Embracing New Approaches to Workplace Safety

In this episode, Mary Conquest speaks with Stephen Scott, a Human and Organizational Performance  (HOP) consultant and speaker who spent three decades at Alcoa, the aluminum giant that famously decided to focus on safety over profits.

Stephen had a realization that pursuing zero incidents was actually harming workplace safety. He argues this approach encourages organizations to cover up mistakes and focus too much on metrics. Furthermore, it actively discouraged the workforce from raising safety events, and EHS professionals missed out on crucial feedback to create safer workplaces.

After a series of fatalities, Stephen knew that something had to change. He tells the story of how HOP and then Critical Risk Management (CRM) were slowly embedded into Alcoa.

Once the organization had embraced principles such as error is normal, people make mistakes and blame fixes nothing, the safety culture started to improve. They then shifted focus from trying to prevent all the high-frequency, low-consequence events to managing critical risks that could lead to serious injuries or fatalities.

It wasn’t a straightforward journey, but Stephen shares real-life stories and practical guidance to help safety professionals embrace new approaches to workplace safety.

- [Mary] Hi there, welcome to "Safety Labs by Slice." The story of Alcoa's turnaround under CEO Paul O'Neill is the stuff of legend.

In 1987, Mr. O'Neill, a virtual unknown on Wall Street, was a surprise choice for chairman and CEO. In his first address to Alcoa's nervous investors, he scared the pants off them by starting his speech with, "I want to talk to you about worker safety." Instead of focusing on share value, cost savings, or global markets, he explained his plan to make Alcoa the safest company in the United States by aiming for zero injuries.

This singular focus changed everything about how people worked at Alcoa, and a year later, profits hit record highs. When O'Neill retired 13 years later, annual net income had increased fivefold. Now, this story is a safety professional's dream come true, but that's only one chapter in Alcoa's story. The mantra of zero injuries only took the company so far.

And today's guest is here to tell us the story of the years that followed. Steve Scott worked for global mining and metals giant, Alcoa, for over 30 years. He moved through the ranks from general factory worker to supervisor and cast house superintendent. In 2008, Steve assumed the role of continuous improvement manager at Alcoa's U.S. primary products business, supporting eight aluminum smelters and a refinery.

For more than 10 years, Steve was involved in leading HOP implementation at Alcoa. He spent his last four years there as the director of human performance and continuous improvement, charged with embedding HOP and critical risk management across all of the company's sites globally. He primarily focused on serious injury and fatality prevention.

In 2019, Steve retired from Alcoa and started work as an independent consultant. He now helps other organizations put HOP, New View, and critical risk management principles to work. He aims to engage employees in serious injury and fatality reduction all while improving overall business performance.

Steve joins me from Charleston, West Virginia. Welcome.

- [Steve] Glad to be here. Thanks for asking.

- So, is there anything I missed in my little origin story of Alcoa's safety focus?

- No, that was a really good summary of where it all began with Paul O'Neill.

- Okay, okay. So, what was it like being a worker there in the years before you started doing continuous improvement? How did the safety policies kind of permeate the workplace?

- Yeah. So, probably one of the best ways I can set this up is, when I started, I started in 1989 at a smelter called Eastalco in Frederick, Maryland. And at the time, that smelter was owned by a company called Alumax. And it was later acquired by Alcoa.

And the first thing we heard when Alcoa started bringing people to our smelter to integrate it into the Alcoa fold was, "You guys are terrible at safety." We heard it over and over and over again. "Your safety record's horrible, your safety systems are terrible, your performance is bad. We don't put up with that in Alcoa."

So, we got this, you know, immediate dunk into the Alcoa safety philosophy. And Alcoa really was a company that had safety at its foremost value, that was the first thing you heard from people when they introduced you, when they started talking about Alcoa, like I said, the first thing that hit us when we were integrated into Alcoa.

And it really was at the forefront of everything they did. So, what we started seeing on my end, because, at that time, I was a brand new first-line supervisor in the cast house, so, what we started seeing on my end was every safety incident was a really bad negative event.

