Is New View Safety More Effective Than Traditional Approaches?

In this episode, Mary Conquest speaks with Eliza Lynch, an HSE manager in the construction industry and frequent guest on safety podcasts, who has strong opinions and uses strong language.

Eliza’s early career in EHS was very Traditional Safety oriented - sometimes referred to as Safety-1 or Command and Control Safety. However, more recently she’s directly experienced New View Safety, also known as Safety-2 or Safety Differently.

Regardless of terminology, it’s common for members of the HSE community to align themselves with one of these two orientations.

However, Eliza’s analysis and observations have coninced her it’s too simplistic to claim one safety approach is more effective than the other. She explains why HSE professionals needed fresh ideas while asserting that abandoning traditional approaches to safety would be counter-productive.

Eliza strongly believes New View Safety builds on Traditional Safety but definitely doesn’t replace it. Instead, EHS professionals just need to focus on the most appropriate ways to improve safety outcomes and set people up for success.

♪ [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." On this podcast, we do our best to invite guests from every corner of the safety world. As a result, I've spoken with academics, novice safety managers, psychologists, authors, and veterans of the profession.

Many align with one of two orientations towards safety. These perspectives are variously referred to as command and control versus the new view, Safety-I versus Safety-II, or traditional safety versus safety differently. Is one of these approaches more effective than the other? Why do people feel that the standard safety methods were lacking?

Is safety differently a natural evolution of the practice, or is it really no different than the thinking from earlier generations? Our guest today has explored these questions in her own work and sees merit and fault in different approaches to safety management. Elisa Lynch is a health safety and environmental manager in the construction industry. She's a frequent guest on safety podcasts.

Elisa has strong opinions and strong language. So, if you have delicate ears or have someone in the room with delicate ears, please adjust accordingly. Elisa has worked in Sydney, Australia and her native Ireland, both in the workplace health and safety space and in employee management and training for over a decade.

In that time, she has been involved in commercial and residential construction and traffic control safety. Elisa has experience in both Safety-I and Safety-II practices and has applied her analytical mind and observational skills to understanding what works and what doesn't. Along the way, she's learned to improve safety outcomes and set people up for success one conversation at a time.

Ms. Lynch joins us from Cork, Ireland. Welcome.

- [Elisa] Hi. [inaudible].

- Let's get right into it. Because we might ruffle some feathers and, in fact, I hope we do, because it means people are listening and thinking about their own views. Tell me a bit about your particular experience in safety management. What influence do you think your industry experience might have on how you view safety in contrast to someone working in a very different setting?

- Okay. So, all of my experience comes from construction. So, everything is…I view it all through that lens. And how it has shaped my view, I guess when I started out in safety, it was very much traditional command and control, people doing stupid things. That's how accidents happen.

They just weren't paying attention. And very much a shame, blame, and retrain response. And I worked in that kind of environment for the last probably five or six years, I suppose. And it made me hate the job, to be honest. I really didn't enjoy it.

If I was out in the pub and somebody asked me, "Hey, what do you do for work?" I'd be like, "Oh, Christ, I really don't want to fucking say it, but I'm a safety officer." Like, that's, like, the least nice job to have that people don't respond well. They're like, "Oh, Christ, here we go." So, yeah, that's where I started out, and that has very much, yeah, shaped my view of safety management and how that can go really wrong.

It can go really against you. It can be really hard to get traction that way. So, yeah. Did I answer the question?

- You did. You did, for sure. And I mean, of course, you can't say, like, if my experience was in office situations, then blah, blah, blah, because that's not your experience. But, yeah. So, I'd like to start by orienting the conversation around your understanding of the concepts that we're talking about.

So, we'll no doubt end up using these terms as shorthand, so let's get a sense of how you understand...we'll call them Safety-I and Safety-II, and here's the critical bit, how you understand them as defined by their practitioners or advocates.

- Okay. So, Safety-I, or traditional safety, I would understand as command and control. I would understand it as a very rigid system where you are doing safety to people, basically. And Safety-II, or safety differently, or new view, I would understand it to be a more collaborative approach where you are doing safety with people, and more specifically, with the people who are at the point of risk.

