You probably have an awareness, but I like to do a little bit of a test.

So, you put something towards your leadership and you'll get a response to that. And it may be that they're just unsure and they can be led to the next stage, or it may be that they're not quite ready and you'll need to gauge that depending on your situation. But there'll be various signs and signals, and a couple of them will be that you'll attempt to get something off the ground and it keeps getting canceled, postponed, or it just somehow doesn't work.

Another test is that when you are trying to adapt to the approaches and people are changing it all the time, it means that an actual fit or, you know, not actually following the suggested methods, then, you know, switching it back to more safety I approaches, then you're struggling along there. And then, of course, there's a situation where there's outright disagreement with some of the philosophy.

So, what I suggest in those situations is you probably want to pull back a little bit. And I use the neuroscience-based approach that marketing very much leans on, and it's called priming, which is, I mean, marketers and advertisers do it all the time, right? So, they plant ideas deliberately over a period of time. And I think there's research around exactly how many times people need to hear a message before all of a sudden in their minds it clicks in that that's the way the world's heading.

So, that's basically what you need to do. It sounds manipulative, but in actual fact, what it is, is our brains are wide in such a way that we need reinforcement of an idea before we are willing to shift into it most of the time. And we need that to provide that for our organization. So, you want to go back to giving people a steady diet of reading, definitely to get started.

And the reason for that is so that people can engage with the ideas in a way that's meaningful to them rather than being told they can take it in and adopt it according to what works for them. Getting guest speakers and ensuring that they hear about case studies. And the other thing is, if you should be able to do this is at least do some micro experiments, relatively small experiments that will show some successes.

Now, the reason I say that is that you are not going to get traction with anything until leadership experience it for themselves because you can talk the theory till the cows come home, however, it's not until you actually go through...it's literally a feeling of sometimes a little bit of discomfort because underneath all the safety differently, and I'll come back to the fact that it involves power sharing, a shift in power dynamic can have a bit of discomfort associated with it.

For some parties, that's the opposite. It's like, woohoo, finally, this is great. Someone's listening to us. But for some it means letting go a little bit of power and finding a new way to engage with people to get things done. And discomfort comes with that. What that means is that people that are going to go through that experience will need to find ways to create some...you know, it's called crikey, I can't think of the name right now.

But it's where if you take something away, but then don't give someone a platform to move to, that's not going to feel good. So, you've got to create something that's going to work for people and you've got to show them what that looks like. So, it's really challenging to lean too much on the theory, which is a little bit of tell, you've really got to show people and give them an experience that they're going to find resonates with them.

And you might find it's a bit of a trial and error process before you get to that.

- Yeah, it sounds like you need to develop trust and change a little bit, or trust that the change is thoughtful and will work and is worth, you know, whatever sacrifices people might think that they're making, such as power levels, right?

- Yeah. At face value, you see, it doesn't seem like, you know, an inviting prospect, does it? You know, it's why would you? Why would you give something away? And especially when there's no understanding of what you're going to get in return. And it comes back to...if we've brought back to the indigenous principles, if you enhance another person's manner, it will inevitably enhance yours too.

But you have to let go first. And that's a difficult thing to do. What, of course, has happened too is that people tend to have been rewarded over a period of time for the sorts of behavior that develop power and potentially control. And that's not to say that people all of a sudden, you know, sociopathic characters desperately seeking power.

Not at all. What it is is that the way that society and European methods of doing things works is that, you know, we have a competitive environment that we work within and in order to, you know, develop success in life, what we do is we win and the construct that we've been using is a little bit of win-lose. And when we shift over to a new view paradigm, it's actually win-win.

So, you will still win, but others will win with you. And when you experience that, feels good and you see the benefits and it becomes a no-brainer. So that's getting people who might be ready to that next stage is about giving them the awareness of that. And once you've given your leadership an awareness that that's the ballpark that you're now playing in, then you need to move on to giving them an understanding of how new view safety actually works.

And what you're talking about there is showing them an understanding of how teams are creating capacity and working within the capacity that you're giving them and how they're handling demands and whether they're resilient or not. When you start to understand that that's how your teams are actually creating safe outcomes or the lack of, and that that's what you need to support, you know, then you're really onto a winner.