Now, you probably think, "Well, of course, it was a negative event," but, I mean, we were issuing discipline, we were reprimanding people, we were counseling people. And that behavior, I was rewarded for doing that, you know, it was reinforced on me that that's how you hold people accountable, that's how, you know, we get to keep this performance going.

Whenever there was an event that rose to the level of an OSHA recordable or a lost workday, it generated more scrutiny. So, what we found ourselves doing, you know, and talking to people with other companies, this is really, really common, we found ourselves trying to figure out any way we possibly could to avoid classifying something as a recordable or a lost workday.

Case management was the term everybody used because that number got so much scrutiny, it was part of our performance objectives. It was, you know, published all over the place, and anybody that wanted to know anything about that plant, that was one of the things that they saw. So, you know, while we felt like we were doing all the right things to try to manage safety, what we found was we were actively discouraging people from telling us about safety events.

Until we had an event that was too big to hide, a lost workday case or a recordable where someone actually needed medical treatment. So, you know, over time, we really started to see that we were actively discouraging people from telling us stuff that might have allowed us to learn and improve and put better controls in place to prevent the next bad thing from happening.

But that's kind of the trap we got caught up in with this drive for zero. It was really clear that zero was good and anything else was bad. And so, zero was the bar that we used to determine success or failure, good or bad, reward or punishment. And when that's the case, people just quit telling you things.

It's almost a human nature.

- This focus on zero was so strong even before you were involved, it was, as you've said, part of the DNA of the company. How hard was it to step back and question and say, "Okay, there's something wrong here?" Like, there was clearly something wrong, but how did you figure out that it was something as fundamental as what had been part of the way Alcoa worked for so long?

- When I first came into Alcoa, when I was still working at a plant, I was in operations, right? And then I was in a continuous-improvement role and, eventually, I kind of got pulled into the safety, the corporate safety department. And one of the things we started seeing was we would go to a plant and what we saw at the plant didn't reconcile with the plant safety performance.

So, we would see and hear things that worried us but we would look at the plant safety performance and everything looked great. And everybody does this, right, every corporation. One of the checks you use is you look at the plant safety performance and you compare it with their workers comp expenditures. Because workers are not going to avoid a comp claim if they're off work, it's how they pay their bills.

And so, that was one of the things we started seeing, was we saw some of those anomalies where I've got a plant that's, you know, got really good lagging indicators, low loss-workday rate, low TRIR, but they're spending a lot of money on workers comp, you know, something's out of the ordinary there.

And then we start seeing...when we had a significant event and we'd go in to talk to people, we'd hear things like, "Well, you know, that almost happened a year ago," or, "Oh, I can remember when that happened back when..." And we go look through the records and we can't find any record of it ever having been reported. And so, you know, the easy thing is to look at that and say, "Well, these are..."

I don't want to use the term bad people, but, "These are people who are not doing what they're supposed to be doing." When the reality was these were people that were being incentivized to tell us what we wanted to hear. If my paycheck, my bonus, and, you know, the higher you get in the company, the bigger percentage of your annual pay is that variable comp, and when my variable comp is dependent on that number, I'll do everything I can to influence that number.

And that's just human nature. So, that's what we started seeing. And we started thinking about how to manage that. And it's a really tough one because this was so ingrained into the DNA of Alcoa that those low numbers were...you know, that that was how we managed things. I think I give a lot of credit to my boss at the time, was Laurie Shelby, who now works with Tesla.

Laurie got some help when OSHA changed their rules to, basically, make it really hard to incentivize lagging indicators. So, Laurie went to our board of directors and our CEO and executive lead team and convinced them, "Okay, we need to take those lagging indicators out of everyone's performance objectives."

And she succeeded. And I want to say the year was about 2017, was the first time that no salaried employee in Alcoa had a performance objective related to DART rate or lost workday rate or total recordable rate. And that sent a really strong signal to the organization that, "Hey, you know, you don't have to manage that number. What we want you to do is keep people safe, not manage that number."

And that was a big change point in Alcoa.