So, traditional safety, safety management plans, risk assessments, all that jazz, done from behind the desk and sent out from upon high, and then the kind of more new view would be more collaborative. That's my take on what they [crosstalk].

- On how they view it. Okay. So, now we'll jump into what do you mean when you say Safety-I, command or control, traditional safety? And I'm throwing these terms all in the same bucket, so please let me know if that's a misconception. But, how do you see these ideas showing up in practice?

- In practice, I suppose I see traditional safety showing up as safety officers marching around with clipboards, pissing people off. And I say that because I've been that person, like, who's [inaudible] that parted the waters. Like, literally walking through a site and people are just fucking scattering as you're going because they don't want to talk to you.

So, yeah, that's my view of it. That's how I would describe it versus when I take a more, I suppose, new view collaborative approach. It's you're walking through a site and people are happy to see you coming, and they're like, "Hey, how's things?" And you can have a conversation and have a chat, and people come to you with problems versus, I would have found, in my experience of a traditional approach, people would hide things.

So, very much underreporting, cover up of things, all that kind of jazz.

- So, when I say Safety-II, the new view, or safety differently, is it fair to throw those all kind of into a bucket? I'm sure there are nuances, but… - Yeah. Look, there are nuances, but I would throw them all into a bucket. There's too many books to read to even get on top of, oh, like, Safety-II, resilience engineering, all this kind of jazz.

I'm sure there's probably people going to be listening to this going, "She has no fucking clue." To be honest, I put them all in one bucket.

- Okay. Well, I mean, fair enough.

- And so it works for me.

- That's what we need to sort of set out so people understand the conversation the way that you're understanding it. So, I think it's clear to me that if traditional safety was foolproof, if it worked 100%, then there would be no new view. How do you think new view advocates define the deficits of the traditional view? And why did they feel that there was a need to reexamine safety management practices?

- I think the need came from stagnation, like, traditional safety has only been able to bring us so far. Even if you look at fatalities statistics, you know, at national levels or international levels, it's not getting better.

It's just stagnating. And there's a reason for that. It's that, like, what's the definition of madness? Doing the same thing over, and over, and over and expecting a different result. The different result wasn't coming. We have not achieved zero harm. We won't achieve zero harm.

Or, like, I don't believe in zero harm anyway as a management trope or goal or whatever way they want to make out that, oh, it's a goal, it's something to work towards. And if you say that you're anti-zero harm, it's also you're pro accidents. It's like, "No, I'm not pro accidents," but, like, fucking hell, zero harm is clearly, I think, damaging to safety culture, if you can say safety culture is a thing.

And, yeah, so I think people were frustrated with the traditional approach, probably frustrated with, you know, going to work every day and being the person that people walk away from. It's not a fun…it can be a lonely job, especially if you're a team of one, which a lot of safety professionals are, and where people don't want to engage with you because you're out with your clipboard just drilling rules all the time without understanding maybe why people can't or won't follow the rules.

So, I think that's where the new view was born out of that frustration of we need to do something different and maybe, crazy idea, the people doing the work might have the answer of how we should do that.

- So, I know that some thoughts and research has gone back at least to the '80s. Do you think Safety-II is really new, or do you think it's a case of rebranding old ideas?

- I don't think it's new. I probably did when I heard about it first. I was like, "Oh, mind blown. This is unbelievable." And actually, the first time I had heard about it, I was at a workshop in Sydney by one of the, kind of, I suppose, the thought leaders, one of the founders of safety differently. And I thought he was crazy.

I was like, "This is never going to take off. This is never going to become a thing." But yeah, I think maybe they've just...and it might be social media, it might be that kind of thing that has gained traction for these ideas, or maybe it's just really engaging people, the likes of the Sidney Dekkers and those who are, I suppose, drawing people in.

They're engaging, they're controversial. I don't think the ideas are new. I was actually…I was doing a…I went back to university two years ago, and I was doing an assignment and next thing, I was reading up on James Reason or something from, like, late '80s, early '90s, and it was all about organizational drift.

