How To Reduce Safety Clutter

In this episode, Mary Conquest speaks with Drew Rae, an Associate Professor in the Safety Science Innovation Lab at Griffith University, who co-authored a research paper named; ‘Safety clutter: the accumulation and persistence of ‘safety’ work that does not contribute to operational safety.’ We all know that excess safety procedures, documents, roles and activities cause organizational issues, so Drew helps HSE professionals understand the leading causes and key solutions.

After briefly outlining his research methods, Drew explains why safety clutter (a term he coined) exists, and we learn why adding new safety activities is much easier than removing them. He then reveals how we can identify different types of clutter, including duplication, generalization, and over-specification, and how they can be managed more effectively.

Drew describes how the word “clutter” was carefully chosen to make discussions about this workplace problem easier, and he provides great practical advice on starting conversations about decluttering. He also shares the crucial question HSE professionals can ask co-workers to identify the main pain points.

A key learning is that safety clutter is surprisingly difficult to reduce - despite apparent absurdities. Therefore, limiting new safety activities is easier than removing existing ones. This rational and insightful interview will give safety professionals many sensible decluttering solutions.

♪ [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." Have you ever had to fill out a checklist just to show you've completed all your other checklists, or been required to train people in safety procedures for jobs that they don't even do?

This kind of unnecessary safety work is something we all know happens, we all know it's absurd, and we laugh about it, but it's surprisingly difficult to change. Our guest today co-authored a research paper that identifies this kind of work as safety clutter. Today, we'll talk about different varieties of safety clutter, how and why this type of work develops, and what can be done to weed it out so you can focus on more effective safety practices.

Dr. Drew Rae is an associate professor in the Safety Science Innovation Lab at Griffith University in Queensland. He teaches courses on research methods and safety engineering, and manages the lab's research program. Drew's own research uses a mix of ethnography, field experiments, and theory-building to investigate organizational safety practices.

He's particularly interested in understanding the myths, rituals, and bad habits that surround the work of managers and safety practitioners, and how this work influences frontline operations. Drew co-hosts the "Safety of Work" podcast and is on the editorial board of the journal, "Safety Science." He co-authored the paper we'll be discussing today, which is entitled "Safety Clutter: The Accumulation and Persistence of Safety Work That Does Not Contribute to Operational Safety."

He joins us from Mount Tambourine, Australia. Welcome.

- [Dr. Rae] Thanks, Mary. Pleasure to be here.

- Okay, so before we get into the specifics, can you briefly describe the methodology of the study so that listeners can understand a bit how the authors sort of reached the conclusions they did?

- Certainly. There's always a risk when we talk about methodology, that we either try to sanitize or we get overly honest about our research methods. So, I'll try to sort of steer in middle ground. We run lots of research projects, which are examining just the normal work of people.

So, a typical project, we will have a researcher on-site for extended periods of time, months or weeks, just watching what's going on, talking to people casually on a day-to-day basis. We'll be in meetings with managers. We'll be in conversations with the halls afterwards.

We never ran a like specific safety clutter project. What this is, is an accumulation of observations from lots of those sorts of ethnographic studies. And in part just a pooling of experience from the researchers, sharing stories with each other about different projects, looking for similarities, looking for differences.

And then we went out to specifically ask some questions to test our tentative assumptions and our tentative conclusions by reflecting them back to safety practitioners and organizations to see what resonated with people and what people were more inclined to challenge so that it wasn't just our own impressions. We were making sure that this was something that was fairly stable across multiple organizations and the perceptions from multiple directions.

- It struck me as something that everyone knew but maybe couldn't put their finger on, or couldn't name, or couldn't discuss. So it's very interesting in that sense. So, in the abstract for this article, safety declutter...sorry, safety clutter is defined as, "the accumulation of safety procedures, documents, roles, and activities that are performed in the name of safety but do not contribute to the safety of operations.

Why is safety clutter more than just an annoyance? In in what ways does it potentially harm the workforce or the organization?

- That's a fair question. And this is an area where I can make some hypotheses or assertions, but I want to be clear that this is probably where we've got least evidence. We know that it is annoying, proving that it's actively harmful is quite hard to do and possibly unethical to conduct.

So, we think that it probably affects over several areas. We think that there is probably a strong link between clutter and disengagement. The evidence of that idea is fairly anecdotal, but a lot of the negative name that safety gets when people talk about, you know, elephant safety and when they complain about safety, when they say that safety is a waste of time, almost inevitably what they're talking about are activities that we would put squarely into the basket of safety clutter.

So, if you're looking for worker engagement, positive thoughts about safety, you think that sort of thing is important in your organization, then definitely clutter has something to do with it. There's also just the opportunity cost. Safety takes time and it takes an amazing amount of time. It particularly detracts from people that we really want to have discretionary time.

So, supervisors and safety practitioners are the people who have most safety clutter. And in extreme cases, you have supervisors who spend every afternoon, so they basically go off the floor at midday and spend the rest of the afternoon on paperwork ready for the next day.

So, their role as a supervisor has shifted from looking after people to looking after the paperwork. And every time we complain about lack of adequate supervision or the accident wouldn't have happened if the supervisor had been...this is directly attributable to the supervisor having a lot of their time stolen by activities that many of which would fall into the basket of safety clutter. Sort of third problem that we have is a lack of flexibility within the organization.