- Yeah, I would think so. At this point, you're looking for fresh ideas, you know what's not working. Tell me about how human and organizational performance kind of came onto your radar and started being implemented.

- That all really started in about 2007. The guy who was the corporate safety director at the time was a guy named Jeff Shockey. And Jeff met some people that were involved with human and organizational performance and thought this was the next great thing to continue our safety journey. We're still focused on zero, right, but this was a way to get us closer and closer to there.

So, Jeff brought in a guy named Rob Fisher, who still runs a company called Fisher Improvement Technologies, he still does a lot of work with HOP and organizations. And we started trialing it at one of our big Alcoa plants in Davenport, Iowa. And it kind of picked up from there, got across the company, but again, it was still focused on preventing bad things from happening, right?

We focused a lot of attention on identifying error-likely situations and being able to predict when we have a higher than normal likelihood of error and what are some of the tools we can use to reduce our error rate? So, it was really heavily focused on preventing bad stuff from occurring.

Which is great, right, it's a really good thing to focus on. So, we were about eight or nine years into this HOP journey and we had hit some really good safety milestones. For the first time in Alcoa's history, we went a calendar year without a fatality.

It had never happened in the history of Alcoa. We got that number out to about...I think the number was 887 days without a fatality. And we were feeling really good about ourselves. And then we hit a four-year period where we had eight fatalities. And as each one happened, we kind of looked at it as an anomaly, as, you know, a black-swan event.

But after, you know, the second, third, fourth, you can't keep looking at it like that, right? And so, we start going back. And, you know, I think it was Laurie, at the time, Laurie Shelby, at the time, started combing through the data and during those 887 days where we were fatality-free, we had some really, really scary events happen where we were just lucky no one was killed.

And then we started running out of luck because, you know, luck's a terrible strategy for fatality prevention. So, when you get in a position like that, you have two choices. You can keep doing the same stuff harder or you can do something different. And we made the decision that what we were doing, doing the same stuff harder, wasn't getting us where we needed to be.

So, what do we need to do different? We had a lot of contacts, Alcoa had a lot of contacts in Western Australia with other big mining companies, and in the mining business, especially with Rio Tinto, they were big on this process called critical risk management. Which, basically, says, "What are the hazards that are going to kill people? What are the critical controls that are going to keep them from dying when that event occurs? And how do we manage them effectively?"

And so, this really forces you to shift your thinking. We were thinking we could prevent every bad thing from happening, critical risk management says, "Let's just assume the bad thing is going to happen, and how do we protect people when it does?"

- Going back just a little bit, it's interesting to me, I had thought that the HOP stuff came after the zero, like, that the zero-injury focus had stopped and then moved into HOP. So, obviously, this zero-injury focus and HOP can coincide.

- Oh, yes.

- And it did help you to a certain degree.

- Yes.

- But then, in the end, yeah, you had to move to this critical risk management.

- Right, and almost everyone that practices HOP today will tell you that the target of zero is a self-defeating goal, right, that focus on zero. And there's lots of data to back that up. But we were so...I don't know what the word is, we were so focused on that idea of zero, it was such a thing with Alcoa that, you know, it almost felt immoral to let it go, you know?

- The word blasphemous came to mind when you were talking about Laurie Shelby talking to the higher-ups trying to convince them. I imagine that, at first, it sounded like blasphemy to them.

- Yeah. And had we not been going through that experience with that string of fatalities, that's the kind of talk that would've gotten somebody fired. I don't say that figuratively. When we first started introducing critical risk management to operations people, I went to almost all of the plants in Alcoa probably over the course of the first year and just gave an informal presentation to plant leadership about what critical risk management is.

And I started off with this idea that focusing on zero is not working and we need to plan for failures to occur and be prepared to protect people when they do. And when I would get ready to cue that slide up, I would say, "Okay, this next one, this is the slide that would've gotten me fired a year ago."

And then I would say that. And, you know, people in operations, you could just see a big sigh of relief when you said that because they know that not every accident is preventable. That's why they're called accidents, right? So, telling them that we have to assume, we have to plan for bad things to occur, our focus needs to be on, how do we protect people when they do?