And I was like, "Hang on a second." I was like, "This shit is from the '90s. This isn't new." But what I will say is that I hadn't ever heard of any of the theories before. When I was working in….when I was engaged with traditional safety, you kind of go into a company, again, this is my experience of it, you go into a company, the safety management system is set up, it's there, and you slot in, and then you just keep the cogs turning.

There's no real creativity in it. There's nothing new in it. So, they don't need to tell you what the background is or where these theories came from. It's set, there it is, there you go. Just follow the system. Whereas, I guess, with new view, because it was under such scrutiny, you do have to go, "Well, where has this come from?" And if they can...now, they probably could refer back a bit more to some…could credit a bit more, I think, on some of the ideas that are out there now.

Don't shoot me, I haven't read all the safety differently books, maybe they are citing more than I realize. I get a lot of my info from LinkedIn blogs. But yeah, that's my take on it.

- Okay. So, in that evolution, is there anything valuable that you think got lost along the way? Are we in danger of losing sight of solid practices or principles by equating traditional with ineffective?

- Yes. There is absolutely a place for traditional safety management. There will always be. And especially in high-hazard industries, where some stuff, you just need to control it and you need to make sure those controls are in place, and that needs to come from a command center, you know, confined space entry, these kind of things.

You can't fuck around with that. Like, it needs to be a certain way. That's not negotiable. It's not wisdom-of-the-crowd stuff. That's these are the rules, and they have to be that way, full stop.

- And you think that has to do with risk, like, maybe the higher the risk or, you know.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

- Yeah. There are certain hazards, I guess, that we know what they are and we know how to control them. That's been figured out. And it is a case of then training and ensuring there's that current competency with the people doing the work. And supporting them to do that work is ensuring that they have that competency.

So, those kind of things, you can do elements of new view with it in maybe your approach to figuring out their understanding, that you can have cool conversations or learning teams around stuff versus what I would see as the traditional one, which is, read it, sign it, do it, you know.

But at the same time, whether it's new view or traditional, those control measures are the same. They have to be in place for confined space entry, for example.

- Yeah. The laws of physics aren't going to change.

- Like, you know, this shit's going to kill you. New view, maybe not. Yeah.

- Okay. So now, so we've kind of looked at some deficits on both sides. So, tell me what you feel is really working with each perspective, the new and the old.

- I suppose with the old is structure. From, I suppose, a practitioner point of view, it's very much…a system is there to follow, the structure is there, the history of how things have been done is there. There's a comfort in that.

Rightly or wrongly, there's a comfort in it. And there's a comfort for everyone at all levels of the organization, which matters. You know, there has to be… I have walked into boardrooms all excited, and I'm like, "Oh, my God, let's do a new view safety." And the board are like, "Sorry, what? Like, no, absolutely fucking no way. What are you even talking about? This is not happening."

So, you know, they need to be comfortable with this. They need to. And traditional safety, definitely, it's the norm. And it has absolutely saved lives. Like, there is no doubt about it, that traditional safety management has brought us an extremely long way, but it will only take us so far, I think. So, yes, there are good things about it.

Good things about the new view. The new view wouldn't exist without traditional safety. It just wouldn't. It can't. So, it builds on that. But it's not either/or, it's and. Like, you have to have both.

You can't just get rid of everything. And I think people from probably a more traditional standpoint maybe get defensive about new view safety and be like, "Oh, they're just saying, 'Throw everything out and just leave it to all the guys on the ground and they can figure it out,' and this is crazy." Like, nobody is saying that. Like, not one fucking person has ever said that.

That is an extreme exaggeration of what new view safety is. So, new view, for me, is very much building on what you have with your traditional safety management system. It is not scrapping everything. It's actually, really, testing it. I suppose I would say it's giving it more assurance that what you have in your traditional system is working because you're looking at it in a different way, with more curiosity, more engagement, if that makes sense.

- So really, just because you're questioning how things are done doesn't mean that you're saying everything is done poorly. It just sort of opens up that curiosity.