And it matches very nicely with innovation techniques where you start out with micro experiments, then trials, then pilots, which is scaling up again, and then you start to embed. And then beyond that, of course, what you need to do is build sustainability. So, there's really quite a process to go through. The challenge to go with that too is that, generally speaking, it's a lot slower than you might think.

When I left the aerospace industry, which was very, very fast-paced, very agile, and we implemented safety differently there very, very quickly, I thought that the whole world was going to go with me at that pace. But what I've tended to find is that because you are doing slightly slowly evolving from command and control styles of doing things, it needs to be slow.

And that's because it needs to be safe and everyone needs to come on the journey. So, it does take time, you know, it's really a three to five-year journey for an organization to begin and then start to actually get really good results.

- I think that's a really good thing to mention to safety professionals who are enthusiastic and want to jump in there right away. And I've heard this before too, if you don't kind of build that foundation, then you won't be as successful. I wanted to ask, you mentioned freedom within a framework. What does that mean...what does that concept mean?

- Freedom within a framework, that's one of my favs. Look, it depends on the context yet again, but generally speaking, what you're talking about there is that you are giving your team more autonomy, more authority, and more agency. So that's the freedom part. And the framework, obviously, is that you provide a framework that they still need to work within, but really how that term is intended is that you would still create boundaries around that.

So, you're stepping into more co-design with your team. So, you could start with something really small. So, for instance, you've got, I know a lot of organizations in Australasia use these golden rules and life-saving rules. And when you unpack that with a team, say, for instance, if you did a learning team on those golden rules, you'd find that some of them actually work really quite well and are effective and useful and helpful, and some perhaps aren't.

And so this is where you can start to give freedom within a framework, which is to either ask your team to rebuild those or perhaps to...if the team says, look, some of them work some of the time or most of the time and we need to be able to adapt to the conditions that we've got, and at times literally break them. You know, you're giving the team the freedom to be able to make those decisions and those calls as they work and trusting them to do that in a responsible manner.

I mean, certainly what I've found over the years that the minute you give a team responsibility, they step up to that simply because they're just overjoyed almost to be able to self-determine in that sense. One of the things that often comes up as an objection to that is how you handle accountability. Because obviously, there will sometimes be a situation where something goes wrong and perhaps someone did something unwise and, you know, there's a question of an issue around accountability.

And there's a lot of talk about forward-looking accountability, which is to say, hey, this happened, but what is it that we need as a team to be able to ensure this doesn't happen again as opposed to blame, shame, punishment. However, I really like to draw on the thinking around peer-to-peer accountability.

And here's a bit of a plug for anyone that's interested in New Zealand and what we are about. If you follow rugby, which is the kind of national sport, and our rugby team, which is called the All Blacks who usually dominate the international rugby tournaments, not that I'm a rugby fan per se, but they're very well-respected for a lot of the philosophies that they use to build their performance.

And one of those is they lean heavily on, they call it their "no dickheads" policy, which is cheeky and fun, but that's actually based on peer-to-peer accountability. And when something goes wrong, not so much whether they make a mistake on the field, but you know, perhaps a team member lets the team down with some shenanigans in the weekend when they were drunks or, you know, things that really they need to be accountable for, what is happens is rather than management disciplining them and putting them through a process like that, what they do is they get the team together, their peers literally to have a conversation.

And what goes on behind closed doors is obviously not shared, but the intention there is for the team themselves to say, hey, mate, you've let us down and that affects us. And when you build your accountability around the pure fact that people and teams often care very much about each other and would hate to think that they're potentially harming or letting the teammates down, that's far more effective than the command and control approaches that we use most of the time currently.

- That brings to mind for me in Canada, indigenous restorative justice, which is an alternate way of dealing with crime, which is essentially what you say is, you know, accountability where you speak with the people who have been hurt and together you come up with what's going to happen to restore justice.

- That's right. And that's fantastic how effective those approaches are as well. I mean, it can be a little bit more lengthy, but you get a far better result most of the time.

- I would think so.

- Sorry.