And that just seems like such a much more realistic approach than telling people, "Zero's achievable, every accident is preventable. We just need to keep focusing on preventing the bad things from occurring."

- I thought you were going to say that they reacted in shock but it's interesting you said they reacted in relief because, yeah, otherwise, you're holding people to a standard of perfection really, right?

- Right. Expecting zero is expecting your people to be perfect, your process to be perfect, your equipment to run perfectly, you know, the weather to be perfect, the customer never to change their... it's expecting everything to be perfect. Which is crazy, right? And when we go back and we think about the message we sent when we started rolling out human and organizational performance, the first principle of HOP is error is normal, we all make mistakes.

Well, if you believe that, how can you believe every accident is preventable? Those two just don't go together. So, you have to get over this idea that error is something that happens to bad people, stupid people, lazy people, people that don't care enough.

Error is something that happens to all of us. We all make mistakes. We all deviate. Sometimes we'll all take shortcuts, we'll all make bad choices. Those things happen, especially in a work environment that's really dynamic and sometimes outright chaotic. So, you have to keep asking yourself, "What's the worst thing that can happen? And when it does, not if it does but when it does, what's going to keep me from being seriously injured or killed and is that enough?"

- You had a great example of that involving the crane. So, can you share that with our listeners, the crane dropping a load?

- Yeah. So, what we had to shift our thinking from, when you think about the task of picking up a heavy object with a crane, the thing that we desperately want to avoid is not dropping a crane load. The thing that we desperately want to avoid is dropping the crane load on a person. And that's a really big shift in thinking, okay?

So, it doesn't mean we don't care if we ever drop a crane load, right, we still, you know, inspect our cranes, we still train our operators, we still do pre-op inspections, we still inspect the rigging, we still do all those things, but the thing we care about the most when we're picking up a heavy object with a crane is making sure nobody's underneath the load.

Because when we drop a crane load, not if but when, when we drop a crane load, we don't want it to land on somebody. This is the same thinking that automotive engineers realized somewhere back in the 1950s, that telling people to be careful and not wreck wasn't keeping people from dying in cars, so, they started introducing seat belts and safety glass.

And then, later on, we got crumple zones and airbags and breakaway steering columns, those things aren't there to keep you from crashing, they're put into that car with 100% assumption that it will crash, how do we protect the occupants when it does? So, you know, that was kind of the switch we had to make from let's not drop a crane load to let's assume we're going to drop a crane load, how do we make sure nobody's there when we do?

- So, you're, again, managing the critical risk. And I think I've heard other people too talk about it's a shift in thinking in terms of what you're trying to prevent. So, you know, twisted ankles? Bad. Fatalities? Maybe worth more time putting in to prevent those. Not that twisted ankles are good but you know what I mean, there's a difference between those two injuries.

- That's the other problem with focusing on zero. I think it all goes back to Heinrich's Pyramid, okay? Not necessarily the intent of Heinrich's Pyramid but the way we've interpreted Heinrich's Pyramid. For years and years and years, we looked at Heinrich's Pyramid and we saw everything down at the bottom, the unsafe conditions, unsafe behaviors, first aid kit, near misses, first aid kits, and we said, "Wow, if we can shrink that, then we're not going to hit the top."

And the problem with that thinking is you can roughly break up events into two categories, high-frequency low-consequence events and low-frequency high-consequence events. So, in lots of industrial settings, the most common injuries are slips, trips, and same-level falls, they are rarely the source of serious injuries and fatalities.

But if we think about Heinrich's Pyramid, if we think about it, and that means that's the biggest number of injuries, we have to shrink that down so we won't get to the top of the pyramid, which doesn't make any sense at all. The things that cause slips, trips, and falls are not the things that cause people to have life-altering life-ending injuries.

And the corrective actions you do to prevent slips, trips, and falls, improving your walking and working surfaces and, you know, cleaning up spills and better housekeeping and things like that, better footwear, that's not going to keep the next person from being run over by a truck. So, we had to think differently about those things. And Tom Krause did the research that got everybody onto this SIF thinking, looking at serious injuries and fatalities differently than other injuries.