- Yeah, yeah, exactly.

- I think that a lot of proponents of safety differently, for example, would say that it's research based rather than assumption based. So, in other words, they didn't come along and just dismiss Grandpa Simpson for no reason. They have qualitative and quantitative research to back up their ideas. What are your thoughts on that body of research?

- Some of it's fairly hard going, to be honest, to read. I think reading research is dull if you're not, like, really into it. So, it can be quite inaccessible. What I will say, and I think it was actually referenced by one of the other people you interviewed, Dave Provan and Drew Rae do a fantastic podcast, "The Safety of Work," where they do the hard work for you.

They'll read the research paper for you and then they'll distill it into a podcast, and you can kind of get the takeaways. So, I find that really helpful. But yeah, like, research in general, I find hard going to read it. So, I don't find it very accessible. So, when it comes to new view, I would very much lean on the experiences of people doing the work versus information from academics, if that makes sense.

Like, I want to hear from someone who has done it, and that's somebody who isn't going to try and sell me a book for me to find out how they've done it. I just want to know. And those people are few and far between.

- What do you think is the place of that kind of academic research, though? Do you think it is also…it may not be inaccessible on the ground. Do you think that it's useful to have, or do you think it's just…do you think we kind of know what we know already and it's more about implementation now?

- No, I wouldn't say that we know what we know definitely. Like, it definitely has a place. I'd love to be more into it. I'd love to find it easier to read. No, it definitely has a place, and there probably isn't near enough of it. Like, if you think of the scale of the amount of work happening versus the amount of research we have in either traditional or new view, there's probably not nearly enough.

And even then, they're probably still very Western kind of like...again, looking at a global scale of work and how good are we really on a global scale at safety, probably not great. So, there's still loads more to do, I think. I just won't be the one doing it or reading it.

- So, that makes me wonder, you've worked in Australia and Ireland in safety, do you notice...and I'm sure you have colleagues that you've spoken with in other countries, not to start any kind of nationalist debates...

- Start a war, no.

- ...what differences do you see? Like, do you think that the regulatory environment makes a difference, or do you think what's happening on the ground affects it? Or, would you characterize sort of "Australian safety" as different in any way from "Irish safety?"

- Oh, Jesus, Irish safety. Yeah, we're way behind. We're behind everyone. We're behind traditional, we're behind new view. Like, you could walk onto a construction site at the end of my road now and be like, "Is it 1985?" Like, really now.

There are some great people doing great work in safety here, but I suppose there are so many smaller businesses and smaller contractors that just, like, even this conversation, they wouldn't even know what the hell we're talking about. Versus I suppose in Australia, they have a monopoly on safety academics over there. Don't live over there, but they…I left Australia in 2017, and at that time, I didn't see safety differently or any new view stuff on the ground.

It was not, I think. It wasn't happening. So, I think it's starting to probably gain traction now. The regulators there, the regulators in Ireland, yeah, they're not…well, look, they're under-resourced, like every regulator, I guess. They're under-resourced.

They're very much…they're there to police and to punish. They're not there to engage, or to guide, or to help. Like, you would absolutely not ring the Health and Safety Authority in Ireland and go, "Hey, I have a question." They'd be like, "Why don't you already know? I'm going to fine you." So, just do not pick up that phone. I did find the regulator in Australia more engaging.

There was a few inspectors that I could pick up the phone to once I kind of had engaged…once I had, I suppose, interacted with them a few times. I could pick up the phone and be like, "Hey, what do you think about this?" And they'd say, "No, you're…" - I think part of that, too, might just be the nature of the beast, right? I mean, by the nature of being a regulatory body, they have to come up with regulations and rules, probably more so than guidelines, although maybe it's moving that way.

But, you know, things do have to be a bit black and white if you're going to talk about monetary, like, fines or that kind of thing.

- Yeah. And they do have to enforce. Like, you need an enforcing body. But that's not to say that body couldn't have an arm that is advisory and helpful and not scary and terrifying. Because if you scare me and terrify me, I'm going to hide stuff from you and I'm not going to go to you for help.