So, one of the things that we are increasingly recognizing is important for safety is resilience and adaptability. So, the ability of the organization to respond to changing needs, changing circumstances, new situations, new clients.

And the more we have an administrative burden of paperwork and procedures and checklists as part of the way we manage safety, the harder it is to make those flexible changes in order to do the adaptation. Often the reason why you can't do something in an organization comes down to because you haven't filled out the appropriate paperwork or because you needed a particular approval that takes time to get.

So, the more we rely on systems and paperwork for our safety, the less flexible we are about our operations. And there are times when that has a cost for safety.

- The other thing is that there's sort of a drive in this administrivia to account for every possible context, situation, outcome, condition that just isn't possible. Talking about flexibility, right? It's kind of impossible to create a procedure for every possible situation that could occur, right? So, it makes sense to be encouraging flexibility in people's thinking and understanding.

- Yes. There's an important word you used just there, the need to account for every activity. And this is something that we might come back to later in this conversation is the relation between accounting in a just colloquial sense and accounting in an organizational sense.

That this is one of the drivers of safety clutter is some things don't happen or don't matter unless there is an administrative record that can be counted.

- So, in the paper, you've identified important context in what you call asymmetries. So, I understand those to be relevant truths or conditions of safety work as a whole. Was that accurate?

- Yes. And this is something that we struggled with in doing the research is the more we tried to explain why safety clutter exists, the more it seemed that some things that we actually think of usually as quite positive for safety are also directly linked to creating this clutter. So, there's a sense in which clutter may be both universal and inevitable.

Even attempts to declutter can create clutter, which as a researcher, I'm allowed to find fun and interesting, but in organizations can be incredibly frustrating.

- I can imagine. Yeah, that was one of the questions before I started reading the article that I thought is that, you know, no one intends to put clutter in the way...it comes from good intentions. But anyway, as we go through some of the reasons or possible reasons you've identified for a safety clutter, I think that we'll get more into that.

So, the first asymmetry is, I'm quoting here, "It's easier to add or expand safety work than to remove or reduce safety work." So, I'll just ask, why is that? Realizing that it's a huge answer.

- So, we could sort of split this up into a few different types of ways it's easier. And one of the most simple ones is just opportunities. There are lots of activities we do in organizations that create paperwork for other people in perpetuity. One of the things that I have asserted before that's not technically true is that you never have an accident report that recommends that we do less safety as one of its recommendations.

Although there is actually an exception. There's quite a famous report, the lord hidden report into the Clapham Junction accident actually calls out safety clutter. And this is decades ago, the Clapham Junction Accident. He calls out the accumulation of railway rules over time as one of the causes of the accident. But that's very rare that someone gets to the end of an investigation and says, you know, this accident was caused cause you do too much safety.

Do a bit less and you'll be doing better. We never have an audit, and the auditor that comes back and says, I've ticked too many boxes. In order to close out the audit, I need you to remove a little bit of the things you're complying with. So, there's lots of activities we do that then generate this need for creation of further paperwork in future. There are very few activities we do, except for explicit red tape production exercises, that involve the deliberate removal of things from our organization.

But the asymmetry sort of goes deeper than that because it's psychological as well that we feel bad and we feel we are taking a risk when we remove something that is there in the name of safety, even if we have for years complained about it. And this is what first got me interested in clutter was my encounter with an activity that's often known as take 5s.

And the very first time I heard about a take 5 was someone complaining about it. And what struck me is the person complaining was the general manager for safety. And I just couldn't understand how is the general manager for safety complaining over something that surely he has control over, but an activity that he could have introduced on a whim and just said, hey, everyone, tomorrow we are doing this activity, would come into the organization totally within his control.

No one would quibble. For him to remove it requires deep angst for him, requires approval from the board, requires him to provide evidence that it is not working, as opposed to putting it in with no evidence that it would work. This, I think, is the real asymmetry is that we feel so bad and we require so much evidence to remove safety activities because we are afraid of we remove it, something bad happens.

We'll be blamed for not doing enough. Not doing everything that we could. And one of the things we were trying to fight back against writing this paper is the assumption that the safest thing is always to do more, because we believe quite strongly that you can make yourself safer sometimes by giving yourself back the time and using that time for things that are more appropriate.

You know, if you are doing two separate inductions every day, sort of like one talk that's with the client and then the team goes away and they have another talk before they start, each one of those taking half an hour, that extra half hour is not adding safety, but it is making everyone just rush a little bit more, cut a few corners, be slightly more reluctant at the end of the day to finish the job before it gets dark.

So, yes, we can make things safer by taking away, as well as safer by adding on. And if we could just shift that thinking a little bit, I think that would help a lot with clutter.

- It mentions in the article the burden of proof shifting from needing to prove that something will be effective, as opposed to needing to prove that it's not effective in order to reduce it, which is interesting. So, the second asymmetry is along the same lines. It's that, quote, "Many regular or ad hoc events trigger the addition or expansion of safety work, but there are relatively few opportunities to reduce safety work."

And I think that speaks to the human psychology. When something bad happens, we want to prove to ourselves that we're working towards preventing it in the future.