And Krause, in his research, said, "Only about 21% of your incidents have the credible potential to cause serious injury or death." So, all the work you do focusing on that other 79% of your incidents is good work, right? It's preventing those slip, trips, and falls, and sore backs, and twisted ankles, but it's not going to prevent the next serious injury or fatality.

They're different hazards, they're different modes of failure, there are different things involved. And so, if you're focused on zero, you're by definition going to spend an inordinate amount of energy trying to drive down that biggest chunk of incidence, which is high-frequency low-consequence events.

- Yeah, and I think the theory there is that if you shrink the whole pyramid, you'll shrink everything. But in fact, like, visually, I'm thinking what you're actually doing is switching it from a triangle to more of a rectangle, right?

- Yeah.

- You're narrowing the base but you haven't done anything for the top. So, what's the process? How did you guys integrate CRM?

- So, what we did, we started thinking about, "Where can we fit this into stuff we already do?" Instead of throwing in a whole new thing, we didn't want to go in and say, "Throw out everything you were doing and do this instead," we tried to integrate it with a lot of the things that we brought into our operations with our HOP rollout. We started a very different pre-shift toolbox meeting with the workers.

If you think about the way we originally did toolbox meetings, the supervisor came in and he read some type of safety flash that was generated by the safety department. It could be about, you know, lawn mower safety or, you know, anything. Just had to talk about something safety-related, so, he read something. And then they went and talked about what was going on today.

So, we kind of turned that around and we said, "Let's talk about what's going on today and use that discussion of the work we're getting ready to do today to identify any high-risk tasks that exist, stuff that's out of the ordinary or we've got people that are new to the job or that we've got contractors working in close proximity to us or something, let's talk about things that make this task high-risk. Maybe it's the fact that I'm really distracted because I've got a sick child at home and I didn't get much sleep last night and that makes me more likely to make errors today but let's talk about what makes that high-risk."

So, we had been doing this since early on in the HOP rollout. We've been structuring these meetings and having them. We got it to where every crew, every day, every shift began with a discussion like that. We said, "Okay, let's just..." And these were well-ingrained, they were well-received, by the most part, by the workers because they just felt more pertinent to what we were doing than reading me something about lawn mower safety, right?

So, we just added to that. When we talk about our high-risk tasks, let's talk about what are the hazards involved, what are the critical controls that we need to have in place, and how do we guarantee that they're effective? So, we just tacked that on to that discussion and it felt like a really simple change to what we were already doing.

We changed some of, like, our shop floor observation programs, instead of focusing on compliance, "Make sure everybody's following all the rules, wearing all the PPE," let's focus on what are the critical risks, what are the critical controls, are they effective? So, we tried to integrate this into things that we already had in place and working and we just kept sending the message that critical risk management is really about shrinking the focus to the things that are most impactful to preventing serious injuries and fatalities.

So, we don't have to be experts on everything, we want you to know these critical risks, these critical controls, and what effective looks like. That's the thing we're going to manage really aggressively.

- Well, it sounds to me like that is sort of a natural evolution, you fit it in with things that you were already doing. One thing that I'm curious about is I think from what you've said, that having had some of the HOP practices in place made it easier to put the critical risk management things in place. This may be an impossible question, but if you were to do it over again, would you do it in a different order or would you...it's a bit impossible because, you know, there's a lot of uncontrollable, but would you do it differently, I guess?

- No, that's a great question. The only thing I would do differently is when I talk to people today about implementing HOP, critical risk management is part of the process, this is part of the package that I want to know from day one that this is part of it, right? It took Alcoa 10 years to realize that, okay? So, that's the only thing I would do quicker.

I think the benefit of the way that we did it at Alcoa almost by accident was, by time we got to critical risk management, we had well ingrained in the organization the idea that error is normal, people make mistakes, blame fixes nothing, you know, we should look for systemic causes rather than just blame the victim or the last person that touched it. If you don't have that belief among leadership, critical risk management becomes really hard to implement.