- Yeah, exactly.

- So, where does that get anyone?

- So, interesting that you say that you haven't yet. So, have you seen safety differently sort of in practice? You mentioned that it was the ideas were kind of out there, but they hadn't quite trickled down? Have you since seen them trickle down anywhere or?

- I suppose I've spoken to a few people who would have it in practice now. Have I seen it myself? I suppose only from my own practice in the company that I work with of trying to do my own things with it, which has gone well. But, not a massive scale, I suppose. And then the other thing is, I think, I'm kind of probably in an echo chamber as well, like, the likes of LinkedIn and people I network with, we're all very much…we kind of go, "This is getting traction. This is going to be great."

And then you realize, okay, there's like 100 of us in the whole world, that I know of.

- So, this is not representative.

- Like, you know, it's not representative. We're definitely all going, "Yeah, we're great. This is brilliant. This is getting there." And then you go, "Hang on a second. No, it's probably not. Take the blinkers off."

- Well, but, you know, I mean, in order for people to follow, somebody has to lead, right?

- Yeah.

- That's the way with any kind of social change. And speaking of change, I want to go back to something you mentioned earlier about, you know, running into the boardroom and saying, "Safety differently. We're going to do it." Blah, blah, blah. And everyone being like, "Back up the bus. Like, what are you even talking about? Who are you? Who hired this person?"

- Yeah. Literally, I've had that moment.

- So, I have heard from many, many safety managers that their most difficult task is to get buy-in. I think it's often getting buy-in from people sort of on the floor as it were, but it's also getting buy-in from management and managing organizational change. What's your experience with that?

Like, you've already said, like, don't run in there and… - Don't do what I did.

- Don't do what I did.

- Yeah. Yeah, don't do what I did, because you have to really know your stuff, and I was just so hyped and excited at this idea. I was like, "This is going to be unreal." And they were like, "Calm the fuck down. What are you talking about?" So, I would say… Sorry. Repeat the question again.

- Just, I guess, yeah, it wasn't really formed as a question, just about buy-in, like buy-in for management. You know, how would you…what do you know about that? Like, what have you learned? What do you think…you've said what doesn't work, have you found things that do work? Or, again, maybe just heard that certain things get traction from other people.

- Yeah. I suppose, yeah, I'd have…like, in terms of buy-in, what I've had, I suppose, the best experience with is I did the whole run in and talk about safety differently, and that didn't really fly. So then, I kind of regret.

I was like, "Oh, shit, what am I going to do?" So, I just kind of started to do it anyway. And I don't mean I went rogue, I mean I literally just started speaking to the guys on the ground in a different way, asking different questions, and engaging with them differently. And I just kind of forgot about the board for a while. Because I just need to do what I'm doing with the guys at the point of risk, and then it'll start to speak for itself.

And then when the board see that, oh, geez, the lads are actually engaging with Elisa. Oh, the lads are not running in the opposite direction from her. They're actually picking up the phone going, "Hey, we've got a problem here. Can you come down and help us out?" Or, "Hey, we've had an injury and we're actually telling you about it." That kind of stuff. And when they see that and they're like, "How did you…what is this? What's happening?"

And then I can say, "Oh, well, actually, I've been reading X blog or listening to this podcast, and they say that maybe if we don't treat people like shit, then they work really well for us."

- If we try this, yeah.

- I jest. I jest.

- Yeah. And actually, I was on a kind of networking webinar thing the other week, and a guy called Simon Bowen was on there giving a keynote. And he introduced safety differently at Luton Airport. And he was actually saying a lot of the same things.

And I was kind of going, "Oh, actually, I have been doing this okay for the last while," from hearing him speak about it. That he was like, you know, "It takes time." Like, it takes a long time, so what you're doing is planting seeds. You just got to figure out where you're going to plant them. And that could be by changing your language or whatever that is.

Like, I used this phrase of...I'm saying used, not coined. I'm not that…like, I'm not saying I made this up, but I used this phrase of setting people up for success, and I just kept using it over and over again, every opportunity I had. And then about six months later, I heard one of the directors say to someone in my earshot, going, "Yeah, but how do we set this guy up for success?"