- Yeah. I think it might even be simpler than that. That when we have a task in front of us, we want to contribute to it. So, if you have a supervisor produces a report, they don't want to produce a report without recommendations. But they then give it to the manager. The manager doesn't want to just do anything and contribute nothing, so they might add something or make a comment.

And if it goes up a level above, that person doesn't want to be seen to be not helping. They want to do something. They want to add something. They want to introduce some ideas. So, it's just naturally human to want to contribute and to take positive action. Doing nothing makes us often feel lazy. Who has sat in a job interview and said, okay, I'm coming in as safety manager, what are you going to do for the first six months?

I think I'll just sit back and relax. I think people suffer from change fatigue. So, my plan for the first six months is to let things go. Business as usual. Let people adjust. We want to act. We want to prove ourselves, we want to show our value, particularly in areas like safety that everyone ultimately does have a real emotional connection to.

- Yeah, that's a bit the cult of productivity, I think, that underpins a lot of work life. But that's a big rabbit hole and I won't go down that right now. So, the article mentions some underlying causes of the asymmetries. And we've talked about a few, but I'll mention them. So, one is responses to accidents, a need to demonstrate to others that we're managing safety.

This is one that I'm really interested in, the separation and professionalization of the safety role. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

- Sure. So, my co-author on this paper was Dr. David Provan. David did his PhD looking specifically at safety professionals. How they think, how they work, what sorts of things that they have discretion over where different views of safety might influence their work, and what sorts of things they have no control over because they're just serving the needs of management.

And his reason for doing that is that he has noticed over his career, and there are statistics that back this up, that the idea of the dedicated safety practitioner is a relatively recent idea. And the idea that this is a role that stands sort of separate from supervision, separate from operations, separate from engineering, separate from HR as its own thing is increasing over time.

And we are struggling to define what is that direct value add that that role has. Because the more we make it into a separate practice and even a separate profession, the more we don't have control over a lot of the decisions that are directly relevant for safety. We don't directly control the work environment through decisions like what capital equipment to purchase or even what jobs the company takes on.

We don't directly control the people because we are not part of HR. We don't select who is working, we just have to work with the people we've got. We don't purchase tools. We don't design how the work actually happens. That's not considered our role, that's operations. And so what levers does safety actually have to pull? The more separate we become, the more we become our own profession, the more we use systems and bureaucracy as our way of trying to influence other people.

And so what you might sort of think of as a positive, you know, there've been major accident investigations like Challenger and Columbia that have called for the importance of independent safety departments. But the more independent we become, the more we can only influence other people by creating paperwork for them, and by trying to force them to follow that paperwork as a way of trying to influence other aspects of the organization.

Now, this is tentative, you can't draw a direct line from that to the safety clutter, because there are realms where every bit of that paperwork could be essential. It could be an important control. It could be an important check. But it just creates much more opportunity and much more impetus for this adding in of safety activity rather than trying to balance what's effective and what's not effective.

- I have a lot of guests who talk about the need to sort of break down silos and work more closely with operations and that sort of thing. And I imagine if they're talking about it, it's because it's not happening, right? Otherwise, they wouldn't...if they didn't see the need for change, they wouldn't highlight it. So that's interesting.

So another one that you kind of touched on there is compliance with goal-based regulatory regimes.

- Yes. So, again, this is tentative. And if we're correct, it's really quite ironic. The whole premise of goal-based regulation is to try to simplify and make more efficiently the meeting of safety targets.

So, the idea is that instead of the regulator producing lots and lots of compliance requirements, which create a compliance burden for companies to meet, then the company can choose for itself how it's going to manage safety and simply manage in accordance with its own strategies and tactics for achieving safety. The trouble is that in order for that regime to work, the company doesn't just need to be safe.

They have to demonstrate that they are safe. And so this has produced a really quite rapid rise in safety activities where the primary purpose of that activity is to demonstrate safety to outsiders. And the secondary purpose is to manage safety within the organization.

And for anyone who doubts that, I just dare you to open up your company's own safety management manual, and you'll see immediately that it is directly written to be read by auditors. It is structured in a way. Its table of contents are in a way. Its preface is in a way. Its index is in a way. It's all designed to be audited.

Now that doesn't mean it doesn't have some internal efficacy, it doesn't mean that other people don't read it. By the way, when we do check, we do find that no one else reads it, but it's clearly intended primarily to be audited. And yeah, you can trace electronic documents, who opens them and when. And safety management systems are primarily there to be read by the safety department in preparation to be read by auditors.

They're very seldom accessed by other people. And that's just sort of symptomatic of the amount of work we have to do to demonstrate safety to outsiders under goal-based regulation. Arguably, and it is just an argument, things were easier and simpler when we had strict compliance requirements, because at least we knew exactly what we had to do. We didn't have to demonstrate that we were doing the right set of things.

We just had to demonstrate that we were doing a fixed set of things.

- I think the legal structure has to do with this too, right? I mean, part of this is the auditors are there for prevention and lawyers are there for when prevention didn't work, so that you can be seen to prove...so that you can prove to outsiders, you know, that the company legally met their requirements and did everything in their power to prevent whatever has [crosstalk 00:21:56].

- Let me push back a little bit on that because people often cite the law and the need to defend the company in the event of an accident as reasons for creating paperwork. Now, I'm not a lawyer, but there is some direct evidence that that's simply not true, either that having the paperwork will prevent a prosecution or that having the paperwork will be a good defense in the event of a prosecution.