- Oh, I was just going to say, and it has its detractors. People who think that...who don't want to change from sort of a traditional, again, command-and-control type of approach, punishment approach in this case.

- Yeah. And, of course, the main challenge with this new view safety movement at the moment is the fact that a structure of our regulators and the law and business still works on that punishment approach. So, here we are teaching, you know, new approaches that don't really fit into the current structure and systems that we've got.

And that's the responsibility I think as safety professionals and as businesses to lead from the front with that in terms of making change. I'm currently working on a project that's a real privilege. I've got funding from our regulator, WorkSafe New Zealand, to run a project on what it would mean to be more transparent in businesses.

And literally next week, so it's very much on my mind, we are doing a discovery session with the board, discovery session with management, and a discovery session with the work teams and looking at how people are working together, how they're communicating, how decisions are made, how policy and practice influences, you know, how they work together.

And asking the question of, are there ways in which transparency could...or more transparency improve the way everyone's connecting and relating together? And it'll be interesting what they come out with obviously. And it's based on the understanding of the fact that this constant use of punishment in order to control businesses doesn't entirely fit with this new way that we're working together now.

And we need to ask a question of what does ethical responsibility look like? And one pillar there is to have improved transparency. And I'm so confident that as a group, they're going to be able to answer that question. So, watch this space, it'll be one of the chapters in my book.

- That'll be fascinating. I wanted to touch back on something that you mentioned earlier about when you were in the innovation industry. I think that this is connected. You talk about an agile learning team framework, and I'm going to guess that agile is coming from...is something that's used frequently in the innovation industry. So, how does that apply here?

Like, what does that kind of framework look like?

- Great. Yeah. So, my experience in the aerospace industry, I worked for an organization called Rocket Lab, and we are actually an American company. It started and founded in New Zealand and most of the operations are based in New Zealand, most of the rockets are launched from here, but it's now an American-owned company. We have a launch range in Wallops in Virginia as well.

What we did there is rather than use the...I call it quite clunky, learning team approach to getting going on new safety differently journey, we used self-directed work teams instead. And that was very effective at supporting the agility of the organization and the needs of, you know, a fast-paced pre-production phase that we were in.

And what you do in a situation like that, and I'll bring it back in a moment to that learning team framework is you basically ensure that a lot of the decision-making is being handled at the team level. You're ensuring you've got processes by which they can resource themselves and you might have team leaders who help support that process, but it might be team-based puzzles and business cases which facilitate it.

But it means that they can be quite agile at making safety decisions and getting well-resourced as required. Because at the moment, most organizations have created a whole function around delivering safety management. And let's face it, that in and of itself is relatively bureaucratic and at times not particularly agile. So, if you were to take those principles and apply it to a learning team's framework, what that means is that rather than building your approach based on sort of a lot of workshops, what you're doing is you're building into the current team processes that you've got the learning and better questions and driving weak signals through your systems...within the current work systems as they are.

And that's a bit of a challenge because what that means is you are less able to drive and lead it directly as a safety team and you have to really build the capability into your work teams and your managers to enable that. But once you start to get to that, you really start to get the goal coming through that way.

And I really encourage people to start to think in those terms. You probably would have to first off run sort of trials and pilots based on the real sort of longer winded workshop style. And, of course, it's an obvious point to say that even if you had went straight right through to a more agile learning framework and then went right through to self-directed work teams, you would still need to obviously have workshops based on particular discreet problems that needed to be solved where you get a group together to solve it collectively and have that facilitated, or ultimately have the team sort of self-facilitate.

But that's probably the direction that you want to head because what we tend to see is that the learning teams are programs which are amazing by the way and definitely the place to start. Can fall off the rails a little bit if the champions that are driving them perhaps shift on from the company or, you know, you go through a very busy time, and COVID, of course, is a classic example where everyone's so under the pump that they can't do workshops.

If you are really leaning on those tools and methods to build new view approach, then you'll find that it won't embed and sustain quite as successfully.

- So, building on that, what does safety leadership look like? And you've actually answered this second question a little bit, but what are the best ways to foster it within an organization?