I nearly did a fucking jig in the hallway outside the office. I was like, "Yes." That is a slow burn, but it happened, and that was a big win. It's like, I suppose you have to change your view on what wins are as well. I would say definitely if you're looking for wins, it's those kind of small wins where you see this is catching on literally one conversation at a time.

- Yeah. Yeah. Patience. Patience.

- Patience. Yeah, play the long game and eventually, they will see. When you hear the language of the board start to change, when you hear that kind of engagement and empathy from them for the people doing the work, that's when you know, you're like, "Okay, now I can go in and go, 'So, I've been thinking, do you remember when I had that brain fart about six months ago about safety differently, let's have that conversation again.

I've calmed down.'" - Yeah. Yeah. So, you just mentioned some, but can you tell me about any moments or experiences you had that were formative for you in developing your views on safety management? Or are there any aha moments, good or bad, that stick out?

- I suppose very early on, it would have been generally people's reactions to me on site. You can get quite an allergic reaction from somebody on site if you go up and go, "Hey, like, that's wrong because my clipboard says so."

And you can literally see them tense up, going, "Please get out of my face." So, those experiences would have been quite formative in me wanting to not do this job anymore, which I did probably around three or four years ago try to leave the profession successfully, bored, because I was really jaded with the negativity because it's seen as a negative role.

All you talk about is negative things. So yeah, that would have been quite formative. And seeing the way people on site...like, there's been a few times I've been in a room where, I will say, there's been an induction going on, and it's, "Here, sign that method statement. Yeah, it's 75 pages long, just fucking sign it and get out and do the job."

And that happens more times than it doesn't happen. They might not be swearing or [inaudible]. And, you know, it's this crazy volumous, volumous documents, where, like, that's just ridiculous. Like, nobody is…we all know.

Like, we all know that nobody is reading them. We all know that nobody knows what's written in them. We all know there's typos of another job from the previous site written in the middle of that document and nobody gives a shit. Like, they're just...just keep going. Everyone just head in the sand as long as you've got the signature. Like, whereas when I think of the term consultation, in traditional view, for me, consultation is read it and sign it.

In new view, consultation is help me figure this out. We're going to figure this out together before we even put pen to paper.

- So, if experiences like that kind of pushed you away, what brought you back?

- What brought me back? Bills. Bills. Okay.

- Yes. Yeah. That is a noble course.

- So, I'd moved home from Australia. I had left my safety job in Australia about three months before we moved home to Ireland and I was, like, tootling around, going, "Oh, what else am I going to do?" And I was thinking I was going to go do social work or something like that. And I moved back to Ireland and it turned out that because I had been living away for so long, I was no longer eligible for…so, here, we get either free tertiary education or very much reduced tertiary education.

But because I'd been living outside of the EU for more than three years, I wasn't eligible. So, I was like, "Right, that scuppers that plan then. I cannot go back and retrain on something else." I tried to get a job in a call center, I tried to get a job as a secretary, I tried to get a job doing literally anything else other than safety, and I was having no luck. And literally the first safety job I applied for, got the interview, got the job.

I was like, "Right, okay. Back I go back into this." And I was like, "Oh, maybe it'll be different here." It wasn't. But I... Go on.

- I was going to say, but you've obviously, like, found some enthusiasm. You're not sitting here, you're not engaging on LinkedIn or talking on podcasts because you don't like it.

- No. Yeah, sorry. That's true. I'm very much in giving out more at the moment. I had not long started with the company I'm currently with and one of the directors was pushing me to go to this IOSH conference. And I didn't want to go, but I was like, "All right, fine, I'll go." And he was saying, "You know, you should really try and network and kind of make safety friends."

I was like, "I don't like safety people. I don't want to be safety friends." And so I went to the conference and there was actually two guys doing keynotes there. One was Kevin Furniss, who was with Maersk shipping at the time, and he was presenting on safety differently, which I just thought was amazing. I was like, "A couple of years ago, I had been at this workshop in Sydney, thinking this will never catch on, and now, I'm on the other side of the world, I'm back home, and this is in an IOSH conference."