Or even if both of those were true, that that is a good financial strategy for the company. Because if something is costing you $100,000 to implement, to protect yourself against a $50,000 fine that may or may not happen, that's not a good investment. And yeah, if an accident happens at your company, under almost every safety legal regime, I recognize you've got an international audience, but this is an international thing.

By definition, you have failed to meet your legal requirements once the accident has happened. Chances are if the regulator wants to go after you, you are going to be done. The only question really that's going to protect you is have you made a sincere attempt to meet your safety obligations?

If you can show a sincere attempt, then possibly they will decline to prosecute or go under some alternative arrangement. In Australia, we often use a thing called voluntary enforceable undertaking. But the one thing that will guarantee a prosecution is if there is any evidence that you were just doing safety activities to cover your back, that you were just filling out paperwork as a token effort.

That's incredibly bad documentation to come out in the event of any sort of prosecution or civil suit.

- Interesting. So, I think people create it with the...I'm not saying it should be created for that reason, but I think people do create it to cover themselves, right? But that's a pretty good reason why that's really not necessarily a great strategy.

- Yes, and be...

- And one is to...

- Because it's not a great strategy and because I ultimately believe that people within organizations are generally pretty smart and pretty rational, and usually invested not just in their own self-interest, but in the interest of the organization. I don't think we should assume that people are doing something dumb there. I think we should assume that when they say they're doing it to cover themselves legally, that's actually just an acceptable way of saying something slightly different, which is more a need for a social defense rather than a legal defense that people want to protect themselves against criticism from other people and they want to protect themselves from fear that they themselves are not doing the right thing.

So, this is why someone will make a decision and then do a risk assessment after that decision. It's not a legal defense, it's a self-justification or a self-reinforcement. Hey, I have made the right decision. And if anyone asks me, I can show this risk assessment. I can show them, here's my reasoning. I can show them I've made the right decision. Your people want to be right and they want to be good.

And often I think we use...we want to obey the law or we want to avoid prosecution just as code for things that are a bit harder to say. That we're scared of being criticized or we're scared of feeling like we've done the wrong thing.

- Yeah, I think that's a deeper and probably more accurate motivation for a lot of people. And it's important to point out that, you know, safety clutter is born out of good intentions regardless. So, in the paper, you identify three mechanisms that generate clutter. So, let's talk about these because it gets a little bit more specific if the idea of clutter is still a little bit abstract in people's minds.

So, the first one is duplication. Can you give a few examples of how that...

- Sure. I'll start with the worst one that we've got in the paper, which is in one of our projects, we traced that in order to make it actually onto site, a worker from a subcontractor had to undergo five separate inductions. So, there was a generic client induction, there was a project-specific client induction, a generic contractor induction, a project-specific contractor induction, and a site-specific induction.

Now, we put that in the paper because that's the most extreme example we found. And my poor field researcher, sorry, Mohamed, had to sit through all five inductions. And it wasn't that they were covering such important things.

- Surely there was no duplication in any of the material between all five of those - There was duplication between slides within each induction.

- Yeah. Yeah.

- But so, how does that happen? It happens when you have multiple organizations and multiple systems working together, where each system thinks that it has to make sure that something is done. So, the client has being audited, the client has to demonstrate that everyone has done their induction, but the contractor is being audited too. And so they have to demonstrate that everyone has done their induction.

And the person running the project looks at the generic induction and says, "Hold on, there are some things specific to my project that this doesn't cover. It's too generic." So, they put in place their own induction, but then they get told, "Sorry, because we're being audited, you can't remove the generic one." Oh, and by the way, every induction must cover these 10 topics.

So, it's got to go in your specific induction as well. So, these are people that aren't being silly. They haven't just like blindly put things in. They've been forced by rules within their own companies and structures within their own companies all to do something that turns out to be the same thing. I myself went onto a site at a different project, and Mary, I don't know if you've ever been visited to a sort of hazardous site.

You sort of show up and you get briefed. You know, here's the work we are doing today, here are the hazards, have you got your safety equipment? The guy then turned the page over and said, okay, that was my induction, but there's another company working here, so I've got to go through exactly the same material for both companies because there were two companies working on-site that day. And it was the exact same material, again, because both forms had to be filled out because otherwise one of the forms would be missing from the system.

So, when companies work together, that creates clutter. When different systems within the same organization work together, that creates clutter as well. So, when you have a separate safety and a separate environment and they both end up needing to create a risk assessment for your trip, suddenly you've now got two forms with the same questions on, because they cover much the same thing, just one for the safety system, another for the environment system.

Another thing that happens is when we try to standardize, we think that that's going to reduce clutter, but it tends to increase clutter because a lot of the standardization is not locally relevant. So, one thing a lot of companies do is they say, let's reduce everything to 10 golden rules, 10 essentials that matter for safety.

But on any given site, possibly only three of those rules are even relevant. I heard one story of a manager who needed to tick off that all 10 rules were going to be covered. So, he came onto a site and said, you know, can you show me that you're complying with your working at height rule? And they weren't doing any work at height. So, he said, okay, well can someone put up a ladder just so that you can work at height and I can tick off that you've complied with the work at height?