Because you go back to preventing the event from occurring, right? Well, if everybody just did what they were supposed to, we wouldn't drop a crane load. And the other thing, one of the key parts of critical risk management is verification of critical controls in the field. You go out where the work is being done, you talk to the workers, you look at what's going on, you identify the critical controls and judge their effectiveness.

If you're still not over the blame thing, 98/99% of the time, you're going to say, "All my controls were great because I don't want to put down on paper that something wasn't great because that looks bad on me." And so I think doing it...if we did not have that foundation of human and organizational performance, it would've been really, really difficult to effectively implement critical risk management.

- Taking a bit of a shift here, you've referred to Todd Conklin saying that safety is not the absence of incidents but it's the presence of capacity. Can you explain what that means to you and why it's important?

- Yeah. So, Todd said that...the first time I saw him speak, I want to say it was in like 2014. And I remember I took a picture of the slide, I was sitting in the audience, because it made sense to me, but it didn't really click fully. In 2015, there was an incident at one of the Alcoa plants where a worker was killed doing a really super-boring routine task.

And if you'd asked anyone in Alcoa at the time, where's the next fatality going to occur, nobody would've said it was going to happen at this plant. This was a plant with a really, really good safety record, 25 years it had been around, no fatalities, really good low lagging indicators, really engaged workforce.

Not much turnover, most of them had been there a long time, they were very experienced, very engaged, good leadership. And it was just not where we thought it was going to happen. This was not a task that anyone would've said was our high-risk task today. The worker that was killed was using a crane, an overhead crane, to pick up a crucible of metal and molten aluminum and move it from one side of the cast house to a furnace where he was going to put it into a furnace.

He did this 33 to 34 times a shift and he'd been doing this job for more than 20 years. And the thing that killed him was a forklift operator doing just a boring routine job. He set something down where he was supposed to set it down and he was backing out from the load to go do something else. And he struck the crane operator who was on foot and killed him. And when I heard the details of that event, Conklin's phrase immediately clicked.

This was a plant and this was an area, and even the two people involved, there was a huge absence of incidents, right? No fatalities in the history of the plant, really low lagging indicators, neither of these people had ever been involved in any incidents before. But there was no capacity for failure in that process where that worker, standing on foot in the middle of a work area, was working in the same space as a piece of mobile equipment.

There were no defenses in place to protect that worker from that piece of mobile equipment, so, there was zero capacity for failure. And I can remember having that discussion with the person who told me about the event. I said, "This is what Conklin's talking about when he says safety's the presence of capacity. There was zero capacity for failure in this event."

- I spoke with Chris Clearfield who'd written about systems, there's another way to talk about that, being slack in a system, right, being...the capacity to fail, to me, seems like it would be slack. So, looking back on all of it now, what do you think was the hardest part of implementation for either HOP or CRM?

And how did you handle the challenge or how did your team handle the challenge?

- Yeah. I think the hardest part for HOP was you had a whole bunch of people in leadership positions. Because HOP is all about leadership, right? A lot of safety initiatives, we ask the workers to do something differently because they're the ones getting hurt, HOP is really about leadership. We had a whole bunch of people in leadership that thought the same way I did when I was working in the cast house, that when a bad event happens, you start investigating, you get to the point in the event where the worker didn't do what they were supposed to do, so, you punish the worker.

And that's the way we dealt with things for years and years and years. And like I said, I was recognized for doing that. So, changing that behavior of leadership is, everywhere I've been, the biggest challenge with HOP, is getting leaders to look at that differently, that these are not workers that woke up today and said, "Today, I'm going to go to work and do something stupid, it's going to get me killed," these are workers that are trying to do the job we pay them to do in a dynamic often chaotic work environment.

So, when something bad happens or when someone doesn't follow a rule or when someone makes a mistake, rather than beat them up for it, let's try to understand what put them in a position where they thought that was the right thing to do, and how do we make sure nobody else finds themselves in the same position?