I was like, "This is mad." So, that kind of piqued my interest. And then there was another guy, Nippin Anand was presenting as well. He does this fantastic workshop on Costa Concordia, that cruise ship that crashed there back in 2012 or '13, I think, and he did a presentation on that. And they both really just took my breath away.

I was like, "This could be really cool if I was to look at things, I suppose, from a different perspective." And then I started to engage with more on LinkedIn. And actually, there's a guy, James MacPherson, who has a podcast called "Rebranding Safety," and I was listening to his podcast, and I reached out to him.

And we just started exchanging messages. And yeah, and I just started to find, I suppose I found like-minded people on LinkedIn that happened to be on this side of the world that just completely flipped the script for me. And then I realized I could go to work and have a good day and, like, chat with people and have a nice time, and do good work without fighting with people.

And yeah, make some sort of an impact or improve somebody's day through safety, which usually, it's the opposite. So, yeah.

- Yeah. And I think most people that go into safety do it because they care about people and they want… No? You don't think so? What do you think? Oh-oh.

- Sorry. I wish I hadn't had that reaction there. I don't think most people go into safety intentionally. They end up there.

- Yes. No, that's… Yeah. I've heard a lot about… Yeah.

- Like, this whole, it's noble, it's my... Like, it might be now, but it ain't nobody growing up wanting to be a safety officer. Like, come on. Like, it's usually, "I had an incident," or, "I witnessed an incident," or, "Something happened in my life and I had to retrain." Like, for me, I was working in traffic control in Sydney because I had been a backpacker, and that's what backpackers do to make money, and then I decided stay.

So, I moved up into management and then it was just a lateral move from there across to safety, because that's what people did. I didn't, like, choose...

- Yeah. I've heard a lot of meandering paths into safety. But, you know, there are training programs for safety professionals now.

- Oh, yeah.

- And I mean, those didn't exist before, so now, I think perhaps more young people are seeing it as an option as opposed to just maybe being a bit invisible to them.

- Yeah. I would hope that more young people are seeing it as a viable option. I hope it's piquing people's interest, because we need it, because we are, generally speaking, on average, a very old, very male, very white profession. That's what it is, like the diversity is severely lacking.

So, yeah.

- Yeah. I'm going to be speaking with someone about women in safety later on this week. So, hopefully, we'll wade more into that. Do you have any advice for novice safety professionals who are maybe just sort of encountering this debate, these two influences on safety?

- I would say keep an open mind, read widely, listen to everyone, but may form your own opinion and see what works for you in your practice. Because I really do think it's so individual and it is a practice that I don't plan…I know I probably sound like I very much pin my colors to the mast on which side I would mostly land on, but, like, to quote James MacPherson, "It's a buffet."

Like, you can take…there are so many different theories, so many different systems, so many different approaches. So, why just stick to one? You can do anything with it. It's so varied and, yeah, there's so many ways you could approach it. So, yeah, keep an open mind. And don't get stuck with just one.

- Okay. And so what would you say to safety veterans who maybe feel that this whole discussion, this whole debate between old and new is theoretical and maybe not all that valuable?

- I would say that I would hope that I try to understand their point of view. There's a lot of, I suppose, yeah, safety veterans that have been in the game a very long time, have probably witnessed some horrific injuries or accidents, deaths, all that kind of thing.

So, I don't think that we should be dismissive ever in that way, but same thing, I don't think they should be dismissive of new view. Now, I think the discussions and the battles that happen on LinkedIn or between some of the academics or some of the big names or heavy hitters are kind of, like, whatever, they're background noise, I don't really pay attention much anymore.

The conversations need to be happening between actual practitioners, and you need to seek those out. I have learned more…in the last year, I joined a networking group called Project Mollitiam, and they're based out of the UK, but it's all online, so you can be anywhere. But there's such a diverse range of experience in that room, and that's where my learning has accelerated.