Now, those are people behaving rationally within systems that forced them to be irrational.

- There was another one in there...so we're talking about generalization here as well. And I think there was one in there that said office cleaners, you can correct me if I was wrong, had to be trained to work heavy equipment that had nothing to do with either where they did their work, or how they did their work, or what their work was.

- Yes, I can't remember the exact context for that one, but there was always a rational explanation for why they're being asked to do this strange thing. So, it seems like nonsense that they're being asked, but typically, you'll have things like cleaners, they're technically on a high-hazard site and there's just a rule that, you know, everyone who is on the high-hazard site has to be taught to do this.

You know, the fact that you are just in the office of the high-hazard site, the generic rule doesn't account for that. And if you try to account for that, you've just made the rule even more complicated. You might end up making them do a risk assessment in order to prove that they're not going into the high-hazard area. And so now you've created another piece of paperwork to justify why they don't have to do the training.

- So, that was generalization, and then on the other end of that is over-specification. So, is that what you're talking about now with where you're adding, for example, the risk assessment in this situation?

- Yes. So, over-specification is a tricky one. One of the things that is kind of invisible to most people...whenever you write down a procedure, you are always including some steps and excluding other steps. That's just a natural thing. You know, if you wrote down every single thing that you needed to do to do a task, it would be infinitely long.

You instead of saying, "Check your email," you are saying, "Pull out the chair from the desk. Sit in the chair. Turn on the computer." We always include some steps and we leave out other steps. And then when something goes wrong, we realize, hold on, there's an extra step we need to add in here. And then when something else goes wrong, we add in another step.

The most obvious example of this that everyone would've experienced is whenever you buy a power tool or an appliance, the first three pages of the manual are always just filled with hazard symbols and warnings about the dangers of your toaster or your fridge Because every one of those things is something that is potentially a hazard.

And some of them may be obvious until someone hurts themselves and then you decide, okay, it's not obvious. Got to put it in the manual. And ultimately, you just end up specifying every little bit. And then someone else has to do a slightly different job using the same procedure and all of those extra details don't fit anymore.

So, they have a choice. They can either break the rules by not following the procedure or they can follow the procedure, even though it's got steps that are totally unnecessary for them.

- So, it's hardly surprising that people do in a case like that, quote-unquote, "cut corners." Maybe those corners shouldn't have been there in the first place.

- Yes. When you have to check that the fuel cap is still on, on your electric car because otherwise, you are breaking the rule about the safety check of your vehicle, you've either got to literally lie on a form or do something nonsense every day because there's a vehicle safety check.

- Yep. Yeah. So, the article acknowledges the difficulty of reducing safety clutter, but it also..I'd like to move into making suggestions for safety practitioners. So, there were a few here. And one of them was start having conversations about clutter. So, which conversations should people have and how can they start them?

- Okay. So, this was something that we did very deliberately in the framing of our paper and how we've socialized it is just the whole term safety clutter. What we were trying to do is create a permission structure for people to say, I care about safety, but I don't think that this particular thing is good for safety.

So, the risk is always that if you object to a particular safety thing, you are seen as anti-safety, or you are seen as not being with the program, you are seen as a troublemaker. And so we wanted to introduce a term that was at least neutral, but almost friendly to bring up in a conversation.

Someone doesn't have to say, I think that this is nonsense, or I think...I don't know if I'm allowed to swear on this show because, but people usually swear when they're referring to safety activities as nonsense. But they can say maybe this is clutter, that's a more easy thing that you can say to a manager. And so yeah, we think that we've sort of started this permission structure and we've seen some benefit in organizations just taking it on using the fact that it's a bit easier to talk about clutter than to talk about nonsense.

And being able to just gently push back. And the time to push back is when things are introduced. Once they're in place, they're really, really hard to remove. That's part of that ratchet effect we were talking about with the opportunities and the difficulties, the asymmetries. And so if you can push back at the time when someone suggests something, then that prevents it being introduced, prevents it becoming embedded, makes it easier to not have to clutter.

- Yeah, I think clutter is a good term as well because it differentiates between...when you say to declutter like a room or something, you're not saying let's remove every object in the room. It's already clearly understood that clutter is only the excess.

- Yes. And it's a negotiable term as well. People can have legitimate disagreements about what should or shouldn't be in the room. We think that's okay.

- True. Yeah.

- One person can say that's clutter, another person can say, no, actually we need that there because my mother-in-law's coming over and if she doesn't see the photo, she's going to be offended. That's the same as saying you're just admitting we've got to have this piece of paper because the auditor's going to check it. And if we're honest about that, fine, everyone can just live with the piece of paper because we got to have it.

- So, another one was find the low-hanging fruit. And this comes with an interesting sample question for safety professionals to ask workers, which is, what is the stupidest thing that I'm asking you to do in order to work here [inaudible 00:36:26] day? So, can you talk a little bit more about the idea of low-hanging fruit and why that's an important question to be asking?

- So, one of the things that we have repeatedly encountered over years of interrogating the evidence behind safety activities is that particularly safety practitioners and professionals have a very strong confirmation bias that their current activities are working. Now, if you doubt that, just look at any of the conversations that happen online around contentious topics such as take 5s or subcontractor inductions, is you'll find people who swear by those activities and you'll find people who swear at those activities.