- Yes, absolutely. What you need to do is you need to...I mean, if you're a safety lead driving new view safety through, you'll find that some leaders will head towards what we call host leadership rather than hero style quite naturally. And it's quite a nifty little term. I wouldn't use this with anyone that I was working with because it sounds terrible.

But what you're saying there is that the hero style is that the manager or leader who's very used to having the best answers and has probably been rewarded for that and gained their position as a result, which is great because they're amazing people but learning to be a host, which is creating an environment by which people can make their own decisions and furthermore make their own mistakes because the challenge with it, of course, is that you've got to step back and allow others to stuff it up and learn.

And, you know, it's a bit of a long game in that sense. And the current reward systems in our organizations with KPIs and short-term results don't tend to lead us in that direction. So, we have to be quite conscious and intentional about heading towards host leadership. What I tend to find is that some managers and leaders and supervisors and so on will gravitate towards that approach naturally.

It might be their preferred method and style anyway, but others will find that...they'll step back and observe a way while on that. And oftentimes watching others operate within that and learning together will be an effective method. And some, in fact, will still will...I don't want to use the word struggle because the reality is that everyone has their key strengths we want to play to those.

So, what I suggest is that if you are coaching someone who has a little bit of resistance and doesn't grip onto the ideas immediately, what you can do there is you can help them be part of solving the problems that you're dealing with because they're probably great problem-solvers. So, you're saying, hey, look, you know, we really want to say trial handing over the management and review of procedures to our teams, which basically means let go and, you know, your expertise isn't valued anymore.

What instead you would do is say, hey, we are really interested in having a go at this. Would you help design how that could work? And perhaps you can come up with the initial plan for how that could work and then we could adapt it from there. And what that means is you're building on the strengths and the skills of the people that you're working with, which, you know, is the new view approach in and of itself. So, you know, there's a lot to be learned and this is, you know, one-minute version of a much larger topic.

- Well, yes, unfortunately, every question is always a much larger topic. Going back to your early days with new view, is there anything that you would've done differently if you knew then what you know now, or is it all just kind of part of the learning process?

- That's a cool question. I'm nearly 50 and you don't get to be 50 without being able to look back on your life and think, there are so many ways I could have done everything better, right? I mean, that's part of the package. And I think I wouldn't do anything different from the perspective that I think the most important thing with new view is to, I'm a bit cheeky, I say put your big girl knickers on and you go for it.

And, you know, if you're really up for a few challenges, you put your skates on as well. You know, you just jump in, have a good go and, you know, ubiquitously fail forward and failing forward is painful. And especially in the early days of failing forward, that's really painful and you're going to make a spectacular show of yourself at points here and there and, you know, it's the courage to follow through and keep on going when that happens.

That I wouldn't change because you know, they were certainly the days when I went through that process. And I think everyone does need to go through, although you can learn from others and make it slightly less painful. But, you know, the things that I would change is I think leaning against, you know, collaborating with others so that you're learning together and sharing the load of the failing forward.

Definitely listening to, you know, a wide variety of thinking so that you've got lots of different ideas to draw from. And the other thing too, and this is not a silver bullet, in organizations, it's a challenge because we are so used to being different to hierarchy and authority, but to actually sit the occasional person down and have a real heart to heart and, you know, be prepared to be vulnerable yourself, put your heart on your sleeve and really encourage and challenge people to try new things and to step into new paradigms because I think there will be resistance out there.

But, you know, everyone's human and at the end of the day, everyone just wants to do well and to succeed. And if you draw on that, which is inherent and all, then, you know, you're likely to get opportunities, which might, you know, be befuddling at first. So, I can only offer encouragement to anyone that's either partway through the journey or just getting started that it's a lot of fun, it's exciting, and there are challenges along the way that's absolutely guaranteed.

But in a sense, it's the making of you. You know, you get to become a better person in the process and, you know, it's like being in the boxing ring, you're having a good go and you're definitely going to learn some stuff. So, go for it.

- Knickers and skates. Got it.

- Yeah, that's the answer. Bright and colored computer. Actually, I have to say that I've always drawn on the Wonder Woman avatar. I mean, she's got some bright knickers, right?