Getting people to change that way of thinking continues to be the biggest challenge in implementing HOP. Because it's so easy to blame the victim or the last person that touched it, right? It does a lot of things for us. Number one, it absolves us, the owners of the system, the leaders of the operation. It absolves us of blame when we say, "Hey, we've got a great process, that worker didn't follow it."

It also means that we have to make changes, we have to fix things, right? We can't just say, "Let's get rid of that worker," and, you know, it'll never happen again. We have to fix things, we have to improve. So, it's really a big challenge to get people to embrace that. But once you do, especially once you get someone who's a very influential leader to embrace that change, it's amazing how fast it catches on.

Because, number one, the workers see it. The workers see us responding differently to bad things happening. They start to trust us more, they start to tell us more things, we start to hear about those events that we wouldn't have heard about before. So, we get this flood of information now that starts to give us a more accurate picture of what really goes on in the work environment.

And with that, we have opportunities to learn and improve. But getting workers to think or getting leaders to think differently about that whole thing of blame and accountability is the biggest challenge in implementing HOP.

- And do you have any advice or tips or ideas for, like, any listener who might be on this journey for persuading leadership?

- The easiest way is if you're dealing with someone that has a burning platform like Alcoa, when we went through that period with a bunch of fatalities, we had a burning platform that changed the way we dealt with serious injury and fatality prevention. Almost every time I get contacted by a new organization wanting help with HOP, they're in some type of position like this.

We've just had a series of bad events and someone recognized we need to do something differently. If you're having a really bad time with your labor, if you have a labor union that you're having a really bad time with, you're having a really bad time with employee engagement, this is something that will help. I promise you.

HOP almost always comes into an organization as a safety initiative. If it's embraced, it becomes an overall operating philosophy, right? Because we don't just learn and improve from safety events, we learn and improve from quality events and from reliability events and from just normal stuff where nothing bad happened. It just becomes a different way of responding to things.

And so, the employees lose that fear that we've ingrained in them of being punished, blamed and punished for everything, and they start being more open about telling us things that we probably don't want to hear. And so I think that's the biggest challenge, is you have to get a leader...I said earlier, HOP's all about leadership, you have to get a leader to embrace it and sponsor it.

And then you quickly have to convince the employees, "We're going to respond differently when bad things happen. We're not going to immediately focus on the victim or the last person that touched it, we're going to, instead of asking the question, why did you do that, we need to ask the question, what did we do that put you in a position where you needed to do that to get your job done?" And when you turn that around and put it on how did we fail rather than why did you fail, it's amazing the different discussion you will have.

- Yeah, I can imagine. So, you touched on this. You say that companies come to you when they've got a burning platform. Or typically that's maybe a good...

- Very often, yeah.

- Yeah, a point of inflection, a time when they're actively questioning, "Okay, something we're doing isn't working, we got to try something different." In the safety industry as a whole, do you think that there are a lot of organizations on this sort of HOP/CRM journey or do you think that safety professionals are generally still pretty skeptical about these ideas?

- Yeah. I think if you looked at industry as a whole, HOP is still a very uncommon way of managing, of leading. I think the majority of organizations out there are still led and managed by people who have those old-school beliefs about, you know, "We've got great processes and great rules and great standards, and if people would just follow them, everything would be great. So, when they don't, we should just get rid of them and bring someone else in."

I think that attitude is way too common today still. I think it's changing rapidly. And I honestly think that the current labor crunch, that almost every part of the U.S. is in right now, where we just can't get enough people to run our plants is going to accelerate that. You know, one of the things you can't do is you can't treat people badly when they're happy to leave and go somewhere else.

And there's lots of opportunities to leave and go somewhere else. So, I think this type of environment is going to make more organizations question the way they treat and interact and respond to their workers, and HOP changes that. HOP changes the way you look at your workers. You don't look at them as problems to be fixed, you look at them as resources to be, you know, tapped. These people that are doing the work, they're the experts on the work, and there's so much we could learn from them if we would just listen to them and, you know, work with them to improve things.

So, yeah. I think there's a huge opportunity to do that and lots of room to grow.