And the reason we think is that if you are a safety manager, you are often not quite conscious just of the power imbalance between you and frontline workers and how you will get lots of people telling you that they think that your activities are great, not because they think that your activities are great, but because there is political and personal and sometimes job security in telling the safety manager that you are behind safety rather than telling the safety manager that you think the stuff is nonsense.

And so we need to find ways of asking people and giving people permission to complain, but not to gripe, but to complain specifically about the particular things. We don't want just a general attitude of all this safety is nonsense.

I'm sick of all this paperwork. That doesn't help anyone. That just makes people on both sides feel bad. We want people to be specific and say, okay, if there's one thing I could get rid of, I'd get rid of this and I'd do the rest of it. I don't like it, but I'd do it if only you'd get this rid of this one thing. And so that's the conversation that we would encourage is not let's get rid of everything, not let's do a drastic decluttering of our entire systems, let's just find the real pain points and prove that we can fix them.

So, I think that that gives positive feedback to everyone. It gives workers a sense that they are being listened to and that they're being trusted to know what's important and what's not important. And it gives safety managers a taste of what I think is the best thing for safety in a company is to be liked for something other than just being the lone voice for safety, for the safety manager to be the good guy because you've actually made someone's day-to-day job just a little bit easier and a little bit nicer and a little bit more fun.

And I think once safety people get a taste of that, then they can have sort of two parts of their role. One of them, which is maybe sometimes having to toe the line, sometimes having to be the policeman, sometimes having to be the tool of management, but also to be the rational voice that says, we all work here together. We all want our days to go smoothly. I'm not going to put things in your road that I don't have to. If I tell you we have to do something, then it's because I can't protect you from it.

- Yeah. I think also it's a baby step, isn't it? Because people, as you said, are inherently...well, sorry I'm putting words in your mouth. But people are afraid of maybe letting go of that control or being seen to let go. And low-hanging fruit is a way to try it out and see if the sky falls as is the next one, which is conduct a controlled trial for removing a piece of clutter.

- So, this one I have to admit, the evidence is starting to tell against it. This is really disappointing to me personally, but also very fascinating as a researcher. So, the hypothesis that we had was that you could essentially replace an activity that wasn't working with evidence that the activity didn't work so that if anyone came along and said, "You know, why aren't you doing this risk assessment?"

You could say, "Well, actually, we did a controlled trial. We showed that we were safer without it. And that's why we don't have it." And that should be enough to satisfy a client or regulator, anyone who complains. Even in the event of an accident, you could still show, look, we've got evidence that we were doing the safest thing, so we were fine not doing this thing that was unhelpful. That was our reasoning.

But we have done controlled trials of safety activities and we have demonstrated, we think really quite conclusively that some specific activities are not working in the way that people think that they're working and are detrimental. And the companies that went to considerable effort to support those trials and to collect that evidence are still using the activities.

So, yes, whilst I love the story I told around evidence and why I want to believe that evidence is the solution, it doesn't, at least so far doesn't seem to be. The reluctance to get rid of ineffective safety activities seems to be stronger even than evidence. Maybe this shouldn't have surprised me.

There's a sort of mentor in the skeptic community that you can't sort of reason someone out of a position, that they didn't come into through rationality in the first place. And maybe it's the same that you can't evidence someone out of an activity that they didn't implement because of evidence in the first place either. But yeah, so that one was in the paper, but I have to say it just doesn't work. Or at least so far, we haven't seen good evidence that it works.

- But it's a good way to talk about the next thing, which was dealing with external stakeholders, which sounds like it was kind of the downfall of that specific approach. So, oftentimes external stakeholders will make demands that result in safety clutter. And it's naive to think that those demands will stop.

So, there were three things mentioned about how safety professionals could deal with those demands, and one of them was managing stakeholders.

- Yes. So, this one I'm still quite confident about is I think that when people say they have to have in place safety clutter because external stakeholders demand it, that is more often than not an excuse or a folktale rather than a rationally held belief.

And since this paper, we've got more evidence on how this seems to happen, which is that very often there are stories that perpetuate within companies for far longer than the evidence justifies. So, you know, one regulator once asked for a particular form, that becomes a story within the company that we got prosecuted because we didn't have this form and we lost the case because we didn't have this form.

And you interrogate around and no one currently working for the company was actually part of that story, even the people who surely would've been involved if it had happened anytime in the past decade. So, often these perceptions about external stakeholders are actually just we've never had a frank conversation about expectations.

Safety people use the external stakeholders as their justification for putting things in rather than actually testing out their assumptions about what external stakeholders want. And I think that particularly applies to regulators. I've lost track of the number of times a company has told me they've got something in because the regulator wants it.

And the regulator has directly told me, no, we do not want it. We think that's a misunderstanding of our own requirements. And when it gets to that point, you realize that put the two people in a room, and or rather the safety manager needs to put themself in a room with the client, with the regulator, and just say, this is how we're planning to manage safety. Does this meet your needs?

Is there anything else you insist on?

- Yeah. So, managing stakeholders is...I think communicating with stakeholders is really what you're talking about because managing could be seen as, you know, persuading or politicking around stakeholders, but really just talk to them and [crosstalk 00:44:45].