- Right. And she's got...they're not skates, but she's got tall boots for sure. And they're also bright. We're coming up on time. There's a few questions that I like to ask all my guests. This one is the University of Moni. Where would you focus soft skill training for tomorrow's safety professionals if you were to develop some kind of curriculum?

- Oh, that's a mint question. In New Zealand, when we say mint, which means, I don't know if anyone else uses that word, but it means that's, you know, like minting a coin. It's just an incredible question. Look, when I first stepped into Rocket Lab and I was working with a large group of obviously mainly men, and I'm not an engineer, and people said to me, "Well, crikey, how did you get that job because your engineering knowledge is not, you know, up to that standard?"

But I said, "Look, what we need in this environment is a little bit more of the soft skills." Look, hey, soft skills is, you know, all the classic stuff like empathy, listening, and I think dialogic approaches. So, if it's something that's not your natural style, and that's absolutely fine, what I recommend is that you really have a good read around dialogic approaches.

And what that means is rather than diagnostic, it's dialogic meaning that it's conversation-based. So, what you're doing there is you are learning to have conversations through to better ways of thinking about things. Of course, it's time-consuming. We exist in a world where we need an answer and we need to fix problems quickly.

And sometimes that is the best approach. But if you build a relationship with someone and sit down and take the time to have conversations with them, meaningful ones, I mean, not just about social things, but, you know, how they're thinking about things, what ideas they've got, collaborating on different approaches, then slowly you'll unpack better ways of working together.

And it's about trusting a process like that. If you do a bit of reading around that, I'm sure you'll come up with some different bits and pieces that you want to try. So, I highly encourage that.

- This is a little bit similar to a question that I just asked, but we can maybe make it a little more personal if you're comfortable with that, which is, if you could go back in time to the beginning of your safety career and you could give one piece of advice to your younger self, what do you think that would be?

- Well, I think this is common to women specifically. I mean, it's not only, that's a generalization, but as women in the safety industry, I think we sometimes deal with a little bit of imposter syndrome, perhaps sometimes we are not quite as technical and perhaps we work in a male-dominated industry. But just to believe in yourself and know that the specific skill set that you bring to the team is really important.

And even if you're not necessarily getting instant, what's the word, feedback, just trust that if you're not getting feedback, that you're actually doing a great job and keep going, keep learning, keep drawing on wisdom of others, and put together a vision for yourself and just go for it.

- That's excellent advice. Outside your book, how can our listeners learn more about some of the topics in our discussion today? Are there particular resources that you'd like to point people towards?

- Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's a privilege to be writing a book and it will certainly be getting published next year. And I'm in the final stages now. There are a lot of good books out there and I think it's important to read widely on what the academics are teaching first and foremost. I also really believe that reading and getting an understanding beyond safety science is really important too.

You know, really look into sports psychology, look into the social sciences, look into neuroscience, look into quantum physics. You know, I think we tend to say professionals get a little bit bogged down in, you know, our profession and the needs of our profession, which is busy and demanding on a good day, but, you know, expand your horizons and you'll be able to bring some of that back into the work that you do with people.

So, yeah, really encourage that too.

- So, where can our listeners find you on the web, and by extension, if they're excited about your book, where should they be looking?

- Oh, that's kind of you. If anyone's interested in following me, just send me a connection on LinkedIn. So, just Moni, M-O-N-I, and my surname is Hogg. Good Welch name, H-O-G-G. And yeah, I'll accept your LinkedIn, and then as I'm putting my book out, I'll be obviously publishing it through LinkedIn and so on.

And be great to be connected. Yeah.

- Awesome. Thank you. Well, that's all the time we have for today. Thanks for joining us, and thanks so much to you, Moni, for lending us your time and your ideas.

- Well, thanks, Mary. Thanks so much. It's been a real privilege to connect and chat, and I wish everyone all the best on their journeys forward. Thanks.

- Lastly, I'd like to thank the "Safety Labs by Slice" team for all the great work behind the scenes and say bye for now. Safety Labs is created by Slice, the only safety knife on the market with a finger-friendly blade. Find us at sliceproducts.com. Until next time, stay safe.