- Okay. And so, for our listeners, what's the biggest takeaway that you would like someone listening to the podcast, safety professional, if they only remember one thing from what we've talked about, what would you like that to be?

- Only one thing.

- Just, like, memorize it all.

- You can't prevent every accident, bad events are going to occur. The realistic strategy for keeping people safe is plan for the worst thing to happen and make sure you've got the right controls in place so that when it does, people aren't seriously injured or killed.

- Perfect. Great. So, I have a few questions at the end that I ask every guest. And the first one, I'm going to call this the University of Steve, so, let's say that you were put in charge of developing curriculum for tomorrow's safety professionals, for students, beyond, you know, the regulatory and PPE and the kinds of things that they need to know that are technical, what kind of sort of people skills do you think would serve them best in their future career that you could teach them?

- Being a better listener. I got to preface this with saying that I'm not a trained safety professional, right, I'm an operations guy who got dragged into the safety profession, but most rewarding thing I've ever done, I think the biggest opportunity for what I...when I see safety professionals, especially...well, it's both, it's young safety professionals just coming out of school and it's 30-year safety professionals is they kind of get pegged into this role of being the safety cop.

"I'm the person that's going around telling people to put their hard hat on or put their earplugs in," or, you know, "I'm enforcing the rules, I'm becoming the cop." And I think the thing I would advise people is the whole idea of...Edgar Schein calls it humble inquiry. Instead of thinking, "I know the answer and I'm going to tell you what to do, ask questions. Be inquisitive and listen to what they tell you."

So, instead of telling people, "Hey, wear your earplugs, hey, I see you're not wearing your earplugs, is there a problem with the hearing protection? Is it uncomfortable? Is it hard to get? Is there some issue with it, you know, that we can work together to fix?" Or, "what's the source of noise around here? Is there something we can do about it?"

So, just going, making that switch from being the safety cop to being, you know, the humble inquisitive person that asks good questions and then really listens to what people tell you.

- Yeah, I think that would do a lot for a lot of people in many industries. The other one is if you could travel back in time and go to the beginning of...I realize you said you were dragged into safety, so, you can choose whichever moment in time was the beginning of your safety, the safety portion of your career.

If you could only give younger Steve one piece of advice, what would that be?

- Yeah, I think I'd go back to when I was a superintendent in the cast house. Because I think that's at the point where I really fell into that trap of blaming and punishing the victim every time something bad happened. And I would go back in and tell young Steve, "All you're doing is encouraging people to hide stuff from you. They don't trust you, they won't tell you things, they hide things from you until it's something that's too big to hide."

And so, that whole idea of defining accountability as punishing the victim or the last person that touched it needs to go. Think of accountability as creating an environment where it's safe for people to tell me exactly what happened so that we can learn and improve from it.

- So, if listeners are interested in learning more about anything that we talked about, are there any resources that you would recommend, books, or websites, or conferences?

- Yeah, I'm a huge fan of Todd Conklin. He's funny, he's entertaining, he's also very, very smart. I just had the privilege of being around him a lot during my career, and every time I'm in the same room with him, I learn something, he says something that just makes me think differently about something.

Read anything he's ever written. Listen to his podcast, he's got a podcast called "Pre-Accident Investigations," listen to that. If you ever get a chance to see him speak, go see him speak. He's very good. Sidney Dekker is another person. He's not as entertaining as Todd, he's a little more dry and academic, but he's also wicked smart, has some really, really good thinking and teaching about accountability and how to define that and think about it differently.

- Awesome. And where can our listeners find you on the web?

- Probably the place you'll see me the most is just on LinkedIn. If you look me up on LinkedIn, Stephen Scott, it's Stephen with a PH. That's probably the place you'll find me the most. All my contact information's on my LinkedIn page. And I usually respond within a day or so to anybody that contacts me that way.

- Great. Well, unfortunately, that's all the time we have for today. So, thanks so much for joining me.

- Thanks for having me.

- Yeah, it was really good. And thanks to our listeners for tuning in. Thanks also, as always, to "The Safety Labs by Slice" team who are the epitome of continuous improvement. Bye for now.