- Oh, I absolutely agree that part of a safety manager's job is politics. A safety manager is the interface between a company and lots of external demands, both at current, past, and future potential. So a safety manager is a politician in that sense of managing policy and managing stakeholders. But yeah, a lot of managing stakeholders is communicating early, building a social relationship, and it amazes me that there are safety people who don't see that as part of their job, who will even actively say, you know, I'm not political.

I just implement the system. And yeah, okay, if you don't want to think of it as political, fine, just think of it as being a human being and treating other people as human beings. Taking them out for coffee. Talking to them. Understanding their expectations, understanding their needs. That is what political management is.

- So, a couple of other ones were leadership styles and a reflective evidence-based approach. So, let's talk about leadership styles, and then I'm curious if anything has changed in your view of the reflective evidence-based approach.

- Yeah, sure. So, the leadership styles comes to what I was talking about before about. As the safety professional role gets separated from the organization, we start to use structural approaches to leadership. We lead by managing and we manage by implementing systems. And that's only one style of leadership.

I'm not a big fan of the way ideas like culture have been corrupted in safety. But there is an essential point here, which is that you can influence other people by ways other than making them do a form. You can influence them by symbolic gestures and by motivation, and by the work climate, and by your relationships with them.

You know, you can influence other people by sitting down with them and listening to them, rather than making them fill out a form. And they're more likely to go away and do what you want because you listen to them talk about their kids for half an hour than because you made them do a risk assessment. And I think in safety, as our role has become separated, we've become more reluctant to use those other tools of leadership. And I think just more active reflection on our role as leaders, rather than our role as safety managers would really benefit some safety practice in some organizations.

- Yeah, I think trust plays a huge part in that. And there are many ways to build trust. So the reflective evidence...

- We could have multiple further conversations about trust. Yes.

- Yes. I know. I know, which is why I was, like, you know what? Keep going.

- Yeah. Let's keep off that because I think some of your other guests have dealt with that better than even that I could.

- So, the reflective evidence-based approach, has your mind or has your thinking changed in any way about this, or is this still something that you would suggest?

- No, I'm still convinced of this one, and this is ultimately where I think the safety practitioner community needs to move in order to genuinely become a profession. So, I was wrong about the idea of trying to remove embedded safety activities just by proving that they don't work.

So, we have to ask instead, how did these activities get in place in the first place? You know, if there's an asymmetry between adding things and removing them, we've got to look at both sides of that asymmetry. If removing things is hard, we need to make it harder to put things in in the first place. So, rather than just talking vague, let me give some like specific examples. Very often when we do accident investigations, we make recommendations, and we shouldn't, because one investigation is not good evidence as to what would solve a general class of problems within an organization, or what possible side effects those recommendations might have.

- So, accident reports should be producing findings about this particular case and hypotheses, or at least statements of the problem that needs to be solved rather than a recommendation. We then need to have a normal change process, whatever our company would normally do if we are making that sort of investment to work out what solutions do we want to implement. And the safety professional should be part of properly examining options, selecting candidates, trialing those candidates, seeing what the evidence base is for different approaches.

And if we have more of that mindset when we are introducing safety activities, then we don't need to worry so much about removing the bad ones because they won't be implemented in the first place.

- It sounds like you're saying rather than recommendations, come up with research questions, essentially.

- Yes. Own organization research questions. You don't need a researcher to help you. You just need to be a professional. Now, even a doctor doesn't just say, oh, you're sick. Okay, let me just look up Wikipedia and see what drugs are suitable. The medical profession has an evidence base behind it that has large controlled trials of things and has cooperation and has collection of adverse incidents across the profession in order to work out generally what is the best drug for this particular illness.

And in safety, we could be doing a lot more of that.

- Yeah, in the sense of when you're investigating an accident, rather than having what comes out of that be prescriptive being, like, okay, this accident should make us curious about the following things. Let's look into these. That's kind of what I'm saying.

- Absolutely, yes. Yes. That's it exactly.

- Okay. So, my last question for the main part of the interview had been that this article has been out for a few years now. What kind of reception has it received? Do you get any sense that safety managers are paying more attention to safety clutter? And also, as part of that, you know, is there anything that you're thinking has changed on? So, you've answered that last bit, but what else has come to light since this was released, in 2018, I believe, and now?

- Okay. So, there've been some positives and some negatives and some slightly alarming stuff. My goal personally has always been to be a very evidence-based academic. I have no aspirations to be a safety guru, sort of spreading out big-name ideas that other people listen to what I say without considering the evidence behind what I say.

And the idea of safety clutter is spreading quite rapidly. But as most of those big ideas, it's being interpreted by different people according to what they really wanted to hear in the first place. So, I think the underlying concern about the asymmetry and the desire to push back and the permission structure to push back, that's actually working quite well and quite positively.

But I think in some other places, people are just seeing decluttering as, oh, this is part of, like, the new view of safety. You know, devolve responsibility, get rid of what management does, and just get rid of the systems. And that wasn't the intent of the message. And part of our research says that that just doesn't work. That, you know, a desire to declutter by just stripping out things, they will come straight back for all of the pressures that caused them to be there in the first place.