My passion for the job has just gone tenfold from engaging with them. And that's where the conversations need to be happening. So, as I think, I can't remember, I read something the other week that will say about all this fucking navel-gazing of just back and forth between new view, traditional, and it's like, "Whatever, just get on with it. We have jobs to do, and we need to be doing them."

And we need to make sure that at the end of the day, that people are at the center of what we're doing, that we are reducing and preventing harm to the people in our businesses. Like, that's it. So it doesn't matter how you get there. You just have to make sure that that happens.

- Right. Right. So, I have three questions that I ask all my guests, and I'm going to move into those now. The first one is University of Elisa. If you were to develop non-technical training for people studying to be safety managers, where would you start? What soft skills are the most important to develop in the next generation of safety professionals?

- If I could only pick one, it would be empathy. Without that, this whole thing doesn't work. And that is empathy for people at all levels of the organization, from CEO the whole way through to the frontline, because we just have to understand people's perspectives.

I think it can be very easy, especially in new view, to be like, "Oh, we're here for the people at the frontline, the people at the point of risk," and almost to the point of demonizing management, which is not helpful. It really creates an [inaudible] divide. And it's like, Jesus, people in management roles have a hard job as well. You know, they have a lot going on.

I don't envy them. So yeah, empathy and using that empathy to understand context, because context is everything.

- I would agree. Yeah.

- That is University of Elisa.

- If you could travel back in time and speak to yourself at the beginning of your safety career and you could only give one piece of advice to young Elisa, what would that be?

- Stick with it, it will get better.

- It gets better. Yeah.

- That's it.

- Okay. So now, you've actually mentioned throughout a bunch of different tools and that sort of thing, but I'll just ask you now so we can maybe get them together, is what do you recommend as the best most practical resources for safety managers, maybe specifically looking to improve their interpersonal skills?

So, books, websites, online communities, you mentioned one or, you know.

- So yeah, online communities, Project Mollitiam, without a doubt. It's a networking group. We do weekly calls. I suppose, yeah, other resources, like there's one resource, it's not exactly…it's not interpersonal. It's very much technical, but there's a book called "Paper Safe" by Greg Smith, and that should be mandatory reading for every safety professional, no matter what your stance is, on new view, on traditional.

It's just a phenomenal book on really evaluating your systems and your controls and how confident you are in those controls. So, that's a fantastic book. The other thing then, yeah, I mentioned Nippin Anand, he does a workshop about Costa Concordia and about incident investigations and looking at those a bit differently.

So, if you ever get a chance to attend that, do. It changed my view on things. Podcast, it's not a safety podcast, but, I'm not sure if you heard of Esther Perel, but she is a… - I have. I have.

Is she the relationship or family… - Yeah.

- She's a marriage counselor, essentially, right?

- Yeah. She is fucking phenomenal. Like, she's unbelievable. She has a podcast called "Where Should We Begin," and it is all about couples. She has another one called "Housework" and it's work-based. I don't know, I just really enjoy it and it just gives a view on the nuances of communication that I didn't ever expect to take into the workplace, but that I do, and it just really is, I think, brilliant listening.

- I love hearing about stuff outside of areas where you would typically look, right? I had another guest who recommended a parenting book and said, you know, some of the lessons in here are very applicable.

So, yeah, that's great.

- Yeah. Remember that staff are adults, so please don't treat them like children.

- No, no, no. Yeah, no. And she pointed that out too, that it wasn't a paternalistic view… - Okay. What I think, just cut out my response there is all.

- So, last question, where can our listeners find you on the web?

- LinkedIn. That's where I'm at. By all means, connect, drop a message, then actually engage and have a conversation. That will be great. You know, people just connect on LinkedIn and then you're like, "Hi, are you there? Why did you do this?"

Like, if you're going to connect, please actually send a message and then we can have a chat, that'd be great.

- Awesome.

- So yeah, that's it. LinkedIn.

- Great. All right. Well, that's all the time we have for today. Thanks so much for joining us, Elisa, and thanks to our listeners for tuning in and thanks to the "Safety Labs by Slice" team.

- Thanks for having me. ♪ [music] ♪ - 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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