So, I'm a little bit concerned about the detachment of the idea of decluttering from the fundamental message of our paper, which is that a lot of this clutter is an inevitable consequence of bigger issues that need to be managed. The clutter is a symptom. It's not a problem in its own right. And I'm very concerned that people may use declutter just as a way of saying, let's get rid of safety, let's get rid of things that we as management don't like, rather than things that the workers want to get rid of.

And any time we are saving money in ways that the workers have not asked for, I think we should be suspicious as safety professionals. Safety professionals are servants of...or safety professionals, the evidence says that we're servants of management, but I think we all desire and should aspire to be servants of people doing frontline work. And so decluttering should always be to serve those people, not to serve the interests of management.

- Yeah. So, at the end, I always have a few questions that I ask every guest. And so I would like to know what human relationship skills, so some people call them soft skills or core skills, but what human relationship skill is the most important in your opinion for the next generation of safety professionals to, I'll say master, but learn about is good enough?

- Okay. I love that question in part just because of its presupposition that this is what we should be focusing on in the first place is human relationship skills. So, that's nicks out all of the answers...you know, the easy answers is to answer the question, what do we need to learn, or do we need to learn more soft skills?

But you're forcing me to narrow it down. This is probably not universal, but this is in the particular sort of part of safety I operate, which is in evaluation and improvement of our activities. And in that space, I think the most important skill is humility and intellectual curiosity because I think if we are uncertain about what we already know and we are curious, that then leads quite naturally and we don't need to be so deliberate about other skills such as listening and leading.

I think those things stem from ultimately just humility about what we know and don't know.

- So, another one is, if you could go back in time to the beginning of your career, what's one piece of advice that you might give to your young self?

- Okay. I'm finding it difficult to answer this question. We've been touching a lot on my research and very little personally. I'm both autistic and chronically depressed. When I dream of my younger self, I mostly dream of sort of you go back in time and assassinate Hitler, prevent the Drew of today from having to suffer through...taking it purely as a career question.

Let's assume that I have headed down into safety as a career. Let's take that as a given. And let's just look at where would I steer myself to avoid mistakes that...or to speed up some of the things that I've discovered along the way I think would be the aspiration for this time machine. I would give myself an early education in the social sciences, but I don't want to sacrifice my training as an engineer.

So, I need to look at a course catalog that's available, but I really want to give myself like a dual education in both engineering and social science so that I come into safety equipped to see the world from those different perspectives. And able to sort of come in already recognizing the importance of a lot of the gray areas that you learn from social science and a lot of the ability to see sort of patterns and systems that you get from engineering.

And I think those sorts of intellectual foundations are more important than any sort of early career decisions or early other knowledge that I could impart. It's just a way of seeing the world that comes from that sort of training.

- That's my own fantasy. I had a major in anthropology. I would've liked for the other major to have been in computer science or linguistics for the same reasons that you just articulated. So thank you.

- Yeah. It's unfortunate that we sort of force people into this choice between STEM and non-STEM careers. And so you end up with...my wife's a lawyer and she sort of calls it being an engineering groupie that, you know, you're not dissatisfied with the career out of engineering, you just wish you had some of that. And I think a lot of engineers have the same thing is we come to the more nuanced understanding of the world later in life, and we sort of look back on the black-and-white dogmatism that sometimes all of the mathematical and systems training gives you.

And we sort of wish we could soften off those edges without the rough abrasion of the world to do the softening for us over time.

- Well, if it's any consolation, I think most of us come to a more nuanced understanding of life as we age. So, how can interested listeners learn more about safety clutter? Obviously, there's the paper or related topics. Are there resources that you tend to suggest, books or websites, or where would you point curious listeners, I guess.

- Is this an opportunity for self-promotion? Can I plug our "Safety of Work" podcast here?

- If you would like to. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Sure.

- So, I'm presuming that your listeners like podcasts and like hearing about safety. So, David and I have our own podcast...

- I think that's a safe assumption.

- Safety of Work. And that's really quite different to yours. What we do is we try each week to pick a particular paper or a couple of papers. We try as much as possible to make them empirical, so as in not just opinion pieces, the research, and we just try to summarize what the evidence says and then how you can apply this in safety practice. So, that's the first place I'd steer people is just as a gentle flavor of accessing more research through easy Listening.

- More research through easy listening. I think that's an excellent, I don't know, t-shirt slogan or something. But yes, I think that would be a fascinating listen or multiple listens. Where can our listeners find you on the web?

- Well, so long as Twitter exists, my handle is diopter. But the easiest place to find me is LinkedIn, search for Drew Rae in Safety on LinkedIn. You will find me. You can connect with me. Feel free to comment on threads that I'm part of. Feel free to connect with me and message me, and we can take the conversation to other venues from there if people are interested in deeper discussions.

And I'm always interested in talking with people about how these issues apply within their own organization. Whenever we do research, it's always tentative, it's always this is what we currently think, but we'd love to hear more about it, particularly what other people have experienced and how that might sort of test or push back some of the assumptions that we are making in the work that we do.

- Fantastic. Well, unfortunately, that's all the time we have for today. Thank you so much for the thoughtful discussion, Drew.

- It was a great pleasure to talk, Mary.

- And thanks to our listeners for your support. Our wee baby podcast is now 1 year old. We couldn't have done it without your downloads, reviews, recommendations, and ratings. So, thank you. And I would also like to thank the "Safety Labs by Slice" team clutter-free since 2022. 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.

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